Skip to main content

Human Origins, a short history - Sarah Wild ***

It's inevitable that us humans have a distinct interest in where we come from as a species, and in this book Sarah Wild takes us through the latest state of knowledge on the origin of our species and of the various extinct species that broadly fall within the 'hominin' descriptor.

There's plenty of compact information here, with occasional boxes filling in basics, such as how fossils form and what a hominin is. Some of the facts are eminently quotable - my favourite was that of all the species mentioned, only Homo sapiens has a chin (not sure what this says about chinless wonders). I particularly liked the chapters on 'the first sapiens' - what we know about the earliest members of our species - and on 'the big questions', notably what happened to all the other related-ish species and the ways in which we are still evolving.

Unfortunately, though, the book does suffer from Rutherford stamp collecting syndrome. The great physicist commented (roughly) that all science is either physics or stamp collecting - suggesting that other scientific disciplines focus too much on collecting and collating data, where physics is more about deducing laws and explanation of phenomena (hence far more interesting). Wild gives us a plethora of data and species, with many different hominins named, and their distinguishing features reeled off. What's missing is a sense of storytelling and narrative - it's just too fact-heavy.

Just to give one example: in a section labelled 'Homo mysteries', Wild introduced the famous 'hobbit' of the Indonesian island of Flores. We hear about where the remains were found, the excavations, the species' strange mix of characteristics and the debate over whether the remains were of a new species or of individuals with birth defects. But nowhere is there a mention of the best bit of the story (appearing in Henry Gee's The Accidental Species), that the discoverers originally suggested naming the species Homo florianus, but hastily renamed it Homo floresiensis when they discovered their original name means a flowery part of the anatomy. It might be trivial, but a story like this adds human interest. Similarly we hear very little other about the discoverers than their names - ironically, it would have been great to give more human context.

I was also uncomfortable with Wild's use of the word 'ancestor'. As far as I'm concerned, an ancestor is in a species' direct lineage. But at one point we are told 'For many years [Ardipithecus ramidus] was the oldest human ancestor we knew of.' Yet, as we are correctly told some pages later, 'We do not know how the human lineage evolved from early hominins' - all we have is fragments of different earlier hominins, many of which will not be our ancestors, and we have no way of being clear when dealing with specimens too old for genetic identifiers.

The book was absolutely fine as a textbook light, and I was happy to endorse it as such. If you need to get information about the context of human evolution, it will give a good collection of facts (if we overlook the ancestor thing) - but it hasn't got the readability of good popular science.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more