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Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth (2011)

by Chris Stringer(Favorite Author)

3.76 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0805088911 (ISBN13: 9780805088915)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Times Books, Henry Holt and Company

review 1: This book holds important information, but is poorly structured. It seems as if Stringer didn't even try to carry the reader through the narrative, as conclusions are often missing and as the author dwells on specific fossil finds. He should instead start from the bigger picture or bigger questions, which certain finds may offer insights into. The bones found in Nigeria, dated just 13,000 years old, are a positive example in this text. Furthermore, as "Lone Survivors" is meant for the wider public, the focus should be on the past humans themselves, their physiology and behaviour, not on their fossilised remains. Thus, approximate illustrations of human appearance in the past would have served the book better than (to me) unclear pictures of parts of human skulls.A single f... moreossil find may have a profound impact on the field of paleoanthropology, and new questions and answers are arising at such a pace that there is and will be a steady demand for well-structured popular books on what human history on this planet really looks like.(I read the Finnish translation of 2014.)
review 2: This wasn't as good as I thought it would be. I saw the author, Chris Stringer, on the Colbert Report. He was personable and engaging. It made me think this book would be very accessible to the layman. It isn't. It is very dry. I think the author thinks he has dumbed this down for the general populace but no. The only reason I got a good bit out of it was I knew something about all those early hominids, and how scientists had connected them in the past. Stringer kept throwing around abbreviations of things that the majority of people wouldn't know. Then there were utterly useless graphs and charts. They showed nothing. Literally nothing.I did find some of it interesting. That there might have been more than one exodus out of Africa. That maybe there wasn't a direct lineage to some of these hominids. That maybe there was some intermingling between several of the species.But overall this could have been a much better book. I'm sure that scientists in the field thought it was too simplified, and the layman gave up after the first chapter. less

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