Loren Eiseley: For the first time in 4 billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of wind in the night reeds

It’s the birthday of anthropologist and author Loren Eiseley, born in Lincoln, Nebraska (1907). He spent most of his long academic career as a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1947 to 1977. He was interested in the dating of fossils and in extinctions during the Ice Age. But he’s remembered today as a writer of popular and poetic books about anthropology and evolution — books like The Immense Journey (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and The Star Thrower (1979). About the evolution of the brain and the development of consciousness in humans, he wrote: “For the first time in 4 billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of wind in the night reeds.”