BOOK REVIEWS 315

Cramer’s (1982) article as indicating a “humanlike foot” and a brain “more like that of a

robust gibbon”. They were described in the 1982 Garyounis Scientijc Bulletin and the four

descriptive paragraphs in the volume under review are transplanted, virtually intact, from

that source. Neither specimen is convincingly diagnosed. The illustrations of the fibula are

so poor as to be useless. Drawings of the parietal are even worse because the scale was

obviously enlarged more than the drawing it is supposed to measure. From these

illustrations and descriptions it is difficult to say just what mammal these fossils really

belong to although the 44.9 bregma-lambda chord on the parietal suggests non-hominoid

status. Boaz argues that thickness of the parietal and its “external configuration” support

hominoid attribution but fails to provide a single thickness measurement. None of the

fossils in Chapter 11 are diagnostic of Hominoidea at Sahabi and, as a result, the

significance of the site of human evolutionary studies is considerably diminished.

At present, Sahabi is an important paleontological locality sampling a poorly known

time period and geographical region. Since no diagnostic hominoid primate remains have

yet been recovered from the site, Sahabi’s importance in human evolutionary studies lies in

what it tells about the fauna, flora and geology of earliest Pliocene times in North Africa. As

research into Neogene evolution in Africa moves forward this beautifully produced and

spectacularly priced volume will be useful for the data and lessons which it contains.

TIM D. WHITE

Department of Anthropology, The University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A.

References

Boaz, N. T. (1980). A hominoid clavicle from the Mio-Pliocene of Sahabi, Libya. Am. J. p&w. Anthrop. 53,49-H Boaz, N. T. & Cramer, D. L. (1982). Fossils of the Libyan Sahara. Nat. Hid. 91(a), 34-41. Boaz, N. T., DeHeinzelin, J., Gaziry, A. W. & El-Amauti, A. (1982). Results from the International Sahabi

Research Project (Geology and Paleontology), Garyounis Scientific Bulletin, University of Gayunis (Benghhari) Special Issue No. 4., pp. 1-142.

Boaz, N. T., Gaziry, A. W. & El-Amauti, A. (1979). New fossil finds from the Libyan Upper Neogene site of Sahabi. Nature 280, 137-140.

Molecular Evolution of Life

Edited by Herrick Baltscheffsky, Hans Jornvall & Rudolf Rigler (1986). Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. 375 pp.

L40, $69.50. ISBN O-521-33642-2.

This is a collection of 46 brief review papers from a 1985 symposium on evolutionary

aspects of molecular biology. The papers cover prebiotic origins of self-replicating

molecules, mechanisms of RNA splicing, viral genome evolution, and contain many

focused studies of particular gene systems, such as insulin, alcohol dehydrogenase, and

clotting factor VIII. This book is clearly only for readers of JHE with very broad interests.

The language throughout is technical biochemistr-ese, and it will certainly be rough going

for physical anthropologists, who spent all that time in graduate school studying anatomy

(it is rough going as well for those of us who studied genetics). Several contributions,

316 BOOKREVIEWS

however, are well worth a look. Tata reviews the extraordinary structural similarities now

known to exist among different classes of hormones, which certainly bears upon the

grander problems of evolution. Hammarstrom et al. review the evolutionary dynamics of

human small nuclear RNAs, which are being implicated in many different areas of biology

at present. Gallo presents a highly intelligible, if not hot-off-the-presses, review of HTLVs,

and Edelman discusses the possibility of cell adhesion molecules playing major roles in the

drama of morphological evolution.

JON MARKS

Department of Anthropology, Yale University,

New Haven, CT 06520, U.S.A.