Focuses on the history of those who dug the fossils just as much as on the history of the fossils themselves. Our ideas of who our ancestors are has changed rapidly - and continues to change. The lives, obsessions and rivalries of the women and men making these discoveries shapes the way we think about the early hominids at least as much as the raw data does. ( )

What happens when an author has two different ideas about how he wants to write a book? Most authors will simply write two books or make a choice between the two ways. Or find a middle ground. Martin Meredith decided to write one book with two parts. Each part is a very good short book that I would recommend at any time... but package them together as one book and things do not work that well.

The first part of the book is a chronological overview of all the fossils found in Africa - in the order they were found and with a lot of details about the scientists that found them and the reasons why some of them were not found earlier. Rivalries and making tricks on each other seem to be more important than finding the fossils to some of those scientists... and sometimes you are left to wonder if they really believe that their fame is more important that finding the answers. Don't get me wrong - anyone that works deserves recognition for what they are doing but the people that are looking for the past seem to have egos to match the age of the bones they are finding. And the book is using these scientists as a center of the story - the bones sometimes feel like being the secondary topic.

But all that makes the account even more fascinating - because before the reader's eyes, the story comes alive. I had been reading a few books on the topic so there was almost no new information there but the few nuggets here and there were pretty interesting. And the style is very readable, making an otherwise tense topic enjoyable - to the point that if I did not know what the next fossil will be, I would be wondering "now what?".

The second part is a more synthesized analysis of what had happened - a chapter on the found bones and ancestors in the order they had lived (just in case someone did not read the first part of the book or is unable to order the years properly I guess?), followed by a chapter on tools and what is found and how it proves that humanity started in Africa (and unlike the very ordered progression of the first part of the book, here times are mixed whenever needed to support an argument), followed by the emergence of the Homo Sapiens and its dispersal around the world (in pretty broad terms - although the DNA parts were pretty interesting).

This second part is a great introduction to the topic on its own - even if you disagree with some of the more radical ideas, it is a very good short introduction. But as a second part to a book where the first part made the start of the book, it is a repetitive list (in its early part) and the lack of details and full chronology comes very sharply in focus compared to the details of the first book.

Meredith is a historian and journalist that had been writing about Africa for years. So his position on where the humanity started is not unexpected. And the fact that the first people emerged there is something that I believe based on everything I had read so far. But he seems to be pushing too much for the fact that everything started in Africa and there is nothing that first happened somewhere else (the emergence of culture, paintings and so on). Even if that is the case, the argument is just not defended properly - there is not enough data at this point to prove or disprove the hypothesis and he is pushing the data that makes it look like that as the only data available.

When I started reading the book, I expected the one-sided argument - this is why I got the book. But even like that, it felt a bit heavy-handed in the middle chapters of the second part. At the same time in the rest of the book it almost sounded as if Meredith is trying to defend a position which as universally accepted as the fact that gravity exists. But then... I suspect that there are still people that think that Asia or Europe gave birth to humanity.

Overall a decent book made up from a great part and a good one... and one example of a whole that is less than its parts. ( )

A good overview of the history of the study of human evolution. Covers modern analytic techniques as well. Focuses more on breadth than depth, but a very good quick read. ( )

The history of fossile hunting to find the origins of human life and the discussion about what defines humans. It is written with the emphasis on the hunters and less on the results and the difficulties in really establishing the evolution toward our species. ( )

This is a pretty decent short introduction to the homo species from about 6 million years ago (split from chimps) to the emergence of h. sapiens. It uses the approach of telling the story via the recent history of the people who made fossil discoveries. This makes it a little more memorable but is very incomplete and still someone confusing. I have trouble keeping the dates of species and names straight, which is not helped by the the science constantly changing and different POVs. For example it was just announced this month that the human/chimp split may not have happened 4-6 million years ago as this book and common belief supposed, but as much as 13 million years ago. Which if accepted would completely rewrite human history and this book would be out of date in many fundamental ways, like the human exodus from Africa would not be 60,000 years ago but 130,000 years ago. In any case I will keep reading on this topic until this sinks in (someday) but found this book be painless, short and interesting. ( )