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From the discovery of a hobbit-like speciesliving in Indonesia18,000 years ago to the observation of a comet crashing into Jupiter, this bookfrom the editors of Time magazinecovers the distance in time and space. The title is a bit misleading. Great Discoveries is a profuselyillustrated collection of places and events in the natural and human world,from the pueblo cliff dwellers of pre-Columbian Arizonato the recent earthquake that leveled the Italian town of L’Aquila.
A theme perhaps unintended is how much humanknowledge is speculative and disputed. The arguments among paleontologists andanthropologists over whether the Indonesian “hobbit” was an unknown species ofprimate or merely a malformed pygmy brought out “the inner fifth-grader ingrown ups with Ph.D.s” No one knows why the pueblos were abandoned, and despitethe near accurate prediction of the L’Aquila quake by a technician at Italy’sInstitute of Nuclear Physics, few seismologists believe his prophesy wasanything more than blind luck.
