Our Human Story

This book is an updated version of a previous book (COMPLETE WORLD OF HUMAN EVOLUTION CHRIS STRINGER & PETER ANDREWS THAMES & HUDSON 2012). If you want to know the latest research into human evolution, I recommend getting both books as many fossils have been discovered in the last 30 - 50 years. "Our Human Story" is very well written with many pictures and sidebars on things like techniques for dating fossils and tools, a very accessible book, easy to understand.

Very in-depth

This book gives an excellent, concise summary of human evolution. It provides a brief overview of the various relevant species and what's known about them and their evolutionary relationship to Homo sapiens. The writing style is engaging and easy to read. It was just what I was looking for.

One of the best books I have in my library on human evolution. The book is made of quality materials with excellent photographs and diagrams. It is a comprehensive treatment of the subject that complements scientific dissertations of complex topics like genome structures and genetic mutations. EXCELLENT BOOK.

This book has much more recent information about human origins than other books I have.

This was purchased as a gift for my boyfriend's mom, who is a teacher and requested some materials to help her with teaching "The History of Man" to her students. She absolutely loved it!

I needed a refresher on latest discoveries on Human evolution and this book did the job nicely. I went through it in one sitting.

Let me start off by saying that the information in this book is very good. It is a wonderful beginners guide to human evolution up to H. sapien. My disappointment comes from the condition of the book itself. I purchased it brand new but was upset to see the very obvious wear on the book. The package it arrived in included another book with no marks on it at all, and the package itself appeared pristine. All this leads me to believe this book was a a used copy thrown in with the new ones. Very unfortunate. Otherwise, it is a 5 star book!

This book is simple, straighforward and fairly comprehensive. It is good for catching up on human ancestry if one is embedded in another field.

The story of human evolution really needs an update from discoveries over the last 20 years. And this is the book to do it. Well written but it in a serious style which does not spoon feed its readers with meaningless analogies and metaphors. And not a single "!" so it lets the science speak for itself. All Science books should be this good!

As the late evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould constantly used to reiterate, the evolutionary history of life is not a ladder of progress, but rather a bush or tree with many different branches. The authors of this very interesting and well-illustrated book show how true this is of human evolution. The hominin family tree is a very complicated mass of branches, beginning about seven million years ago when the hominin lineage split from the chimpanzee lineage. For most of that seven million years there has been a great diversity of hominin species, with several existing at the same time. For example, over the last two million years there have been at least ten different species of the Homo genus. And a lot is still not known: with future discoveries and DNA research, the tree will almost certainly get bushier. Only for the last 40,000 years or so has our own species, Homo sapiens, which first appeared over 200,000 years ago, been the sole surviving hominin species. The problem is, as the authors show, that it is often difficult to know exactly what the relationships are between the various branches. For example, it is difficult to know whether a particular species is an ancestor of ours, or whether it belongs to a different side branch of the hominin tree. The result of this is that there are many disagreements among scientists about how to classify various fossils and about their evolutionary relationships. What is clear is that upright stance developed long before the appearance of the large brain. Bipedalism came soon after the divergence of the hominin and chimpanzee lineages seven million years ago. The large brain came much later, leading to the intelligence, flexible behaviour, consciousness and art that we associate with humans. The large brain probably developed due to a combination of interacting factors: meat-eating, complex tool-making, social interaction and language. (My bet is that tool-making started off this feedback loop and that the previous development of bipedalism was important in that it had freed up the hands for the later development of complex tool-making.) Other primates and some birds can make and use simple tools, and some pre-Homo hominins (Australopiths) might have done the same. But humans in the Homo genus took tool-making to a quantitatively and hence qualitatively different level. As the authors mention, some scientists have in the past claimed that in the history of our own species (Homo sapiens) there was a “creative explosion” in Europe about 40,000 years ago (with the appearance of cave art etc), long after the appearance of the species itself over 200,000 years ago. They claimed that this “Great Leap Forward”/ “Human Revolution”/”Big Bang” was caused by some biological change to the brain, possibly linked to the development of language. But this idea of some (invisible and unprovable!) biological change to the brain about 40,000 years ago has been shot down in recent years by the discovery of evidence for art and sophisticated tools dating from much earlier than the time that the “Great Leap Forward” is supposed to have happened. For example, engraved pieces of ochre have been found in Africa dating from 75,000 years ago, and decorative beads have been found, again in Africa, dating back 100,000 years. As Stephen Oppenheimer has argued, language developed much earlier than 40,000 years ago and “...humans came out of Africa already painting.” There may even have been language and creativity in earlier species. For example, there is now evidence for Neanderthal art and possibly ritual burial; and there is also evidence that the Neanderthals could have vocalised in a similar way to Homo sapiens. In any case, the “creative explosion” theory wrongly assumes that behavioural change must be determined by biological change. But why does cultural change have to imply a change to the brain? It is more likely that the brain had become “modern” when Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa 200,000 or more years ago, and that any later cultural change took place for non-biological reasons. After all, the development of farming 12,000 years ago, of cities and writing 5,000 years ago, and of industry 200 years ago were also “Great Leaps Forward”, but no one believes that these were the result of genetic changes to the human brain. The final point I want to mention is that the authors refer to possible evidence of social stratification 35,000 years ago, in the form of some burials having grave goods which would have taken a lot of time to create. But, if this is so, it would surely just have been a case of respected (or at most, slightly privileged) individuals, because most evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian. Fully-fledged class differences did not appear until about 5,000 years ago, when, following the development of agriculture, “civilisations” developed in which a ruling class managed to grab the surplus created by the labouring farmers. Overall, an excellent book. Highly recommended. Phil Webster.

The book received in bad condition. Corner is bent. Disappointed with the packing.

I myself have often had difficulties to explain to interested non-scientists the complex history of the evolution of humans. Beginning from the first hominins to todays Homo sapiens. Or at least what we know about it and the many dicoveries with the tools of genetics over the last decades. Chris has achieved what many authors writing on this subject have not accomplished - a clear presentation of the tortuous pathway that lead to us in the end!