Review: The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived" by Clive Finlayson

This is a terrific book, and one that I highly recommend.  Let me see if I can do the book any justice with my efforts at producing a meaningful review.  I work with endangered species and degraded riparian ecosystems along a large river system in the American Southwest, and I very much appreciated Clive Finlayson's incorporation of the environmental and ecological aspects associated with his portrayal and description of human origins.  In Finlayson's The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived he takes great care to deftly weave together the latest information about paleoclimate conditions, the paleoecologies, and the paleoenvironments of the regions that were occupied by our hominin ancestors.  Broadly speaking, Finlayson's tale is an "Out-of-Africa" story, and that is as it should be in my humble opinion.  The Out-of-Africa model associated with modern human origins really does seem to make the most sense when held up to the existing fossil, archaeological, environmental, biological, and genetic evidence and data that is so aptly described by Finlayson in this fascinating account. 

The important take-away for me upon finishing this excellent book was two-fold.  First, we--modern humans--are incredibly lucky to even be here today.  Little differences here or there over the past 75,000 years and it is very likely that Homo sapiens would be just as extinct as other human species, like the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis).  Second, climate-change was the big game-changer over the six or seven million years of human evolution, and it was the ability to rapidly react and adapt to these swings in climate and ecological conditions that made it possible for some human populations to ultimately succeed while many others did not.  This is a lesson that we need to pay careful attention to now.  Just because humans occupy the planet now really is no guarantee that we will still be here twenty millenia from now.

There's a lot of information in this book, and much of it is quite thought-provoking.  I can honestly say that I am just a little bit sad too, that our incredibly long-lived close cousins--the Neanderthal peoples--are extinct.  Somehow I think the planet is just a little bit lonelier without those people who lived here for hundreds of thousands of years in great harmony with their environment.  It seems simply amazing to imagine that there was a fairly long period of time where Neanderthal peoples and modern humans actually occupied the same regions and probably even competed for the same resources in the day-to-day struggle to survive.  This is a great and grand story, and in my continuing quest to more fully understand my own human origins I am so glad to have encountered and read Finlayson's superb book, and to now have it on my shelf to go back to periodically.

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Review: "Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth" by Christopher Stringer

Chris Stringer's Lone Survivors: How We Came to be the Only Humans on Earth comes along some sixteen or seventeen years after his ground-breaking book African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity (Henry Holt, 1996).  Stringer is one of the principal architects and proponents of the "Out-of-Africa" (OOA) hypothesis associated with the origin and dispersal of anatomically modern humans, i.e., Homo sapiens.  According to Stringer and the OOA hypothesis, anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa nearly 200,000 years ago, and then 'something' happened about 50,000 years ago that resulted in essentially the relatively rapid spread of our species into much of Eurasia, eastern Asia, Indonesia and Australia, and into western Europe over a period of about 10,000 years!  What is even more remarkable is that it now appears that there were other populations of archaic Homo species that we coexisted and/or competed with for a time, likely including Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and the newly discovered little people of the Indonesian island of Flores, Homo floresiensis. 

In just under 280 pages, Chris Stringer takes the reader through the history of our human origins with the fossil evidence.  He synthesizes the latest advances in knowledge associated with paleoclimatology, geochronological dating methods, and geology and plate tectonics.  Most importantly, Stringer spends much of the book talking about the evolution of human behavior (e.g., developing and utilizing technology, use of symbolism, developing survival and coping strategies, burial of dead, etc.).  The evolutionary steps leading to Homo sapiens wasn't a given.  It was really a very near run thing, and without the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to changing climate conditions and subsequent changed ecological conditions modern humans could quite likely have become extinct just as our close cousins, the Neanderthals, did about 30,000 years ago.  For example, the massive supervolcanic eruption of Toba on the island of Java was very nearly a game-changer for all human species about 73,000 years ago.  Finally, over the past decade or so, much of the OOA hypothesis has been validated and bolstered with the results of numerous studies and analyses of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA.  In other words, we really and truly are all African. 

While all of this discussion of fossils, paleoconditions, and genetics may sound a bit daunting, complicated, or even off-putting, Dr. Stringer does a sterling job of leading the reader--whether layperson or specialist--through the data and evidence with his well-written and entertaining prose.  I've kind of come to realize that Stringer and his peers--paleoanthropologists--are really much akin to detectives hot on the trail to better understand when we became who we are, and how we became who we are, and perhaps even be able to answer why.  This book will definitely help you get your arms (and brain) around the critical issues and questions associated with what makes us human

In closing, it is my opinion that Chris Stringer's incredibly thought-provoking Chapter 8 of the book, "Making A Modern Human" ought to be required reading by all of us.  I don't know that I have underlined more passages or made more marginalia notes in a book since I left college in the mid-1980s.  Reading this book, and Chapter 8 in particular, has stimulated a desire in me to chase down a lot of the technical references and journal articles that Dr. Stringer has provided in the book's extensive bibliography.  This is a subject that profoundly fascinates me, and I am committed to educate myself and better understand my human origins, and have nothing but admiration and gratitude to Chris Stringer for inspiring me toward this end.  All I can say is read Lone Survivors, it really is one of the most comprehensive overviews of the current state-of-knowledge associated with our human origins that I've read.