For the last 2.6 million years, Shipman explains, humans who coexisted with animals enjoyed definite adaptive and cultural advantages. To illustrate this point, Shipman gives us a tour of the milestones in human civilization-from agriculture to art and even language—and describes how we reached each stage through our unique relationship with other animals. The Animal Connection reaffirms our love of animals as something both innate and distinctly human, revealing that the process of domestication not only changed animals but had a resounding impact on us as well. 25 black-and-white illustrations.

Pat Shipman is a respected paleoanthropologist and a superb science writer with an extraordinary reach. Until I read this book, I had not appreciated the significant impact of animals for charting the course of human evolution or the universal importance that animals have today for improving the quality of human life. (Dean Falk, author of Finding Our Tongues )