Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Karoo
The succulent and Nama-karoo form part of the arid south-western zone of Africa, a vast region of rugged landscapes and low treeless vegetation. Studies of this unique biome have yielded fascinating insights into the ecology of its flora and fauna. This book, originally published in 1999, is the first to synthesise these studies, presenting information on biogeographic patterns and life processes, form and function of animals and plants, foraging ecology, landscape-level dynamics and anthropogenic influences. Detailed analyses of the factors distinguishing the biota of the Karoo from that of other temperate deserts are given and generalisations about semi-arid ecosystems challenged. The ideas expounded, the ecological principles reviewed, and the results presented are relevant to all those working in the extensive arid and semi-arid regions of the world.
Palaeoart of the Ice Age
The many hundreds of books and thousands of academic papers on the topic of Pleistocene (Ice Age) art are limited in their approach because they deal only with the early art of southwestern Europe. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive synthesis of the known Pleistocene palaeoart of six continents, a phenomenon that is in fact more numerous and older in other continents. It contemplates the origins of art in a balanced manner, based on reality rather than fantasies about cultural primacy. Its key findings challenge most previous perceptions in this field and literally re-write the discipline. Despite the eclectic format and its high academic standards, the book addresses the non-specialist as well as the specialist reader. It presents a panorama of the rich history of palaeoart, stretching back more than twenty times as long in time as the cave art of France and Spain. This abundance of evidence is harnessed in presenting a new hypothesis of how early humans began to form and express constructs of reality and thus created the ideational world in which they existed. It explains how art-producing behaviour began and the origins of how humans relate to the world consciously.
The Archaeology of Southern Africa
This book provides an archaeological synthesis of Southern Africa.
Culturing the Body
The human body is both the site of lived experiences and a means of communicating those experiences to a diverse audience. Hominins have been culturing their bodies, that is adding social and cultural meaning through the use pigments and objects, for over 100,000 years. There is archaeological evidence for practices of adornment of the body by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hominins, including personal ornaments, clothing, hairstyles, body painting, and tattoos. These practices have been variously interpreted to reflect differences such as gender, status, and ethnicity, to attract or intimidate others, and as indices of a symbolically mediated self and personal identity. These studies contribute to a novel and growing body of evidence for diversity of cultural expression in the past, something that is a hallmark of human cultures today.
The Emergence of Culture
This book describes the emergent nature of human culture, based on the human ability to create and pass on social codes through instruction and example. It proposes hypotheses to explain how a phenomenon that is potentially maladaptive for individuals could have evolved, and to explain why culture plays such a pervasive role in human life. It then reviews the primatological, fossil, and archaeological data to test these hypotheses.
Yellowed Pages
None
Markets, Firms and the Management of Labour in Modern Britain
Originally published in 1992, this book examines the development of employers' human resource management and industrial relations policies in Britain. It adopts a broad historical perspective, beginning with the inheritance from the nineteenth century and ending with an analysis of human resource management policies. It focuses on how managers organise the employment relationship, how they control work relations, and how they deal with trade unions and industrial relations. The author examines these in the context of the market within which the firm operates, and the strategy, structure and hierarchy of industrial enterprise. The book shows that historically British employers tended to adopt market-based strategies rather than internal ones.
Understanding the Gut Microbiota
This book discusses the community of microbial species (the microbiota, microbiome), which inhabits the large bowel of humans. Written from the perspective of an academic who has been familiar with the topic for 40 years, it provides a long-term perspective of knowledge about this high profile and fast-moving topic. Building on general ecological principles, the book aims to help the reader to understand how the microbiota is formed, how it works, and what the consequences are to humans. Understanding the Gut Microbiota focuses on conceptual progress made from studies of the human bowel microbiota. Where appropriate, it draws on knowledge obtained from other animal species to provide concept...
Human Brain Evolution
The evolution of the human brain and cognitive ability is one of the central themes of physical/biological anthropology. This book discusses the emergence of human cognition at a conceptual level, describing it as a process of long adaptive stasis interrupted by short periods of cognitive advance. These advances were not linear and directed, but were acquired indirectly as part of changing human behaviors, in other words through the process of exaptation (acquisition of a function for which it was not originally selected). Based on studies of the modem human brain, certain prerequisites were needed for the development of the early brain and associated cognitive advances. This book documents ...
