PALGRAVE MACMILLAN TRADE, JUNE 2015Most of my research nowadays is in paleoanthropology, as I try to understand the fossil and archaeological evidence for human evolution. Like all of my contemporaries in the English-speaking world, I was initially trained to look upon the biological history of the human family as a single-minded (and implicitly heroic) struggle from primitiveness to perfection. The going assumption, when I was a graduate student, was that evolution is a process of fine-tuning that, over the eons, gradually makes its subjects ever more perfectly adapted to the environments in which they live. That perspective was hardly surprising, since it intuitively appeals to members of a species that is the only representative of its group in the world today. This lonely state of ours makes it appear logical to reconstruct the story of our evolution by projecting the single species Homo sapiens back in time, in a single, gradually modifying lineage. And of course, in one very limited sense this view is accurate; for we are certainly the product of a unique series of ancestors, each of which existed over a definable period of past time.
But that is purely in hindsight; in prospect, which is how evolution works, things would have looked very different. The upshot is that what I’d been taught about human evolution was very far indeed from the whole story, and it was my involvement with lemurs, beginning in the late 1960s, that gave me my very first inkling of this.
What any observer of the lemurs of Madagascar immediately notices, before anything else, is that they are amazingly diverse. There are way north of 50 species of these lovely primates, arrayed into five different families. These range from the tiny scurrying mouse lemurs, to the cat-sized quadrupedal “true” lemurs, to the long-legged leaping sifakas and lepilemurs that typically hold their bodies vertical, to the bizarre, bat-eared, ...
