Ancestral Images

Pictorial reconstructions of ancient human ancestors have twin purposes: to make sense of shared ancestry and to bring prehistory to life. Stephanie Moser analyzes the close relationship between representations of the past and theories about human evolution, showing how this relationship existed even before a scientific understanding of human origins developed. How did mythological, religious, and historically inspired visions of the past, in existence for centuries, shape this understanding?

Moser treats images as primary documents, and her book is illustrated with more than a hundred engravings, paintings, photographs, and reconstructions.