Our Human Story - Book Review



ISBN 978 0 565 09391 4 Cover Price £14.99

This short book (160 pages) can be highly recommended to anyone who, like me, often loses the plot when reading papers on human evolution. It covers all phases in hominin evolution during the past 7 million years. The most important fossils are named (and the names explained), illustrated, and placed in geographical context by some excellent maps.



There is a good index so next time you are unsure what is referred to by KNM-ER 1470 you can quickly look it up!


I had anticipated that the book might lack the very latest info such as the redating of the early humans from Jebel Irhoud or the early dispersals to Arabia and India. But Louise Humphrey and Chris Springer have it all. Only the 120,000 year-old human fossil from Misliya, Israel (here) was published too late to make it into their book.


Chris Stringer is a strong proponent of the Out of Africa hypothesis that has all modern populations deriving from a single dispersal 45-55,000 years ago. But in this book alternative scenarios are given a fair treatment.


Near the end there is a neat diagram summarizing human evolution during the last million years.




Defining the genus Homo

Reconstruction of Homo erectus georgicus by Élisabeth Daynes
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia Commons

A thought provoking essay in the current issue of Science (here) asserts definitions of the genus Homo and the species assigned to it remain "as fuzzy as ever." They drive home their point by showing, on the one hand, specimens attributed to Homo with australopithecine features and, on the other, australopithecine fossils with features hitherto claimed to be confined to Homo.

This is a brief but instructive read. The take home message is that hominid systematics needs to be rethought. In the process we may need to scrap "the iconic list of names in which fossil specimens have historically been trapped."

Cover of Third Edition 1956

One name that may have to go is Homo habilis (previous post), the handy man. Louis Leakey, it is suggested, was keen (perhaps too keen) to identify this fossil as the maker of simple tools following the dictum of Man the Toolmaker. It was a pleasant surprise to find Kenneth P. Oakley's booklet cited as an influence on previous and current thinking. My well thumbed copy dates from my schooldays.

East African fossils cast new light on the origins of Homo

Reconstructed skull of Homo rudolfensis (KNM ER 1470)
Wikipedia Commons (CC) Durova

This week two important papers address the antiquity and diversity of the genus Homo.

A study published in Nature (here) takes a fresh look at Homo habilis, "The Handy Man," first described half a century ago (see previous post). The mandible (lower jaw) of the type specimen (OH 7) is badly distorted, but has been reconstructed using state-of-the-art computer tomography and 3D imaging technology. Comparison with other fossil mandibles from the region shows that not all can be ascribed to H. habilis. Indirectly. this supports the validity of Homo rudolfensis (pictured) as a distinct species.

A similar approach yielded a new estimate for the endocranial volume of OH 7 (a proxy for brain size). Interestingly, similar values are obtained for H. habilis, H. rudolfensis and H. erectus. 

A new fossil from Ethiopia, described in Science (here and here), is too incomplete to assign to a species. It is exciting because it can be assigned to the genus Homo and is 400,000 years older than all previous fossils. It pushes the origin of our genus back to at least 2.8 million years ago. There could well be overlap with Australopithecus afarensis best known from the skeletal remains of "Lucy"