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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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