Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
Stringer tells the story of research into human evolution as a scientific adventure, with competing theories, new dating techniques turning "firm" knowledge on it's head, and more. One of my favorite lines so far is in the second chapter, in a discussion of the impact of new techniques on two competing theories--"We were both wrong!" Instead of the usual academic self-justification along the lines of "based on the best methods at the time . . ., blah blah blah" Stringer shares with the reader the excitement that comes with watching what everyone, including himself, "knew" being swept away by new methods. The repeated use of the term "Orientals" is distressing. I don't know if this is disciplinary, a British thing, political, or what, but it is jarring. 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 "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.
What do You think about Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth (2011)?
Very interesting, but a bit too dry for a great science topic.
—jade
