When We Became Humans by Michael Bright, Hannah Bailey

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
On the introductory page What's a Human?' - in the section on hominins, the text reads, "Humans and are closest relatives are called hominins" I suspect it should read, 'our' closest relatives.

Written well by Bright and illustrated nicely by Bailey, this book tells of the evolution of humans over 65 million years - and yes, that's when the first mammals date back to! People often say that it was only the destruction of the dinosaurs in the penultimate extinction event (we're going through the ultimate one right now) that 'allowed' mammals to evolve to become today's dominant class of living things (aside from bacteria and viruses, that is. And beetles! LOL!).

I'm not sure I buy that. Dinosaurs, in one form or another date back to some quarter billion years ago, and they didn't start to become dominant themselves until a major extinction event from which they profited, in much the same way we profited. But could mammals have become dominant if Dinosaurs had not died out? I think they could, but there isn't any way to really know! perhaps a more interesting questions is: would humans ever have evolved if dinosaurs had not died out?

This books isn't about speculation though - it's about what actually happened as testified to by the abundant evidence we have for primate and human evolution from fossils, from genetics, and from other sources. This books starts tracing that lineage from the earliest mammals such as Purgatorius (sounds like a Roman gladiator, right?!) to Archicebus, to Aegyptopithecus. Here's a tip - any complicated fossil name like that which ends in 'pithecus' - that means it was some sort of ape or monkey. This one - the fossil of it, that is, was first found in Egypt, hence the start of the name.

A couple of others were Proconsul and Pierolapithecus. Yeah - not all names follow the same rules! Proconsul was a monkey but it cheated a bit because there was an ape in London zoo when it was discovered, that was named Consul, so this was named to indicate it came earlier than modern apes. Duhh!

In language suitable for younger children, the book explains clearly not only what we know, but how we know what we know. Evidence from anatomy, from old DNA, from comparing skeletons, and even from studying modern DNA and how modern organisms are related, can reveal a lot, when you know what you're looking for and have a competent scientific understanding. Those without such an education will draw false conclusions and even make things up. Those people are not scientists, and don't know what they're talking about. Stick with a solid 150 or so years of evolutionary science, a steadily mounting trail of reliable evidence, and a solid track record, and you won't go wrong!

Next up comes the earliest precursors of modern humans such as Australopithecus - there it is again. You now know the pithecus part, but what of the Australo-? Well, what sounds like that? Australia! That doesn't mean it was found in Australia, but that word - that prefix, means of the south. Australia's in the south and this specimen was found in the south - but of Africa. Ah you ask, so why isn't it called Africanus? Well, there is actually one called Africanus! Can't use the same name twice!

The names kept on coming. At one point there was almost no fossil evidence for human evolution; now, scientists are finding it regularly as they learn more about where to look. The book discusses these findings, including what these primitive people ate (and yes, by this point they were more like people than like apes), where they lived, and how they worked with tools.

The scientist sho study these things have found evidence of rock shelters where primitive humans lived the fires they made, and the tools they created. They even named one species 'handyman' - Homo for 'human' and 'habilis' for handy - that is, they were good with their hands. The name is often shortened to H. habilis - the first part always with a capital letter, the second part always lower case. They weren't handy because they lived close by and could come over and fix something for you at short notice! Once the 'H's started showing up, many more were found and this book does a great job of laying out the story, and illustrating how they might have looked - remember we have only the skeletons, so we have to kind of guess how they looked, and one guess is as good as another!

H. heildebergensis and the Neanderthals are discussed next, the mysterious Denisovans, and even the 'hobbit' people - H. floresiensis! But you know what? All of these have disappeared, leaving humans: H. sapiens, as the sole surviving member of our genus (the genus is the first bit, the H, the species is the second bit, the sapiens. If there's a third bit, its a sub-species. All modern humans, no matter whether they look exactly like you or a bit different, no matter what country they live in or what they wear or believe, or eat or do everyday, are this same species. There's a chart toward the end of the book laying out all of these human and near-human species.

The book discusses how this all began in Africa, how the giant mammals of the world died out, and how humans spread from Africa to occupy every content on the planet - the most wide-spread single species there is. Maybe apart from rats. And mice. And bacteria. And viruses! I guess that's quite a few of us, huh?! There's a nice map showing how humans spread across the globe near the end of the book.

We went on - as the book makes clear, to refine our tools, to invent the wheel, to invent glue to hold weapons together to go hunting and to protect ourselves, to beginning agriculture, to domesticating animals - including the wolf which we now keep as dogs - and to inventing video games. Wow! Actually the book doesn't say that last bit - I added it myself. Bu we learned how to make things and then trade them with other communities to get other stuff that we couldn't find or make. Then came trade tariffs. Actually, I added that bit as well!

We went far beyond that over time to grow into and create the complicated world humans inhabit now. The book discusses healthcare, jewelry, art, and monument building, and then writing came along, of course, so we could record everything we did in order to benefit future generations - and this book is one of those results! I commend it as a fun, interesting, educational, and very worthy read.

Human Evolution by Robin Dunbar

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"resting, dosing..." Dozing? I don't know what 'dosing' means int his context! p229
"No species of primate devotes more than 20 per cent of their day to social interaction" - perhaps 'ape' was needed in place of 'primate' since humans are primates?

This was a fascinating glimpse into human evolution and had a lot of material which captured my interest. I don't know if this is all up-to-the-minute material or has a mix of new and old, but I was happy to encounter material I had not seen or heard of before, so this was a good educational experience for me, and well worth the learning. This is a dense book; not scientifically dense in the sense a published science paper, but a lot of information coming down the pipe in short order, so no space is wasted here and it's all good stuff, as they say, packed with science, with references (there are extensive end notes, as well as a bibliography and an index), and with in-place nods to authorities in the various (and diverse) fields this work touches on.

The author pursues a position that I have very little familiarity with, so it was interesting to me to learn of it. Its focus is on time-budgeting: how much of their day early humans, and before them Australopithecines (and before those, apes and monkeys for comparison purposes) needed to devote to resting, foraging, and grooming in order to get the rest, the nutrition, and the social interaction completed in order for their society to function. A lot of this is speculative in relation to ancient societies, in the sense that these things don't lend themselves to fossilization. but there is indirect evidence to support the contentions which are explored here. There's also direct evidence for some facets of this. For example, it's possible to learn from the chemistry of bones whether an individual was stressed or healthy and even what they were eating. What's offered here makes sense in the context of what evidence we do know, and I liked the arguments.

This book was clearly written, and it placed early humans and Australopithecines in an easily grasped context which certainly clarified things for me. I was interested to learn more about just how transitional H. habilis was, and I was also interested to learn more about Neanderthals. I've never viewed them as the bumbling hunched-over people of the historical view, so my quandary has always been just how much like us they were, and I read arguments here that offered some interesting and surprising differences.

There were also some novel (to me) cases made from topics which you don't normally read about in books of this nature such as, how important are things like laughter, singing, and religion, things we take for granted and spare little thought for, in sculpting the kinds of societies in which these individuals existed - or could exist? Laughter is offered as an interesting and viable substitute for grooming in societies who had so many members that a decent amount of physical grooming could not have been indulged-in to cement such numbers together given time constraints on their day. With grooming, we're told that only one of the grooming pair benefits (but perhaps these people sat around in a grooming circle, each grooming the one in front?!), whereas with singing and laughter, more than one recipient benefits, thereby cutting down on how much time was required. I think more study is required, but these seem intelligent arguments to me.

One which I found intriguing is the position that, in modern societies, it seems that three is the size limit for shared laughter in the form of amusing stories or telling jokes, and this may well be true in a modern society where there are so many distractions, and so many topics to talk about. Neanderthals, after all, had no cell phones and played very few professional sports I imagine! I have to wonder if, in a primitive society, we really need to revise our estimates of this nature? Even in modern societies, many more than three people can share a joke if they're attending a performance by a comedian, for example. Not that I'm suggesting that archaic humans had comedy clubs, but they did have camp fire gatherings, so I was rather leery of too much comparison with modern human society.

It would have been nice had this been explored more, and perhaps in scientific circles it has and it would have bulked-up the book too much to go into a deep discussion of it, so my speculations may be immaterial, but this was not the only area where I would have liked to have known more. Another of these was with regard to burials. We can only speculate about the elaborate burials of some individuals that have been exhumed: bodies buried with lots of personal artifacts, rich clothing, tools, weapons and other artifacts. This has been used as an argument for religion, and it is persuasive, but nowhere have I seen another argument set forth, which is that these burials were simply an attempt by friends or relatives to express their love, respect, and sense of loss for those who died. The revelation that an ochre-packed extraneous human femur was found in one grave tends to suggest that not everyone was buried with reverence! I mean, if all of the dead were so decently buried and decorated because of religious belief in an afterlife, then how did this one individual end up being employed as a repository in the burial of two children? Could these people not have been accorded a respectful and loving burial without any thoughts of an afterlife entering into it? It seems possible to me, but then I'm no expert on these topics!

I loved the non-nonsense science which puts creationists in their place anytime, anywhere. One thing which rang throughout this book was that there was a plethora hominins and hominids, which show a continual transition from apes to modern humans This is indisputable. What is harder to nail down are less physically evidenced things such as the arrival of speech and whether Neanderthals had it. here, scientific evidence can still be employed, but it's not quite as cut and dried as are other aspects of evolution. I enjoyed this discussion immensely - it was clear, to the point, and well supported, as was the discussion on friendship and the differences between men and women in this regard. It seems there are six potential requirements for a real friendship to form, any three of which can cause a level of bonding: language, place of origin, similar education, shared interests/hobbies, world view, sense of humor. These things are worth knowing for those of us who are interested in writing novels and imbuing them with realism!

Overall, I enjoyed this immensely. I appreciated the well-referenced, clearly argued text, and the wealth of good and fresh (at least fresh to me!) ideas. This book was very engaging - more so than I had feared it might be!) and kept my interest throughout. I'm grateful to the author and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance review copy, in return for which I offer this honest review.