El Mito de Atapuerca. Orígenes, Ciencia, Divulgación

"El Mito de Atapuerca. Orígenes, Ciencia, Divulgación" by Oliver Hochadel
Edicions UAB, Bellaterra, 2013.

"Atapuerca" has changed from a virtually unknown name to acquire a triumphant resonance: the excavations carried out have found the world's largest accumulation of hominid fossils. The project leaders have erected an entire popularization industry that includes dozens of popular-science-books, television documentaries, exhibitions, its own Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos... This context, and not only the antiquity and importance of fossils, explains how Atapuerca became the new beginning of Spanish history. This book, based on detailed knowledge of the history of the excavations and its scientific relevance, combines a rigorous approach and an unusual entertaining narrative. "El mito de Atapuerca" tells the forging of this "myth" and helps us to understand the mechanisms of how scientific knowledge circulates and receives widespread recognition.

Oliver Hochadel (Bruchsal, Germany 1968) is a historian of science and a tenured researcher at the Institución Milà y Fontanals of the CSIC in Barcelona. His main research focus is the interaction between science and its publics in historical perspective. He has published widely on electricity as a science of spectacle in the enlightenment, on the zoological garden in the nineteenth century as a space for research and on contemporary human-origins research. For the last nearly twenty years he has also worked as a science journalist.