Showing results for "The History of History" in Animals

Our countryside is iconic: a series of distinctive habitats that unite to create a landscape that is unique for the rich diversity of our flora and fauna. In England, his most magisterial book to date, John Lewis-Stempel explores each in turn, taking us from coast to moor, from downs to field, from the park to the village to create a vivid living portrait of our natural history.

From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the rolling hills of medieval England to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, sheep have been central to the human story. Starting with our Neolithic ancestors' first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 10,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and languages, helped us to win wars, decorated our homes and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth.

Renowned rewilder Derek Gow has a dream: that one day we will see the return of the wolf to Britain as it has already returned elsewhere. As Derek worked to reintroduce the beaver, he began to hear stories of the wolf, both real and mythical, and his fascination with this creature grew. With increasing curiosity, Derek started to piece together fragments of information, stories and artefacts to reveal a shadowy creature that first walked proud through these lands and then was hunted to extinction as coexistence turned to fear, hatred–and domination.

From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before. Life teems through Henry Gee’s lyrical prose - colossal supercontinents drift, collide and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today.

Hoof Beats transforms our understanding of both horses and humanity's ancient past and asks us to consider what our relationship with horses means for the future of humanity and the world around us.

Humanity can make short work of the oceans' creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller's sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It's a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the explorers set sail.

Do you ever find yourself wondering how we came to exist? Or how humans came to call planet Earth our home? Oxford Professor Tim Coulson uncovers the history of the entire universe from the Big Bang to human existence taking listeners of all backgrounds on a journey that covers physics, chemistry, biology, the evolution of consciousness, through to the rise of humanity. A 13.77-billion-year epic in the making, A Universal History of Me encapsulates for the general listener everything that he as a scientist has wanted to find out about life, the universe and everything in between.

John Long, who for decades has been on the cutting edge of shark research, weaves a thrilling story of sharks' unparalleled reign. The Secret History of Sharks showcases the global search to discover sharks' largely unknown evolution, led by Long and dozens of other extraordinary scientists.

Fifty-six million years ago, the earliest equid walked the earth-and beginning with the first-known horse-keepers of the Copper Age, the horse has played an integral part in human history. Combining fascinating anthropological detail and incisive personal anecdotes, Susanna Forrest draws from an immense range of archival documents as well as literature and art to illustrate how our evolution has coincided with that of horses.

Swifts live almost entirely in the air. They eat, drink, sleep, mate and gather their nesting materials on the wing, fly thousands of miles across the world, navigating their way around storms, never lighting on tree, cliff or ground, until they return home with the summer. Sarah Gibson has written a fascinating story of discovery, exploring what is known about these mysterious birds, their ancient ancestry and how they have been regarded through history.

This is the third and last of Sir David’s great natural history books based on his TV series and completes his survey of the animal world that began with Life on Earth and continues with Living Planet. In Life on Earth, Sir David showed how each group of animals evolved. In Living Planet he looked at the way they have adapted to the whole range of habitats in which they live. Now, in Trials of Life, he completes the story by revealing how animals behave – and why.

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness. Distinguished scholar Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America.

Here is the epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. This absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs.

For as long as humans have existed, animals have got under our skin, enthralling us with their wildness, enriching our lives and influencing art, literature, science and religion. And we feel perhaps the deepest connection with mammals, as we too are members of this same vast group. In these engrossing episodes from Radio 4's landmark series, Natural Histories, Brett Westwood tells the stories of 10 of the most mesmerising mammals, illuminating the often surprising ways they have shaped society.

Imagine a feline with the spirit of a lion, the sneakiness of a puma, the terrifying walk of a black bear, and the strong arms of a gorilla. This amazing creature was best known as the saber-toothed tiger, an animal so fearless, it could beat beasts even twice their size! After dinosaurs, few vanished animals are as famous as the woolly mammoths, or in 18th-century scientist George Cuvier’s words, "some kind of extinct elephant".

Across the world, invasive species pose a danger to ecosystems. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity ranks them as a major threat to biodiversity on par with habitat loss, climate change, and pollution. Tackling this isn't easy, and no one knows this better than Hugh Warwick, a conservationist who loathes the idea of killing, harming, or even eating animals. Yet as an ecologist, he is acutely aware of the need, at times, to kill invasive species whose presence harms the wider environment.

Looking to the skies above, we have variously worshipped them as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves in their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight and, more recently, attempted to protect them. Award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through this mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to Renaissance experiments on woodpecker anatomy, from Victorian obsessions with egg-collecting to the present fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.

Framed by the author’s personal experience with backyard hens, Chickens: Their Natural and Unnatural Histories explores the history of the chicken from its descent from the dinosaurs to the space-age present. En route, Lembke surveys chickens in ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 19th century, and modern times, including the role of chickens in Jewish and Muslim practices. She also investigates the birds’ contributions to science and their jaunty appearances in literature.

First heard every weekday morning at 5.58am on BBC Radio 4, Tweet of the Day captured the imagination of early risers and bird lovers, proving so popular that it was named Radio Programme of the Year 2014. Each episode begins with a bird call or song, followed by fascinating ornithological detail about its owner. This collection contains every edition from the first series, British Birds.

Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.