Early Humans: Ice, Stone, and Survival

I have bought dozens of GreatCourses over the years. This is only the second one I did not think was worthwhile. The lecturer is quite young and inexperienced. I don’t mind that she brings a feminist slant to the material, but I find it extremely aggravating that she appears to be reading off a Teleprompter throughout the entire series.

I really wanted to learn from this course. I gave it 6 “lectures” but couldn’t finish. Watching someone just read rather than teach was too much. I felt we weren’t getting a true educational experience. No one was teaching. A person off the street could stand and read text. I even tried it on audio only but then I wasn’t getting the visual aids. In the end, it was just too frustrating to watch.

This course focused more on explaining archeological methods as opposed to the incredible story of human evolution. So boring and hard to finish watching but I pushed through.

The rise of humans is a topic which fascinates me. Clearly, this professor is extremely smart as her degree is from Cambridge University. Her basic problem, which I have noticed in younger professors, is that she feels compelled to try to cover every last detail. What would normally be a 50 minute classroom lecture is compacted into 30 minutes. In my opinion it would be far better to give us the "big picture" without every last fact being included. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about the rise of early humans but I became lost in her rapid fire presentation. I confess that gave up after watching the 2nd lecture, so I guess I am not being fair to the professor. But I am not going to waste my time watching the entire course given the abundance of superb other courses. I would suggest that she watch professors such as Gregory Aldrete, PhD or Joyce E. Salisbury, PhD for excellent examples of professors who deliver superb lectures. There is a reason that these professors have multiple Wondrium/The Great Courses series.

This was one of the more disappointing courses I've watched through Great Courses/Wondrium. The lecturer is clearly knowledgeable and passionate about the topic, but she just reads very quickly off the teleprompter. The organization of the lectures is poor. She does not define terms clearly, assumes significant prior knowledge of the subject and the lectures seem to jump around without a clear chronological pattern. For an excellent course on similar subject matter, I'd recommend Barbara King's Biological Anthropology Great Course, which is first rate.

For me these lectures were not well organized and her rapid fire delivery, hardly taking a breath between different thoughts, made it even more difficult to follow and hence more boring..

If you are new to paleoanthropology and/or paleogenetics and want to know more about the subject, this course is for you. If, however, you work in the field or, like myself, are an informed layperson who keeps up with the latest news and findings from this rapidly changing field, do yourself a favor and pass on this course. This is a bare bones introduction to the study of the evolution of early to modern humans. I won't comment on the production values (similarly bare bones) of the series and presentation skills of the instructor as it would be a rehash of what other reviewers wrote. There are other, better Great Course choices but sadly they are moving more and more out date due to the continuous and rapid discoveries in the field of paleoanthropology and paleogenetics. Presenters Gregory Aldrete, Edwin Barnhart, Barbara King, and John Hawks are all experts in the field who deliver superbly organized lectures with excellent supporting graphics and charts. It would be great if the G.C. would invite these experts back to update their earlier works. I would love to watch the 2nd editions of Ancient Civilizations of North America, Major Transitions in Evolution, and The Rise of Humans.

You will repeat the teacher many times to stay with her. Great stuff but needs to be reorganize.

Very interesting information regarding early human development, survival methods and worldly trekking. BUT, I could not get past such a credentialed Anthropology expert reading each lecture. It was similar to the computer generated readers provided by news media. I have been a Great Courses/Wondrium member since 2002, and have been enlightened from over 1000 courses with brilliant and engaging professors, and find a lecturer reading a monitor as their delivery method very distracting. I had a very difficult time staying focused on the lecture discussion. The lecture information would be very difficult to retain if the learner was working out or driving as it is critical to pay attention to the data as it is cumulative. Some learners/students may not be impacted by this now, more common delivery method. I would still recommend the course as the data was very current.

The lecturer clearly knows a great deal about the material in this lecture series - all the sites where remains of humans have been uncovered, all the periods the ancient past is divided into and the range of years they covered, etc.. Because the course is new, many lectures include descriptions of very interesting techniques to investigate or date remains that give us much more insight into how our ancestors lived. What they ate; types of pollen found; DNA; dating methods to supplement radiocarbon - potassium-argon, fission-track, uranium-thorium, and many more. This area is fascinating, illustrating how new tools broaden the possibilities of what we can learn. What is missing is a narrative about how all these facts led to where we are now - I realize we can't know, but even a reasonably hypothesis or two would help to tie the details together. Even if I recalled every detail of every lecture (which I don't, but I have the notes to refer to), I don't think I'd feel that I understood more about "What does it mean to be human? ... Who are we, and how did we come to be this way?" It's possible that adding a few "why" lectures throughout the fact-filled ones might really improve the overall result.