Christopher Stringer

My mind finds it so hard to deal with the colossal timescales involved in palaeontology – even more so in the case of books like this, where the story being pieced together on this Brobdingnagian canvas is so crucial and so awe-inspiring. You're considering vast, Cthulhu-like stretches of time in which human societies grew up, discovered modernity in the form of complex tools and ritualised behaviour, held out for a while against the environment, and then disappeared. One after another, show more flashes of human civilisation blinking in and out of existence in the archaeological record.

Seventy-two thousand years ago, at what's now Still Bay in South Africa, there was a human society that lasted for hundreds of centuries before vanishing; five millennia later, not far away at Howieson's Poort, a different and apparently unrelated civilisation thrived for a while before also being abruptly cut off. These people used compound tools and painted themselves with red ochre, buried their dead and wore jewelry made of tick shells; they must have had their own detailed rituals and legends and mythologies and social conventions that we can never now recover. In many cases they were succeeded by communities of much less advanced humans that did not understand their technology.

All of this is an excellent illustration of the crucial point that evolution is not teleology, that ‘progress’ is not necessarily selected for, and that civilisational modernity has come about through random fits and starts and not through some kind of natural incrementation. The fortuitous anomaly of the last two-to-three thousand years has made it hard to appreciate this basic fact, which often strikes you when reading history but which is even more forceful and awe-inspiring when it comes to prehistory and palaeontology.

Nowhere more so than in the case of ‘archaic humans’, i.e. other members of the Homo genus of which we are the last surviving species. Homo erectus, for instance, had already spread out from Africa to cover most of Europe and Asia, and it was once thought that erectus simply evolved into modern humans wherever it existed, so that different bands of humans suddenly popped into existence 100,000 years ago all around the Old World. This ‘multiregionalist’ hypothesis has now been largely replaced by a narrative whereby Homo sapiens evolved once, somewhere in eastern or southern Africa, and – after tens of thousands of years – finally expanded to colonise Eurasia and the rest of the world, in the process replacing whatever archaic hominins happened still to be in the area when they arrived.

In Europe, that meant Neanderthals. If you have any imagination at all, it's impossible not to feel a rush of excitement at the idea of early humans suddenly encountering groups of these manlike people – a bit like how Portuguese sailors must have felt when they found strange men living in the Americas, only much, much more so: instead of a separation time of 30,000 years or so, this was on the order of 140,000 years. Neanderthals died out pretty much as modern humans arrived in Europe, suggesting that neanderthalis was out-competed for resources or even perhaps the victim of inter-species violence. Then again – still thinking of the New World comparison – perhaps new diseases had something to do with it. (I wish more serious novelists would address themselves to this story. The only good example I know of is William Golding's The Inheritors.)

In any case, there was of course sex as well as violence involved. The idea that humans were boffing Neanderthals, at least occasionally, has been dramatically supported by genetic analysis: it transpires that if you're (genetically) European then around two percent of your DNA is inherited from them. Beyond Europe, it wasn't generally thought that there were any hominids left by the time that modern humans arrived – but this assumption has recently collapsed in a rather exciting way, thanks to new fossil discoveries as well as DNA studies. The most dramatic example is the so-called ‘hobbit’, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an Indonesian island, which seems to represent a descendant of Homo erectus that somehow survived on Flores until as recently as 12,000 years ago – in other words tens of millennia after modern humans were in the region. Moreover, the latest genetic evidence suggests that humans interbred with non-sapiens species even before leaving Africa.

So the ‘Out of Africa’ narrative is complicated a bit by increasing evidence of hybridisation and other complexities. Chris Stringer has been a key player in all this since the 70s, and he tells the story well, though the wealth of material tempts him to drift away from the point on occasion. He brings in a lot of very interesting cultural discussions about religion, language and other kinds of behavioural modernity. The writing style is confident and jovial, like listening to a kindly schoolteacher – he even attempts a few jokes (typically signalled by some hearty exclamation marks), which don't usually come off but you appreciate the effort.

For me this book was the primer in recent developments that I've been looking for – even if the answer to a lot of basic questions is still a cautious ‘we're not yet sure’. Chris Stringer is too conscientious a scientist to gloss over this basic uncertainty, and if you're looking for black-and-white answers rather than the tangle of scientific exploration then this book may frustrate you. Otherwise it should prove a fascinating and mind-expanding read. show less

Low 4/high 3.

In contrast to Brian Fagan's [b:Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations|2308972|Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations|Brian M. Fagan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1198113610s/2308972.jpg|2315387] this is considerably more focused. It's also a more recent creation and, in the rapidly advancing field of human evolution and archaeology, this is critical.

My one big complaint about this is that it's not very well organized. Stringer seems unable to keep focused, instead show more he constantly make references to things he'll cover in other chapters. This is NOT an issue with the subject matter, as Jared Diamond avoided this problem handsomely in his excellent (but slightly dated now) [b:The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution & Future of the Human Animal|49234|The Third Chimpanzee The Evolution & Future of the Human Animal|Jared Diamond|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1406094926s/49234.jpg|1677648].

In general, the technical level is on the high side, so I wouldn't recommend this to someone just getting into the subject. But, if you have some familiarity with the field and can tolerate the poor organization, it's worth a read. show less

Fascinating story but a bit drily told. The most engaging was an account of climate change towards the end of the book, even though only tangential to the main thrust, and might have made more sense as an introductory background. Intriguing fact that Homo has come and gone here many times over the course of time

Contains a number of references to Java Man discovered outside of Solo. A leading anthropology researcher on human evolution proposes a new and controversial theory of how our species came to be In this groundbreaking and engaging work of science, world-renowned paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer sets out a new theory of humanity's origin, challenging both the multiregionalists (who hold that modern humans developed from ancient ancestors in different parts of the world) and his own "out of show more Africa" theory, which maintains that humans emerged rapidly in one small part of Africa and then spread to replace all other humans within and outside the continent. Stringer's new theory, based on archeological and genetic evidence, holds that distinct humans coexisted and competed across the African continent-exchanging genes, tools, and behavioral strategies.

Stringer draws on analyses of old and new fossils from around the world, DNA studies of Neanderthals (using the full genome map) and other species, and recent archeological digs to unveil his new theory. He shows how the most sensational recent fossil findings fit with his model, and he questions previous concepts (including his own) of modernity and how it evolved.

Lone Survivors is the definitive account of who and what we were, and will change perceptions about our origins and about what it means to be human. show less