Ever since Darwin's day, debate has continued as to the origin and development of the human race. It is, perhaps, unfortunate that Darwin coincided with the peak of Western scientific activity and the nadir of scientific activity in other cultures. The Abrahamic Jewish‐Christian‐Muslim religion, still a dominant force in modern culture, makes a very sharp distinction between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom which is not borne out by scientific evidence. I suspect that a scientist coming from a Hindu or Buddhist background, with their emphasis on the oneness of life, would have reached the present scientific view of human evolution far more easily and peacefully.
There is now a scientific consensus, backed up by ever‐increasing quantities of hard evidence, obtained in the teeth of increasingly bizarre religious objections. Humans are great apes, closely genetically related to chimpanzees and bonobos. There have in the past been a number of different closely‐related species of homo, but modern humans, in spite of superficial racial differences, are all of one species and are very closely related to one‐another, indicating a recent origin from a very small pool of progenitors – current research suggests a bottleneck of around 10,000 individuals in north‐eastern Africa towards the tail end of the last ice age. The differences between humans and other apes are increasingly being shown to be differences of scale rather than sharp distinctions. Consciousness for example, used to be regarded as a uniquely human trait, but when reviewing the Oxford Companion to Consciousness (Bayne et al. 2009) (RR 2010/205) we noted that some level of self‐awareness had been demonstrated in a whole range of other animals. Humans use an astonishing range of vocal sounds to communicate in complex languages but, again, when looking at the Blackwell Companion to Phonology (van Oostendorp, 2011) (RR 2012/014) it was clear that these are much more complex than those of other animals rather than totally different from them.
There are some differences between humans and the other apes which are, to my surprise, not touched on in the book under review. Humans are very much better swimmers and show some adaptations which make them more effective in water. This fact has given rise to some rather fanciful evolutionary ideas, which may be why the authors omitted it, but it is still worth mentioning. The other difference, which came to my attention recently when looking at the therapeutic effects of interaction with animals for the Journal of Mental Health (Guha, in press), is that humans keep pets. Humans inter‐relate with other animals to a much greater extent than any other ape. There is some tentative archaeological evidence putting the domestication of dogs far back into human prehistory (Shipman, 2011). This raises the intriguing possibility that not merely humans selectively bred dogs from wolves, but also, per contra, dogs helped select humans: a proto‐human who was able to collaborate with half‐tamed hunting/scavenging wolves would stand a much better chance of survival than one who did not. It is arguable that we are innately dog‐people. The domestication of animals is not mentioned here at all.
Human evolution has, of course, given rise to an enormous number of publications. We could easily fill whole libraries with relevant studies, including plenty of useful reference books worth noting. There are recent encyclopedias such as the Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Wood, 2011) (RR 2012/132); scientific handbooks, such as the Handbook of Human Molecular Evolution (Cooper and Kehrer‐Sawatzki, 2008); dictionaries, such as The Cambridge Dictionary of Human Biology and Evolution (Mai et al. 2005) (RR 2006/032); and useful web‐sites such as www.becominghuman.org or www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/index.html The Complete World of Human Evolution was first published in 2005, and has now been thoroughly revised and updated in a new cheap paperback edition. Revision was certainly necessary: the pace of scientific and archaeological research is such that a lot of new information had to be incorporated. For example, analysis of Homo Florensiensis (the “hobbit man”) has confirmed that this was a separate human species; the Neanderthal genome has been partially sequenced and it has been shown that non‐African humans have traces of a Neanderthal genetic heritage; and some tantalising DNA studies from Siberia have suggested yet another human species co‐existing with early modern humans. Even subsequent to the publication of this edition, very recent evidence has been found pushing the use of fire further back into prehistory than is reported here. No doubt a new edition will be called for in another half‐dozen years or so. In the meantime, this is an excellent general introduction to the topic. It is lavishly, perhaps over‐lavishly, illustrated with photographs of specimens, photographs of jolly industrious archaeologists at work, useful time‐lines and some rather over‐fanciful pictorial reconstructions. The text is in subject order rather than reference book order, starting with living apes and their environment, working on to the fossil evidence, and finally to the interpretation of the evidence. The writers obviously had to use professional scientific and technical terms, but the text should be comprehensible to a well‐educated general reader. Human evolution is a topic of enormous general interest. College libraries, public libraries, and even, dare I say it, theological libraries can be recommended to consider this excellent relatively cheap handbook for acquisition.
