Status
Available
Call number
Publication
London ; Allen Lane, 2011.
Description
Outlines a reassessment of human evolution that draws on recent fossil findings and challenges current theories to say that humans coexisted and competed across the African continent while exchanging genes, tools, and behaviors.
User reviews
LibraryThing member cabanyalblue
I came to this book looking for a definitive account of human evolution, I didn't quite get what I was looking for, but I'm more than satisfied.
I've been looking for a book such as this because I've found that, at times, the usage of names differs so much author to author (Erectus, Ergaster, etc.)
The blurb on the inside cover says that he will answer all of the big questions in the debate on our origins. So, does he? As you might expect the answer is yes and no.
Yes, because many, or most, of the issues that you would want a book like this to deal with are discussed in detail: what kind of relationship existed between modern humans and the Neanderthals, where & when the first modern humans appeared, what the genetic evidence says about us, whether the Neanderthals and other hominins are actually cousins or ancestors of ours, and so on.
No, because some issues are not dealt with: the book does not really discuss species previous to Homo Erectus, so there's little or nothing about our common ancestor with chimpanzees, or the australopithecines, Homo habilis, etc. Instead, the focus is on the later hominins: Erectus, Heidelbergensis, the Neanderthals and us, especially the last two. So, roughly, the book covers the last two million years, but most especially the last few hundred thousand. This is fair enough - there are no superfluous sections in this book, and so discussing these species would have meant a lot more pages and taken the author away from his goal of identifying and describing the origin of our species specifically, rather than the whole Homo genus. But I didn't know this before I bought the book. Also no, because one question, which seems to me to be a central one, was dealt with only briefly over the course of four or five pages: the evolution of language. You might think this is because there's not much to be said - there aren't any fossils of words - but this is a whole area of study, so this was a slight disappointment.
Whether you like this book or not will also depend on what kind of book you usually read. If you have only a passing interest in evolution and science in general, but you find this issue appealing, I think you may find chapters 2 and 3 of this book hard going. These sections mainly focus on how experts in the field can date and extract information from the fossils they find; so, while these issues are relevant to the matter in hand, they concern the scientific method rather than the history and evolution of mankind. It's not overly technical, but there is a lot of information, mixed in with a little of bit of the author's own biography. I found it very interesting, but I did think that the author was brave to place so much of this material so early in the book.
On the other hand, if you're a scientist or you regularly read books on scientific subjects, I confidently predict you will lap this up. It covers a lot of ground authoritatively and, if you're the kind of person who, like me, reads books on issues which human evolution has some bearing on, I think you will often come back to this book for reference. It's well written, there's a bit of humour in there occasionally, and while the author is keen to put across his point of view - that we have a recent African origin - I think he deals with other opinions very fairly.
Highly recommended. If you like that kind of thing.
I've been looking for a book such as this because I've found that, at times, the usage of names differs so much author to author (Erectus, Ergaster, etc.)
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that it can get very confusing. This book seemed just the ticket as the author is the leading expert on human origins at the Natural History Museum in London and it shows: he has a dizzying command of his subject area. The blurb on the inside cover says that he will answer all of the big questions in the debate on our origins. So, does he? As you might expect the answer is yes and no.
Yes, because many, or most, of the issues that you would want a book like this to deal with are discussed in detail: what kind of relationship existed between modern humans and the Neanderthals, where & when the first modern humans appeared, what the genetic evidence says about us, whether the Neanderthals and other hominins are actually cousins or ancestors of ours, and so on.
No, because some issues are not dealt with: the book does not really discuss species previous to Homo Erectus, so there's little or nothing about our common ancestor with chimpanzees, or the australopithecines, Homo habilis, etc. Instead, the focus is on the later hominins: Erectus, Heidelbergensis, the Neanderthals and us, especially the last two. So, roughly, the book covers the last two million years, but most especially the last few hundred thousand. This is fair enough - there are no superfluous sections in this book, and so discussing these species would have meant a lot more pages and taken the author away from his goal of identifying and describing the origin of our species specifically, rather than the whole Homo genus. But I didn't know this before I bought the book. Also no, because one question, which seems to me to be a central one, was dealt with only briefly over the course of four or five pages: the evolution of language. You might think this is because there's not much to be said - there aren't any fossils of words - but this is a whole area of study, so this was a slight disappointment.
Whether you like this book or not will also depend on what kind of book you usually read. If you have only a passing interest in evolution and science in general, but you find this issue appealing, I think you may find chapters 2 and 3 of this book hard going. These sections mainly focus on how experts in the field can date and extract information from the fossils they find; so, while these issues are relevant to the matter in hand, they concern the scientific method rather than the history and evolution of mankind. It's not overly technical, but there is a lot of information, mixed in with a little of bit of the author's own biography. I found it very interesting, but I did think that the author was brave to place so much of this material so early in the book.
On the other hand, if you're a scientist or you regularly read books on scientific subjects, I confidently predict you will lap this up. It covers a lot of ground authoritatively and, if you're the kind of person who, like me, reads books on issues which human evolution has some bearing on, I think you will often come back to this book for reference. It's well written, there's a bit of humour in there occasionally, and while the author is keen to put across his point of view - that we have a recent African origin - I think he deals with other opinions very fairly.
Highly recommended. If you like that kind of thing.
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LibraryThing member hailelib
Lone Survivors got my interest immediately and I read it straight through which usually only happens with some kinds of fiction. Stringer begins with a chapter he calls "The Big Questions" where he gives us some of the background for evolution, describes the first hominid fossil finds and a gives a
While evolution in general is touched on, Springer spins most of his time tracking man through the last two million years with the last 200,000 being the main focus. Much of the material is about the Neanderthals and what he refers to as 'modern man'. This is a recent book (2012) and he is able to discuss the evidence from DNA sequencing that implies some hybridization between the different groups of early man. We may have a few Neanderthal genes lurking in our own genomes.Towards the end the author tells us why he believes humans are still evolving and why he thinks this.
Recommended for those interested in the subject with the warning that Springer has a habit of saying, in effect, we'll talk more about that later. Some might find that a bit annoying.
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quick overview of progress in figuring out how all the different fossils, theories, and genetic discoveries fit together. He then moves on to the ways in which scientists date the fossils and the tools, etc. associated with them and how they can cross-check their dates and then how they have been able to retrieve additional information like DNA. Then we get his views on the various theories about the progress of human evolution.While evolution in general is touched on, Springer spins most of his time tracking man through the last two million years with the last 200,000 being the main focus. Much of the material is about the Neanderthals and what he refers to as 'modern man'. This is a recent book (2012) and he is able to discuss the evidence from DNA sequencing that implies some hybridization between the different groups of early man. We may have a few Neanderthal genes lurking in our own genomes.Towards the end the author tells us why he believes humans are still evolving and why he thinks this.
Recommended for those interested in the subject with the warning that Springer has a habit of saying, in effect, we'll talk more about that later. Some might find that a bit annoying.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Widsith
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
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.
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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, 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
LibraryThing member LisCarey
Where does our species come from? Who were our ancestors?
These are enduring human questions, and we are piecing the answers together out of bits of bone and stone tools and recovered DNA. Chris Stringer is one of the world's leading paleoanthropologists, and one of the leading proponents of the
Lone Survivors is an examination of the major breakthroughs of the last thirty years, with new evidence and new kinds of evidence, including the advances in recovering and analyzing DNA from ancient fossils. That evidence has, in fascinating ways, both reinforced the basic "recent African origin" hypothesis, and raised serious challenges to the idea that this origin happened in one, highly localized place.
We may have made the leap to modernity in Africa precisely because Africa is a huge and diverse continent. When one population made the transition to complex modern behavior, and the local conditions turned against them, they may have died out or moved on or slipped back to premodern levels.
But this was in Africa, and there was someplace to move on to where the environment would support the population density needed for modernity. And if the first group didn't migrate to a more promising area, there were other populations that could exploit them. Because there was a wide enough range of environments, and enough somewhat separated populations of early modern humans, eventually, that critical mass was reached, modern human behavior was here to stay, and modern humans spread out from Africa.
That's the simple summary. This is a complex and fascinating story, including not just modern and extinct human species, but the "archaic" humans whose genes are still with us in our own DNA, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Stringer avoids polemics, does not waste time on science deniers, and points out his own errors and mistakes over the years as readily as he does others'. His writing is clear, understandable, and informative.
There is also discussion of the most newly-discovered, and oddest, member of Genus Homo, Homo floresiensis, a.k.a. the Hobbits of the island of Flores.
Recommended.
I bought this book.
These are enduring human questions, and we are piecing the answers together out of bits of bone and stone tools and recovered DNA. Chris Stringer is one of the world's leading paleoanthropologists, and one of the leading proponents of the
Show More
"Out of Africa" theory, proposing a recent African origin for Homo sapiens in eastern or southern Africa, who then expanded out of Africa, replacing the archaic humans, including Neanderthals, in the rest of Eurasia.Lone Survivors is an examination of the major breakthroughs of the last thirty years, with new evidence and new kinds of evidence, including the advances in recovering and analyzing DNA from ancient fossils. That evidence has, in fascinating ways, both reinforced the basic "recent African origin" hypothesis, and raised serious challenges to the idea that this origin happened in one, highly localized place.
We may have made the leap to modernity in Africa precisely because Africa is a huge and diverse continent. When one population made the transition to complex modern behavior, and the local conditions turned against them, they may have died out or moved on or slipped back to premodern levels.
But this was in Africa, and there was someplace to move on to where the environment would support the population density needed for modernity. And if the first group didn't migrate to a more promising area, there were other populations that could exploit them. Because there was a wide enough range of environments, and enough somewhat separated populations of early modern humans, eventually, that critical mass was reached, modern human behavior was here to stay, and modern humans spread out from Africa.
That's the simple summary. This is a complex and fascinating story, including not just modern and extinct human species, but the "archaic" humans whose genes are still with us in our own DNA, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Stringer avoids polemics, does not waste time on science deniers, and points out his own errors and mistakes over the years as readily as he does others'. His writing is clear, understandable, and informative.
There is also discussion of the most newly-discovered, and oddest, member of Genus Homo, Homo floresiensis, a.k.a. the Hobbits of the island of Flores.
Recommended.
I bought this book.
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LibraryThing member JohnJohnsonII
Not as much new information as I had hoped.
LibraryThing member JBreedlove
Filled in a few holes in my out of Africa origin paradigm. He did a good job of explaining various dating techniques and the complexities of ROA.
LibraryThing member Rockhead515
This was terrific!
A little difficult to follow and understand in parts (that just might be it being new to me) but otherwise a very interesting read.
Has a pretty good flow and I wasn't constantly looking up words.
I will definitely be following up on this subject thanks to this introduction.
A little difficult to follow and understand in parts (that just might be it being new to me) but otherwise a very interesting read.
Has a pretty good flow and I wasn't constantly looking up words.
I will definitely be following up on this subject thanks to this introduction.
LibraryThing member Alhickey1
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
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.
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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 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
Language
Original publication date
2012-03-13
Physical description
xi, 333 p.; 24.1 cm
ISBN
9781846141409