Our Human Story

"I have to admit that this one is also professional and personal. Our Human Story is my go-to book on what is going on in human evolution right now. Which species are which, which ones are where, and what is our current understanding of dates? What did they eat? What were their environments? Why does it matter? What changed? What happened? Human evolution is an incredibly complex subject. We keep on coming up with new species. No one expected the Denisovans. And we keep on finding new species. There’s the hobbit species, Homo Floresiensis, and there’s Homo Naledi, that has just come up in South Africa. It’s really difficult to stay on top of these things and this book summarizes them without skimping on the important detail and it’s written by two people who know exactly what they’re talking about. There is also a personal aspect, because both Louise and Chris are fantastic anthropology researchers at the Natural History Museum in London , where I was lucky enough to work. All of the above. We have ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’ in anthropology. People are continually reassessing old information. Biological anthropology as a discipline is based on looking at the bones and teeth and at shape differences. Are your teeth built for meat? Do they change into teeth built for grass? What is the evolution there? Recently, we have, of course, added new techniques to this. One of those, ancient DNA studies, has particularly thrown some species foxes amongst the anthropological chickens. For instance, the find of Denisova is from the very tip of a pinky finger bone. The very last bone of a pinky finger was discovered in Denisova cave, and they were able to retrieve some ancient DNA from it. And, lo and behold, it wasn’t a Neanderthal. It wasn’t a human. It was something completely new. We got a new species. We know it has DNA that isn’t ours and isn’t Neanderthal, but we don’t actually know what it looks like. “Very few people realize how interesting teeth are” Some discoveries are made in the traditional way. Naledi is a rather fabulous story. Some cavers went down very deep into the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. They were in contact with an anthropology professor who had asked them to look out for anything interesting. After one of the men went through an 11-inch gap, dislocating both of his shoulders, they discovered some hominid fossils. There was a campaign with live video, and some very brave anthropologists entering this cave system, and they came out with an incredible treasure trove of an entirely new species that we had no idea existed, Homo Naledi. There are a lot of evolutionary books that have talked about why we walk upright and why we have big brains. But one of the incredibly strange feature of human life that is not really talked about is our childhood. We have ridiculously extended childhoods. We are children forever. I have previously flippantly said that it is now possible to be a child well up to the age of 40, possibly beyond. What I mean by this is that humans have a period of investment in the next generation that really outstrips any other animal, including our nearest relatives, and including probably our fossil relatives, our ancestors. This has a huge impact on the species that we grew up to be. In the book, I’m really interested in talking about how we get the childhoods that we have, and how those childhoods have made us the species that we are because we have some very unique characteristics. They have to be used to explain the very strange species we became. I hope so. I think the overall theory, in terms of evolutionary biology, is that the long period of investment gives you more time to transfer skills, calories, learning, training to the next generation. All primates have pretty long investment periods as children. What primates have been doing is taking the time to learn to be a better monkey. We need that time in order to learn how to navigate our complicated social worlds. There is nothing more complicated. In the modern humans’ social world you have got to learn everybody’s name; you’ve got to learn how to do useful things, whether it’s making pottery or finding game or chartered accountancy."

"I don’t have a lot of English books on my bookshelf, but I like books by Chris Stringer, who is a paleoanthropologist that works at the Natural History Museum in London. He has a lot of great books that tell the history of humanity. He is an anthropologist, so he doesn’t focus so much on everyday life, but his books are very interesting on how our species evolved from the start of prehistory—about 3 or 4 million years ago—up to today. Yes, approximately. You have a short period—called the Mesolithic—just before that, when people were using some techniques from the Neolithic period, but not all of them. The main change in the Neolithic period is that men and women became settlers. They built houses, they lived in villages, they planted crops, they raised animals. They’re agro-pastoralists. And the demography is exploding. During the Upper Paleolithic time, there were around 150,000 people on Earth. During the Neolithic period, after just a few 1,000 years, there are more than a million. Just because people settled down and grew cereals, the population exploded. There is a site in Ohalo, near Lake Tiberias in Israel, that raises a lot of questions. A lot of seeds from cereal have been found there that are still used today. They found more than 90,000 seeds from 142 different species. They also found an oven for cooking, that can make bread. It’s not a bread that rises, like the bread in our bakeries today, but more like galettes, this thin bread that you can eat. They settled at Ohalo for several years, as a seasonal occupation. It’s possible that those people understood the cycle of life, of growing things. That’s also what the ethnography and anthropology tell us. These people understand a lot because they live near nature—they are not away in cities in apartments very far from the growing fields. It’s scientifically impossible to be sure these people had a growing strategy—taking the seeds to put into earth and waiting for the plant to grow—but it’s unlikely they would use so many seeds just for cooking or for healing. You cannot be sure, but it could be the first agriculture."