by Ian Tattersall
Palgrave Macmillan, March 2012
How did Homo sapiens arise from a ragtag ancestral line, scratching out an existence and competing with kindred species in harshest Africa, to become one of the most successful organism in Earth’s history? Researchers have been digging for answers to this question for decades, and paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall finds in the quest fodder for his latest book, Masters of the Planet.
The unfolding story, Tattersall writes, fits “comfortingly well with our emerging views of the multilevel mechanisms underlying evolutionary change.”
The transformation that “levered humankind away from the ‘lower’ animals,” according to the author, was acquiring the complex array of traits that set us apart first from the rest of animal life and then from all the other ...