What the Bones Tell Us: Adventures of an Anthropologist

Discussing everything from Carthaginian child sacrifice to sex characteristics of pelvises, Schwartz ( The Red Ape ) offers a lucid if perhaps too detailed guide to the mysteries of fossils, bones and evolution. The most sprightly accounts are personal: asked to work on a homicide case, the anthropologist finds a hidden grave by testing the ground for ``odd breaks in soil color'' and ``suspicious depression''; he also chronicles ``fetusgate,'' in which he and other experts mistake a stillborn human fetus afflicted with an unusual disorder for a monkey. While Schwartz's anecdotes bolster his argument for tolerance of unpopular ideas, some discussions may be too narrowly focused for the general reader; for example, he devotes one-third of the book to close description of the current scientific debates concerning whether Neandertals--the preferred spelling for Neanderthals--were indeed ancestors of humans. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Jan.)