In Search of Adam: The Story of Man's Quest for the Truth about His Earliest Ancestors by Herbert Wendt. Translated from the German by James Cleugh (GT110)

Published 1956: First UK Edition / Hardcover / Very Good Condition / Illustrated throughout

Original green decorated cloth with gilt block titles on the spine and original pictorial dust jacket in protective wraps. 540 very clean and bright pages, previous owners bookplate on the first free page. Slight shelf wear on dust jacket consistent with age. (GT110)

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The adventure of cave exploration is only one of the many aspects of the story told in this book. The quest for Adam was also made by biologists and geneticists, looking for clues to the mysteries of life in their laboratories, by thinkers breaking with old prejudices, by professors who proclaimed revolutionary theories of the origin of species, and by talented amateurs whose chance finds opened up new paths of research for prehistorians. All these achievements and discoveries are described. The uncovering of prehistory is probably the most dramatic chapter of natural history, full of incident and intrigue, as well as of human tragedy. Each skull and hand axe that lies in a museum today, and each book that deals with the origin of mankind, has had a career of its own. If the evidence of prehistory is examined with the eye of the professional student it acquires an uncanny reality. It emerges from the museums, the cabinets of specimens and the libraries, dissipating the mists of ignorance that obscure the epochs of human and cultural evolution by which the fate of our world has been decided. In this narrative of scientific fact, I have therefore stressed the man himself, the investigator, possessed and inspired by genius, who first makes the facts come to life. For this reason I was obliged to enter upon other scientific fields beyond my actual theme, citing documents, letters, and reports that enabled the setting in which each separate event occurred to be reconstructed. [Google Books]