This book somewhat defies me to describe it. Part history, part science, and part conjecture, the book takes a look at some of the factors that led humankind to split from the path of our chimpanzee-like ancestor, leave the trees, and begin to undergo the changes that would someday allow the author to write a book about the whole experience and for me to read that book.
So what can I say? The book takes the relatively novel approach of looking at gene sequences to show the changes that have occurred to humanity in the last 50,000 years. During the past, a time of relative scarcity of fruit led certain proto-humans to less arboreal lives in order to obtain greater amounts of food, these proto-humans eventually evolved into societally modern humans, whereas other proto-humans of the time remained in the trees and are now chimpanzees and bonobos.
The material is somewhat dense to reproduce here in just a few paragraphs, but I would like to point out at least a few salient points and then also stamp a caveat on this book. The book is fascinating when it details the expansion of homo sapiens from Africa, as well as in its descriptions of the advantage gained through the foundation of sophisticated language and the beginnings of sedentarism in the middle east. The detailing of the methods used to track Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA in order to determine human lineages around the world provides a useful lens to better understand scientists' unearthing of the roots of civilization. Additionally , the descriptions of other primates, including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, homo erectus and neanderthals also give a useful historical backdrop to the subject matter on this book. The use of climactic data and cross-referencing with archaeological evidence also gave an almost cinematic account of the cyclical waves of human expansion into Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Without reservation, the first eight chapters, roughly two hundred pages, are compelling reading.
And now we get to what my boss used to call 'the on the other hand' paragraph---
On the other hand, the book sometimes feels like a bit of a grab bag. There are lots of interesting things thrown into the mix, but from chapter to chapter the narrative does not always run extremely strongly. Moreover, the writer has a tendency to conjecture about likely possibilities when no evidence is available to confirm or deny various suppositions. This is a very nice thing in that it provides food for thought; however, at times I felt that the author did not particularly go out of his way to highlight the fact that his conjectures were mainly supposition, thusly running the risk of inadvertently having a reader take his suppositions as fact.Additionally, I felt that at times the author also relied on somewhat shaky sources when they suited the narrative of the book. An example of this was that the author introduced Joseph Greenberg's multilateral comparison theories on language groupings as near-fact while at the same time acknowledging that there is a great amount of contention on the topic and that Greenberg was not finished with his work at his death in 2001.
All of this is not so much to say that the reader needs to take this book with an intravenous feed of salt (the author does always demarcate conjecture from more solidly proven fact), as that this is not an authoritative work on the subject of early history. Oddly enough, although the evidence under investigation has a history of thousands or tens of thousands of years, the field of early history is still rapidly evolving due to the introduction of new testing and analysis methods. In a sense, this book serves as an excellent summary of recent developments in the field and presages future discoveries which will further illuminate the roots of the modern world.
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