The World Before Us: How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins

by Tom Higham, John Sackville (Narrator)

Listening Length: 9 hours 4 minutes

Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eurasia, hobbits (H. floresiensis) on the island of Flores in Indonesia, Denisovans in Siberia and Eastern Eurasia, and H. luzonensis in the Philippines. Tom Higham investigates what we know about these other human species and explores what can be learned from the genetic links between them and us. He also looks at whether H. erectus may have survived into the period when our ancestors first moved into Southeast Asia.

Filled with thrilling tales of recent scientific discoveries, this book offers an engaging synopsis of our current understanding of human origins and raises new and interesting possibilities - particularly concerning what contact, if any, these other species might have had with us prior to their extinction.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Evolution, Biology, Archaeology

10 pages, Audible Audio

First published March 25, 2021

About the author

Thomas Higham is an archaeological scientist and radiocarbon dating specialist. He is Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford, UK, best known for his work in dating the Neanderthal extinction and the arrival of modern humans in Europe.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was published less than 18 months ago, but things are developing so quickly in this field that it won’t be too long before it’s out of date. I listened to the audio version. Although it’s well-narrated I’m not sure that audio was the best choice for me on this occasion. There’s a lot of detailed information in here, and with audio it’s less easy to go back to sections I would like to revisit.

The book examines what we now know of humanity during the middle and upper Palaeolithic periods. Since the turn of the century, archaeological scientists have identified no less than 3 previously unknown species of extinct humans. A diminutive species of human, Homo Floresiensis, was discovered in 2004. In 2010 we saw the identification of Denisovans from a few fragments of bone taken from the eponymous cave in the Altai Mountains. The species was only identified though DNA testing, and Denisovans are therefore the first species of human to be identified in the lab rather than through fossil remains. Lastly, 2019 saw the identification of another species on the island of Luzon in The Philippines. We can say, therefore, that around 50,000 years ago there were at least 5 different species of humans in “a veritable Middle Earth”. Given the finds of the last couple of decades, it will not be surprising if further discoveries are made in the near future.

In 2010 we also had the rather sensational discovery that many modern humans carry a small proportion of Neanderthal DNA, and it is since been announced that many also carry Denisovan DNA. Indigenous people of Papua New Guinea carry up to 5% of DNA inherited from Denisovans. This can only have happened via interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. The fact that the 3 types of human successfully interbred raises the question as to whether we are actually talking about different species at all.

We know that the archaic humans of Flores and Luzon had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. Both islands are however east of the Wallace Line, which means that the early humans must have travelled over water to get there. Some academics have suggested this could have happened accidentally on natural rafts, but if so sufficient numbers would have been needed to sustain the population, and it must have happened more than once. It seems more likely that early humans travelled deliberately. This leads on to another main strand of the author’s argument, which is that we likely underestimate the cognitive capabilities of archaic humans. If, as is clearly the case, there was biological hybridization, is it not likely there was also cultural hybridization? The argument is not unreasonable but is obviously speculative to a degree. The author is an opponent of the concept of “the human revolution” said to have begun c. 50,000 BP, arguing instead for a much more gradual adoption of modern behaviours.

The other obvious question that arises is why all these types of human became extinct. We have much more information relating to Neanderthals than for the other groups, and the author argues against the idea of a rapid replacement by modern humans. Personally, I can’t get away from the fact that Neanderthals, Denisovans and Flores Man all thrived for hundreds of thousands of years, but disappeared within a few thousand years once Homo Sapiens showed up. With Neanderthals, the author raises the possibility of assimilation rather than elimination. The last chapter looks at what archaic humans may have contributed to our gene pool, in terms of useful adaptations.

The author tells a great story in terms of how all the above information (and much more) was unravelled, conveying a sense of the excitement he and his colleagues felt with each new discovery. This is very much worth a read if you are interested in the topic and want to get (more or less) up to date with it.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an age for understanding human origins, and the new books keep rolling in. A bit of a battle keeping up. Tom Higham's book is part autobiography, part storytelling and part catching up with all the latest in identifying, classifying and age dating the various hominins including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Floresiensis. The stories of which humans lived east and west of the Wallace line, separating Eurasia from the proto Australia continent were fascinating.
It is a good adjunct to Rebecca Wragg Sykes book Kindred: Neanderthal life... Both worth a read to catch up with all the latest.

[Elentarri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Higham has provided a wonderfully written and accessible overview of what we currently (2021) know about the various types of homo species (e.g. Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis , Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans) that used to live on this planet. He takes a more or less chronological approach, describing what was found, when, what was known then and now, and how that knowledge was obtained through various types of scientific and technological advancement, especially in dating methods, and also the isolation and analysis of ancient DNA from bones and... dirt!, as well as statistical analysis and extrapolation of modern DNA sampling. Higham provides just enough personal anecdotes to give the scientists working on these samples some personality. He also provides lovely, clear and easy-to-understand summaries of how specific types of analyses work and their short comings. Higham also differentiates between what is known, provisional conditions, what is speculation, and what he thinks about matters. There are several maps and diagrams, but more maps and diagrams illustrating the links between all the archaic human species and the various migrations would have been useful. I loved the technical bits. I wished there were more of them and more details about the other archaic hominid species that may or may not fit into the "homo" label. However, for what information this book does cover, it's a lovely, accessible book that shows something of how paleontology is done and highlights some of the more exciting finds connected with the extinct human relatives.

[Rudyard L. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not sure why this book is so widely praised by the literary and scientific community. At this point whenever a book is called the “nonfiction book of the year”, I realize it will be passable at best, with information I basically already know. That happened to me with the Anarchy by William Dalrymple and 5th sun by Camilla Townsend alongside a few others I forget.

The thing with this book is this is not a topic I’m that heavily invested in. I’ve read a couple books and some articles. I got about 2/3rds through this book and realize “I’ve learned absolutely nothing new here”. It’s actually pretty scarce on information on the world of the ice age. It’s more so a book about the scientists who discovered it. To which my response is “why do I care about these squabbles in academia”.

[Shriya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that, with the exception of Harry Potter, never have I found myself rereading any book, no matter how good it was. And yet, the rules have now been broken! I am re-reading The World Before us.


Now, before you ask me: The answer is yes. Do I know Tom Higham? Have I seen him in Oxford? Spoken to him in person? Yes. I have known him for a span of 10 whole minutes that we spent chatting in 2013, after a seminar at the Pitt Rivers' Museum, over a glass of wine, and even back then, I found myself asking him about Neanderthals and whether he thought they were capable of art? I was writing a term paper on Palaeolithic and had always been drawn to Neanderthals because who isn't! They were big, brainy other- humans, who, if you were studying Palaeolithic Archaeology in 2012-2013 were supposed to have gone extinct as soon as modern Humans appeared.

However, to my freshly exposed mind, who found herself studying Palaeolithic Archaeology without a prior background, the theory felt a little too "human centric," and each time I had an outburst in the class saying, "What if-?" I had been shushed with condescending snikers and "What if, indeed!"


So, there I was, standing next to the one person who would soon have all the answers, and who, as I understood it then, had made our lives increasingly complex while trying to study Hominin Evolution and rather timidly, I asked him what it was indeed. When he promised me I would know soon enough and he hoped he would be able to give me the answer in person, I had no idea it would indeed be the case! That I would be hosting him 9 years later on my platform, Speaking Archaeologically, and the conversation would literally start from where we had left it: Professor Higham was about to release his first book simplifying it all for the likes of the 20 year old me in a book that was coming out in less than a week.

Needless to say, several preorders were opted for on Amazon India that night. I myself bought two copies and then spent days with baited breath waiting for the book to arrive, quarreling with a dear friend, who incidentally received a signed copy and hoping against hope that mine would be signed, too!


It wasn't signed but was I glad that this meant meeting Tom Higham again just for getting it signed and also to discuss the finer points in it!


Anyway, that's all the background. Let's now talk about the book. At the risk of repeating myself, I think if there's one book on prehistory you must read, let it be this book because not only does this incorporate all the latest research there is, including genetics, it's also the most readable book in prehistory there is.

Despite being an expert par excellence in DNA analysis, Tom Higham doesn't write like one. He writes it the way he talks to you: casually, affably, with an ease that makes you imagine you're sitting across a coffee table or in a pub at Oxford with him and chatting like you would after the Thrusday Evening Pal-Quat Seminars at the Institute of Archaeology.

He writes warmly, as if he's talking to a friend and that friend is you. He explains even the most basic concepts so that the book remains forever useful even if the research in it is replaced by new facts. There are moments that are described with such clarity that you almost feel you were with him when that happened and there are moments that you will feel goosebumps popping up all over you because something unexpected was discovered (Read the Denny Episode).

I studied Palaeolithic Archaeology at a time when the results for the discovery of the Denisovans were still due, there was no luzonensis and if you proposed that there could be hybrids between Neanderthals and Humans, you'd be laughed at in class. For people like me, therefore, this book was an absolute treat, something that made me have the last laugh after all! Of course I am not claiming that my half baked, fantastic hypotheses are any match to the facts backed up by proof but this is the one book that tells you anything is possible in our study of the evolution of humans and we are only beginning to scrape off the tip of the iceberg!


For the best half of the month, this book consumed me completely. I would wake up at 5:30 every morning to read it, spend most my mornings discussing chapters with my own Archaeology Interns at Speaking Archaeologically, then spend the day mulling over all that I had read. If you disturbed me while I read, you'd have been in for a cranky, harsh telling off and in case you moved my book from my bedside, you'd be in for some serious trouble. The day I finished it, I was overwhelmed with the feeling of having lost a companion now that I had finished it. What would I do with my mornings? What would I read next ? I absolutely refuse this to be the last of this. And I can't wait for what happens next!

[Tim Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well written, engaging, informative, and up to date overview of the surprisingly complex world of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic Period (roughly 300,000 to 40,000 years ago), when the world was a sort of Middle-earth and Homo sapiens were not the only people in the world. It is also an account of cutting age science and technology as applied to genomics and dating remains (and sediment) as applied to the study of our ancestry and the story of our human cousins.

It was really exciting to read such a recently published book that not only gathered together so much information I had only previously seen in popular science articles (this time written by a professional, not a journalist) but also considerably added to the story, as the author participated in a number of studies on our human cousins from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, whether in collecting and analyzing Denisovan DNA or in dating Neanderthal remains particularly with an eye towards establishing how late in world history they survived.

So much is covered. Early on we get chapters that detail two hominids from Africa, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo naledi (whose 2013 discovery in a cave in South Africa is well detailed in the book) but the majority of the book covers the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis (the famed “Hobbits” of Flores Island, Indonesia), Homo luzonensis from the Philippines, and Homo erectus (which evidence points to surviving in the islands of southeast Asia as late as 50,000 years ago). So much of the information covered in the book is new! Homo floresiensis was discovered in 2003, the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010 (the same year Denisovan DNA was sequenced), and Homo luzonensis wasn’t named until 2019. It wasn’t long ago at all scientists said that there had been no interbreeding with other species of humans, now we know that more than 20% of the Neanderthal genome can be recovered from modern populations (and a percentage also of Denisovan DNA, though at the time of writing the percentage wasn’t known yet). It’s still early days yet though in a lot of this, as for instance there are only six pieces of bones known positively to be from Denisovans, five of them from one location, and there are still segments of the Homo sapiens genome that cannot be accounted for by what we know of either Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA, though this might be from a lack of our understanding of the variation possible in the DNA of either species or might be from another unknown group, a ghost population, possibly Homo erectus.

The book can be a little technical at times, using terms such as genetic admixture (resulting from the interbreeding of two or more formerly isolated populations), recombination (the combination of DNA from two parents to produce a combination not strictly speaking found exactly in either parent), introgression (the transfer of genetic information from one species into the gene pool of another by repeated backcrossing with an interspecies hybrid with one of its parent species), exaptation (genetic trait selected for serving for one function but advantageous for a future trait not originally selected for), and interstadial (periods of warmer climate during the last 2.6 million years). I was never lost. Since so much of the book revolves around genetics, most especially the study of the Denisovans, knowing the genetic science is important but the author patiently and expertly explained what I needed to know to understand the text.

In addition to introducing readers to our human cousins that lived in this Paleolithic “Middle-earth” they will get to read about the story of the discovery and study of these groups (particularly fascinating in the case of the Denisovans and Homo floresiensis, with especially the former given a good feel for the personalities involved, the places where the discoveries were made and the studies done, and the drama behind all of this).

The concluding chapters are interesting, as there is a great discussion of how humanity replaced these other groups (it seems to have been more subtle and drawn out a replacement than previously thought), that it wasn’t necessarily the case that Homo sapiens was “superior” so much as these other groups tended to have lower populations, lower group numbers, and less genetic diversity, all sources of vulnerability, and that humanity’s strong tendency to hybridize both biologically and culturally meant humanity not only benefitted from encountering these groups but in a very real sense something of at least some of these groups (Denisovans and Neanderthals) lives on in us today. Also, it is becoming clearer that it wasn’t just Homo sapiens that had anything civilized, as tools and even art have been found associated with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and given how many islands Homo erectus and Denisovans reached, at least the possibility that they had maritime technology exists.

It's an exciting time in Paleolithic archaeology and paleontology and this book did a great job of conveying that excitement. The discovery of Homo floresiensis has inspired researches to digger deeper in the islands of southeast Asia to see what is there, while advances in genomics and in finding DNA in sediment opens up the possibility to find a wealth of information when skeletal remains are sparse or even nonexistent.

[Sasha]

This is a case of something that happens quite a bit in today's books written by scientists who are actively engaged in research: although the book presents itself as being about the history of human evolution, its main topic is the researchers who work in the field. Consequently, the bits of text that tell us about human origins aren't told cohesively, and certainly not chronologically.

There are some books where such a focus on the scientists explores the drama of academia politics, and therefore is interesting to read (Priya Natarajan's Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos is one example*). But I don't think that the approach that Tom Higham takes in The World Before Us reaches that riveting level.

____
disclaimer, I know Priya as a colleague and mentor but that's not why I liked her book.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Higham has written a book that deftly straddles the tricky line between giving a technical account and a human account of any scientific endeavour. In The World Before Us he gives us his view on what it has been like to be at the forefront of top tier science looking into our extinct human relatives and Palaeolithic ancestors. Having been involved in much of the high profile research looking at the Denisovans, Flores Hobbits, and Neanderthal extinction this view comes with a lot of weight. Fascinating insights into how the science is done, along with guest appearances from some of the key players in modern palaeoanthropology ensures that the book whips along at a frenetic pace and once it gets going it doesn't let up. Infused with the author's infectious enthusiasm for everything Pleistocene, it's a real page turner. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a palaeoanthropology book as much as this one.

[John Rennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book treads a nice line between rigorous enough for people who have some knowledge of the area while still staying accessible to the general public. I am a scientist, but a physicist who knows little of archaeology or biochemistry, and I found it a little challenging in places but understandable after a second read.

Obviously this isn't going to be of interest to everyone, but if you are interested in human information the book is a treasure trove (apologies for the cliche, but it's justified here!) of information about the current state of the art. I found it a fascinating read.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a very interesting book, not only for the way it presents the existence of the variants of the human species - Neanderthal, Denisovan, Floresiensis (hobbits) and Luzonensis - that lived between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, but also for the way it discusses scientific work in the fields of archaeology and palaeontology, how it accounts for the detail, and how the evidence, so limited, can serve to travel back in time.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compared to the many other books on human evolution that I've read over the past twenty years, this is one of the most accessible and readable ones. It's also right up to date, especially on the Denisovans and Neanderthals and the introgression of their genes into Sapiens genomes. Great read!

[Rob Sedgwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a good book and I now feel bang up to date with where science currently stands. Things are likely to change fast so I'd recommend reading this book in 2021 or 2022.

I felt the technical level was about right. It was easy enough to follow but not too hard to understand that I was in danger of losing the thread.

I did feel though that it could have done with a few more diagrams of the relationship between human species and migration patterns. A picture says a thousand words and quite often there was a lot of text to describe something which would be better explained with a diagram. It's not as though these don't exist as you can find them with a simple Google search. The maps at the start of each chapter were of limited use.

[Wej · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is hard to imagine that once there were other human species living on Earth. This book does a great job in taking the readers through the recent discoveries, scientific process and methods used in archeological science and anthropology.
Alongside Homo Sapiens, our planet was once inhabited by Denisovans and Neanderthals, and several other species. The remains of these ancient beings, however incredibly rare, can give us a glimpse into the evolution of humans. Due to the advances in modern genetics, we now know more about the history of early human species. Some of the findings that we particularly novel to me were: certain populations in SE Asia still carry a large share of Denisovan DNA, there was an overlap between different species, (e.g. Denisovans and Neanderthals; or Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens), and they interbred.
I wish that more popular science books were written like this one. Full of interesting stories, not shying away from technical explanations (e.g. about genetic or dating methods), richly illustrated, and authored by a specialist in the field.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

From this book I learned that homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived together for centuries. Other homonin species thrived as well - Denisovins, Hobbits, and they all procreate with each other. Our DNA still contain traces of these now extinct hominins - people who sunburn easily, are morning persons, and who are susceptible to type 2 diabetes usually possess Neanderthal DNA. The reason is that Neanderthals migrated from Africa to Eurasia around 200,000 years ago, until going extinct around 40,000 BC.

[Popular Science Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book mainly discusses the Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo floresiensis - with a focus on how we can find and date the remains of these species. The authors’ academic life is also discussed, including an interesting section on how his master’s student used a new technique to identify a bone from a Denisovan/Neanderthal hybrid. Overall, I enjoyed this book but was expecting it to discuss more than 3 archaic human species. This is not the book’s fault, though - I should have done better research before buying!

[Peter Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The World Before Us by Tom Higham

Deep time captivates me. The idea of learning about human prehistory spanning a period of 40,000 years from 70,000 years ago to 35,000 years ago is like contemplating the infinity of space. Written history goes back around 3,500 years. When we first started writing things down, we already had a history that went back ten times that length.

Deep time is deep.

It is also a Dark Age. There is no written record that can let us know what we were doing during this period. We get some clues that push back our scant knowledge as we find megaliths at Gobeckli Tepe erected something like 10,000 years ago. Past that and it is almost total darkness.

But there is candle flicker in the deep past as Tom Higham explains. The candle is the advance in DNA science that have been pioneered over the last twenty years. Because of this science, we have been able to identify a contributor to the human species from a tiny piece of a forefinger and a few other bone fragments. The DNA analysis from those tiny pieces have allowed scientists to identify the Denisovans, whose genetic legacy is found throughout Asia and into deep Melanasia.

I had not realized how set apart Denisovans were from Neanderthals:

While Neanderthals differ from modern humans at an average of 202 base positions along the 16,500 base pairs of the mitochondrial genome, the sample from Denisova cave differed at 385 positions, almost twice as many.

Higham, Tom. The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins (p. 74). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Nonetheless, one of the fragments discovered came from a girl whose parents had included both a Neanderthal and a Denisovan. One would imagine that the odds of this are astronomical.

Recent discoveries are upsetting the linear progression we used to think existed. Higham notes:

At Mandrin, then, it looks as though we have something completely new. Instead of Neanderthals being replaced by modern humans in Europe around 41–43,000 years ago, it seems that moderns entered significantly earlier. They did not persist, however, and were themselves replaced by Neanderthals. It was only around 7–8,000 years later that modern humans once again repopulated the area, this time in greater numbers and at many more sites.

This is the first time we have found an interstratification like this in Europe: first we have Neanderthals, then modern humans, then Neanderthals again, then modern humans. This is obviously extremely significant, but how can we explain what happened at Mandrin? How could humans have entered Neanderthal territory so much earlier than we considered possible? I have two thoughts on this. The first concerns the population of Neanderthals in Europe 50,000 years ago. We have evidence that they were under some degree of stress in terms of their genetic diversity, which was low (I will discuss more of this in Chapter 15). A study of mitochondrial DNA in thirteen Neanderthals showed that they appeared to have gone through a bottleneck and a population contraction.9 We can imagine Neanderthal groups perhaps isolated from one another around 50,000 years ago, and present in lower numbers than before. Perhaps this was the moment when modern humans made this initial incursion. But why did moderns not remain in Europe? Why did Neanderthals replace them later on?

Higham, Tom. The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins (p. 138). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

The success of our kind was not a foregone conclusion.

I picked up a lot of cutting edge information, but the problem in my opinion is that Higham spends a lot of time in the technical weeds. He is one of the foremost researchers on the issue of dating artifacts in deep time. He was involved in a lot of the discoveries he discusses. This might be interesting for some people, but as a casual reader, I am less interested in the mechanics of dating. Frankly, I skimmed all of that information to find the juicier parts.

If you like deep discussions of technical problems, then this is your book. If you are interested in nothing but the “gosh-wow!” stuff, then you might not want to invest in this book.

[Bihter İyidir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bilimsel gelişmelerin baş döndürücü bir hızla ilerlemesi dolayısıyla insanın kökenlerine dair kavrayışımız her geçen gün daha çok netleşiyor. Bir yandan da her gelişme ve her yeni bilgi pek çok farklı soru oluşturuyor.
Bu kitap 2021 yılında yazılmış ve en yeni bilimsel çalışmaların sonuçlarını aktarıyor. İnsanın evrimine ve homo cinsinin geçmişine dair okuduğum kitaplarda özellikle denisovalılardan maksimum bir kaç paragrafda bahsediliyordu, çünkü bulgular çok yeni ve oldukça kısıtlı. Bu kitap neandertallerin yanı sıra denisovalıları, hobbitleri, homo luzonensisi, homo erectusu en yeni veriler ve genetik araştırmalar eşliğinde kapsamlı bir şekilde anlatıyor.
Okurken çok keyif aldım, tekrar tekrar okumaya değer.

“Yalıtılma ve ayrışmaya dayalı eski insan evrimi modellerinin yerini artık gen akışı, gen sızması ve karışım içeren modellerin alması gerekiyor. İnsan evriminin dallı ağacı, artık kolları sık sık birbirine girip çıkan geniş bir örgülü nehirle değiştirilmeli.”

[Nick Sutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The study of human origins has advanced at such a staggering rate over the past decade or so that the curious layperson may be left wondering where on earth to start. Not to mention that the flood of fascinating new information has been accompanied by a considerable amount of misinformation. Fortunately, with The World Before Us: How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins, Professor Tom Higham provides a well written, well researched and authoritative starting point (there are 30 pages of endnotes and references to credible academic publications for those that decide they want to delve in to the subject deeper). Professor Higham has been at the forefront of a lot of recent groundbreaking research on our evolutionary cousins the Denisovans and the Neanderthals and, for me, the insights and personal accounts of those “times in science when you basically lose it with sheer excitement and joy” added to the book considerably.

[Utku Cevre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karbon bazlı yaşam türlerinin yaşlarını yaklaşık olarak 50.000 yıl öncesine kadar ölçmekte kullanılan Karbon 14 metodunu ilk duyduğumda henüz çocuktum. Türkiye’de çıkmış açık ara en kaliteli çocuk dergisi olan Doğan Kardeş’te arkeolojiyi sevdirmeye çalışan bir yazıda okuduğumu hatırlıyorum. Yıllar sonraki geleceğe, bizim medeniyetimizin yerinde yeller estiği zamanlara bir kapsül göndermek için, teneke bir kutuya biraz bozuk para, naylon poşete sarılmış bir parça gazete küpürü ve fotoğraflar koyup toprağın altına gömmeyi de öneriyordu. Yeni Zelandalı, babadan arkeolog Thomas Higham’ın 2021 tarihli güncel eseri Bizden Önceki Dünya’yı okurken bunları düşündüm. Homo Sapiens olarak dünyadan gelip geçen ilk insan türü değiliz. Higham, odağı Afrika çıkışlı Sapiens’ten biraz uzağa çeviriyor. Avrasyalı Neandertalleri, Sibirya’daki Denisova mağarasından kemik örnekleri çıkan Denisova insanlarını, Endonzeya’da bulunan çok kısa boylu Homo Floresiensis veya namıdiğer Hobbitleri konu ediyor daha çok. İki ayak üstünde yürüyen ilk hominin türü olan Homo Erectus’un Sapiens öncesinde soyunun tükendiği bilgisini yanlışlıyor. 90.000 yıl önce Denisovalı bir baba ile Neandertal bir annenin melez yavrusu olan 13 yaşındaki kız çocuğu Denny’yi tanıtıyor ve tüm bunları anlatırken arkeolojinin en modern DNA analiz ve radyokarbon tarihleme tekniklerinden bahsediyor. Bir parça kemikten bulabildikleri ayrıntılara şaşıyorsunuz. Arkeoloji dünyasında kemik örnekleri edinme yarışının zorluğuna da. Teknik açıklamalarını ilk anda anlamak biraz zor olsa da, konuya bütüncül ve insancıl bir bakış açısıyla yaklaşan çok iyi bir kitap. Tavsiye ediyorum.

[Andrew Fehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topic with very up to date information but it was overly scientific and overly focused on the author's research. I was hoping for a bit more of a survey of the topic.

There was a point where the author was like "it may be complicated but I think an explanation of this scientific technique is necessary." And I was like, "no! An explanation of this depth is definitely not necessary!" That sort of sums up my view of the book.

[Paleoanthro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant, engaging, and informative look at human evolution and the role that genomics is playing in highlighting our place within nature and the diversity of the human family tree. Higham provides a an inside look at some of the most important fossils in human evolution and there relationship to us, while giving us an inside tour of the developing and new scientific techniques that are becoming part of paleoanthropology. Hight recommended reading!

[Shariq Chishti · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a few books on human origins but none by an actual archeologist. Tom Higham, being a towering personality of the field, has written an extremely engrossing and fascinating account of human origin. What really distinguishes the book is the accounts of moments of discovery in field and laboratories.

Also this field of study is evolving with new discoveries very fast and it’s just incredulous to believe that we are still finding and discovering human cousins.

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so good, I loved every second of reading it. The author is an Otago graduate who is now the head of the Oxford radiocarbon lab (!!!) and I've attended lectures by him and he's an amazing speaker as well as writer. He struck a perfect balance between popular and scientific and he made me understand Sanger Sequencing which is something that numerous bioanth lecturers failed to do so over 3 years. I love Denisovans I love Neanderthals I love Homo floresiensis and I loved this book. I kind of also regret reading it because now all I want to do is study human evolution and palaeogenomics and palaeoanthropology and I'm incredibly sad at the thought of anything else.

[Brenda Greene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom and his wife Katrina travel throughout the world to get their hands on all manner of artefacts then extract the DNA, specialising in the Paleaolithic, and date them up to 50,000 years ago. He provides lots of photos, helpful diagrams and explanations of the molecular techniques used, including their limitations, then goes on to describe several digs. The dedication to his craft is reflected in his persistence, attention to detail and length of time at dig sites.

The first three chapters compare earlier descriptions of this period based on morphology and stratigraphy and how that differs substantially from the molecular data. A lot of this will only be of passing interest to readers as the interpretation of bones etc (what our ancestors looked like, what their culture could have been, where they dispersed and when) remains highly speculative and unable to be verified, whatever the method used. Tim's ego comes into play when he lightly dismisses a very valid point that deserves proper discussion about the relationship between genotype and phenotype.

The book gets a lot more interesting from Chapter 4, when they discover a Deniston ancestor, although this exciting discovery seems to wipe from his mind all the previous limitations of the archaeological methods he's described. Humans and their ancestors are highly variable and the number of Palaeolithic fossils are never large enough or representative enough to make many of his statements more than fanciful speculation.

As the number of published papers using molecular tools has increased exponentially since 2018, i was hoping for an overview and insight into the distribution of various finds (bones, tools, food etc) per period as accurately dated by DNA as possible and descriptions of key sites. Full page illustrations would help.

Instead the book is a semi autobiography of dig sites Tom visited and mostly his research into one molecular variant (Deniston), which has been his career highlight. This is ok but way too much detail unless you want some inkling about Tom's research and stream of consciousness. I only hope that the next book he writes has a better structure and focus as it was difficult to keep up with the various conclusions he lept to after looking at all of the evidence at hand.

At the end I did not get a sense that I was any more informed or certain about our evolutionary history, even though it was clear DNA dating had huge potential to do so.

Recent research on Moa bones in NZ, for example, reduced the number of species from 13 to 3 because prior morphological measurements did not distinguish the much larger females from males, or males from juveniles of the same species, or take into account variation in morphology of the same species across its range. Tom's hobbits (really?), Denistons and Neanderthals are just as likely to be one species. I'm surprised his research doesn't prove this one way or another, but perhaps it's not possible. Tom would know.

Even though Tom can identify a tiny bone to be from the right third finger if a 13 year old girl, which is astonishing in its own right, and has DNA from a whole family from our fairly recent past, what we discover is what we already knew. Our genetic code is made up of a highly variable, interbreeding, mobile groups. What Tom has done is to quantify a part of that history.

Tom's style is engaging and you are carried along by his enthusiasm. He candidly states his opinions and shows how the evidence does not support much of it. It's science at its cutting edge, raw and messy, chasing the opportunities as they come and generating more questions than answers. Archaeology is a very imprecise science and he shows that very well.

[Nuri · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to this book in its audiobook version on 1.25x speed while doing other things, and thank God I did because otherwise I would have dropped it long ago and never come back to it. Finishing it was more of a personal challenge "to bring something boring to the end", and at least that much I achieved.

Anyway, to the content of the book: Oh my lord, there was so much ego going on here, so much "I achieved this", "I discovered this", me me me. To be fair, the author also spoke about the achievements of other scientists, but this whole egotism in science really stood out to me, and disgusted me. There was not enough humility, and it made me glad that I didn't start the PhD that I was supposed to start last year. If academic is so much about proving that YOU were the one who discovered such and such, then no thank you, I don't want to be part of this world.
I will admit: him talking about the processes of discovery and international academic cooperation and the frustrations involved in that could be exactly what's appealing to the interested reader from within academia who will feel able to relate.

What else? I've learned about the existence and co-existence of different human species on our planet (I had never heard of the Denisovan humans before, so that's something I will take away from it) and how till today some human populations continue to carry genomes of such extinct human species that make them actually more adapt to living in certain places (for instance in Nepal).

[Joel Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being an anthropology student pursuing undergrad studies at McGill University, I greatly appreciated the addition of Tom Higham's masterful work, the UK paperback edition of "The World Before Us: How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins" to my reading, which is a fusion of both memoir and informative science writing. His intended audience are readers at the tertiary level and above, casual readers with an interest in evolutionary biology and the anthropological sciences.

One of the things that immediately stood out to me was the startlingly multi-disciplinary approach to the book. The plethora of scientific / mathematical disciplines deployed include, but are not limited to archaeology, forensic anthropology, physical anthropology chemistry, biochemistry, geochemistry, genetics, geography, geology, osteology, palaeontology, palaeoclimatology, probability and statistics, etc. I say this because in North America (the U.S. and Canada in particular) in marked contrast qualitatively to the U.K and Europe, anthropology is narrowly approached and taught misguidedly as a 'social science,' with an overemphasis on cultural analysis and relativistic sociological lens in the Arts department, drawing heavily on 'Critical Theory' as a hermeneutic methodology in which to interpret the anthropological / archaeological record with regards to gender, race (the work of Frantz Fanon for example), Marxism (labor, concepts of the superstructure). As a consequence, the discipline as it is taught (referring to the situation in Canada) is stuck in the 19th and 20th centuries, theory-laden, hung on foundational readings based on personalities ranging from Max Weber to Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu (sociologists by training), with little to no real-world application and painfully out-of-date with respect to our evolving, approximate scientific knowledge. If a text had to be chosen as mandatory course reading for undergraduates, I would definitely choose this book because it paints a broad picture, from which interested students may select preferential fields, sub-fields to further their studies in later years.

The book in question is a compact synthesis of the current anthropological knowledge concerning the emergence, spread and evolution of our genus Homo in the Paleaolithic (Stone Age) in Africa as gleaned from archaeological field work. Tom Higham's temporal focus are the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) and the Upper Palaeolithic, a time range stretching from 350,000-50,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans journeyed out of Africa and into western Eurasia (Out of Africa hypothesis). Humans from this point on become "an invasive species, moving into a wide array of new environments..." (p. 27). Unlike other books of popular science, this particular text is written by someone with a speciality in radiocarbon dating, and thus, Higham places principal emphasis on chronology: new, revolutionary scientific dating methods in evaluating the age of archaeological materials such as bones, teeth, shells, soil DNA, stone tools-- the major plus of the book, in addition to drawing equally from the groundbreaking fields of ancient genomics, pioneered by his colleague Svante Paabo and the Human Genome Project. I particularly admired the fact that Tom Higham doesn't water down the science to the point of simplicity; he does get technical in several instances and provides a generous gallery of diagrams to help illustrate the points he's making, whether it relates to laboratory work to remove contamination from excavated organic material or tracts of ancient DNA that illustrate introgression (admixture events).

Archaeological science as it is practiced today in Western Europe relies heavily on the relatively new field, genetics and is therefore necessarily team-driven. Tom Higham reveals how the publication of scientific papers is driven by competition amongst scientists and the prestige of being first in publishing pathbreaking research. According to Higham, "in science, first is everything; second is first loser" (p.78).

DNA extracted from a tiny bone fragment can reveal a lot: the age of the person at death, the date range at the time of death, even the gender of the person via nuclear DNA (gender is in fact a biological marker, not merely a social construct as argued by the proponents of critical theory). It is rather surprising to learn how some of the scientific methods employed in archaeology stem either directly or indirectly from the war period and military science. As it turns out, radiocarbon dating pioneered by Willard Libby based at the University of Chicago is an unintended product of the Manhattan Project. As the author puts it, "radiocarbon essentially gave birth to the field of archaeological science" (p.116). The statistical approach, D Statistic in the area of computational analysis as developed by Nick Patterson, originally emerged amongst his University of Cambridge professors who were recruited as code breakers during WWII in the war against the Germans. This sophisticated technique for pattern recognition later was appropriated by Western intelligence agencies, namely GCHQ and the Center for Communications Research in the US (p. 81). Another gift of the Manhattan Project is the uranium-thorium method used for dating archaeological samples, based on uranium isotopes.

As the book progresses, Tom Higham leaves the reader with a much more nuanced, complex understanding of human evolution that had not been the case in the last decade, let alone the last century. We now know that Homo sapiens not only co-existed with at least 5 extinct human groups that overlapped with ours--Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis--but also co-habited and interbred with the first two groups, whose genetic signatures can still be detected in living people today: Africans (surprisingly), Europeans, Native Americas, East Asians and peoples residing in Island Southeast Asia. Moreover, Higham puts to rest once and for all many unsubstantiated theories that attempt to explain the disappearance of our evolutionary cousins previously hinged on the supposed superiority of Homo sapiens. On the contrary, he convincingly shows instead how Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo floresiensis most likely met their ends as a consequence of low genetic diversity and low population density. In the case of the Neanderthals, they became extinct because they were too few in number, poorly socially networked and scattered across vast land areas in Eurasia and too inbred amongst close relatives. Furthermore, modern humans did not possess an exclusive monopoly on complex cognitive behaviour: Neanderthals and Denisovans had remarkably similar cultural developments to Homo Sapiens with respect to the production of stone tools, symbolic art and ornaments such as perforated teeth, shells, rings, make up applied to the body that are suggestive of cognitive revolution. In so doing, both the categories of "human" and "modern" are profoundly problematized, raising dire questions about the continuance of the term 'species' to separate and designate the numerous interrelated hominin groups. It then becomes apparent the term 'human' is evolving into an umbrella term to account for a range of hominin groups.

Ironically, the success of Homo sapiens was contingent upon changing climatic conditions such as warming global temperatures, which paved the way in turn for the flourishing of tropical rainforests that replaced previous woodland ecosystems. Climate change is once again a crucial determinant in the survivability of our kind, now the only human group left standing on the earth as the population has gone past 8 billion. I see myself returning to this work for a second read in the near future! Brilliant

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book. It addresses the question of what makes us human at a fundamental level that I hadn't devoted much thought to before - on a biological level, we define humans as being Homo sapiens. But the problem is that we aren't entirely Homo sapiens. Higham, who is a top academic archaeologist at the forefront of the most exciting developments in dating and genetic research, narrates our complicated genetic history from the perspective of the researchers who have been making these amazing discoveries.

It seems as though Higham is obsessed with Denisovans - over 1/3 of the book is devoted to explaining research, much of it his own, on this lost relative of ours. The research is pretty fascinating because it's basically like forensically analyzing a crime scene that happened tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. Higham spends a lot of time talking about the techniques that archaeologists have developed to figure out what happened so long ago, and it blew me away. For example, Higham details the research he and others have been doing at Denisova cave in Russia. The cave has accumulated literally hundreds of thousands of years of dirt and debris on its floor, so researchers have been painstakingly excavating and mapping the layers of sediment. Over the millennia, sediment has shifted, subsided, been overturned, been washed away, etc, but it seems as though the researchers have done a great job of somehow mapping all of the layers and accounting for all of the processes affecting the sediment. The next amazing thing is the genetic research, much of it enabled by Svante Paabo, who just won a Nobel Prize for this type of work. Paabo, Higham and others have developed techniques to extract DNA from tiny, ancient pieces of bone. A lot of their techniques revolve around getting rid of modern DNA that inevitably contaminates ancient samples. For example, certain nucleotides decay into other nucleotides at a somewhat predictable rate over time, so by washing out DNA that has low levels of decayed nucleotides, they can raise their concentrations of ancient DNA.

I'll relate one really cool story that Higham tells. One issue with the Denisova site is that hyenas occupied it for much of its history, and hyenas like to chew up and swallow bones, pooping out little shards that are impossible to identify. Higham and others had the idea to gather these shards and extract and test the DNA of all of them. He had a graduate student do this painstaking work, which resulted in them finding a single shard that had the DNA of a first generation human-Denisovan hybrid.

So how did Denisovans, Neanderthals, and other ancient hominins affect our ancestors? Although much is unknown and may be impossible to know, archaeologists have made a huge amount of progress in figuring out what happened. First of all, what do we know about ancient humans? We know that they originated in Africa, and that by around 50-60,000 years ago they had spread throughout most of Europe, Asia, and Australia. However, there is an increasing amount of evidence that between 120-60k years ago, humans were leaving Africa in dribs and drabs, reaching as far as Sumatra, although these early migrations may not have been ultimately successful. These dates indicate that our species, Homo sapiens, overlapped with many other hominins in both space and time - Neanderthals in Europe and Western Asia, Denisovans in Eastern and Southeastern Asia, Homo naledi and others in Africa, Homo floresiensis in Flores in Indonesia and Homo luzonensis in Luzon in the Philippines, and very likely other unknown hominins (likely remnants of Homo erectus) living in Island Southeast Asia. And it's very likely that we interacted with most of these hominins, teaching and learning from them, and often mating with them.

According to Higham, the evidence in Europe indicates that Neanderthals were surprisingly sophisticated. "In southern Spain, for example, we have evidence for marine resource use amongst Neanderthals, including the hunting and catching of seals, dolphins, fish and shellfish. At sites in Greece and Italy there is evidence of turtle and bird hunting, as well as shell-fishing. ... Neanderthals appear to have eaten lentils, water lilies, pistachio, tubers, wild cereals, figs, mushrooms, pine nuts and mosses, and many more unexpected types of food. They were certainly not exclusively meat eaters. ... One of the Neanderthals from El Sidrón had a tooth abscess. Molecular compounds from yarrow and chamomile were identified in the subject’s dental plaque." Significantly, archaeologists have been finding evidence of Neanderthal art: "At a Neanderthal site in the south of Spain, for example, archaeologists found shells with perforations that enabled them to be worn or displayed. In addition, the remains of pigments were found on and near the shells. These included ochre (red), pyrite (black) and natrojarosite (yellow) minerals. A small bone with pigment present at its tip implies its use in preparing these pigments and mixing them to make different colours, mixed in a larger Spondylus shell container. The remains date to around 115–120,000 years ago, well before Upper Palaeolithic modern humans are present in Europe. In ancient Egypt natrojarosite was used as a cosmetic. Could Neanderthals have been using these various pigments to the same effect or for self- decoration? I think the answer must be yes." "In addition to shells, Neanderthals seem to have had a genuine interest in the feathers of big birds of prey. They may have used them in a decorative and therefore symbolic manner. This evidence is based on the presence in archaeological sites of certain birds’ wing bones that have been clearly cut and sawn by stone tools." In addition, "If the latest dates are reliable then the evidence suggests that Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens, were the first cave painters. Who knows, modern humans might have seen these early representations and copied them?" Furthermore, it seems as though the process of humans replacing Neanderthals was not entirely a one way street - Higham mentions several sites where there was a clear back and forth between humans and Neanderthals over the millennia. So in certain early circumstances at least, Neanderthals were evenly matched with humans. Europeans and Asians seem to have inherited their Neanderthal DNA, amounting to 1-3% of our genomes, from one event/population. Fascinatingly, "More than 20 per cent of the Neanderthal genome can be recovered from modern human populations, perhaps more."

For all of the press that Neanderthals have gotten, Denisovans may have left an even larger legacy in humans, especially in East/Southeast Asians. 4.8% of the Melanesian genome derives from Denisovans, and 0.4-0.8% of Han Chinese and Tibetan genomes are Denisovan. Interestingly, after the discovery of the Denisovan bone fragments about 10 years ago, researchers took second looks at odd archaic human skulls from China and realized that they were probably Denisovan or Denisovan-human hybrid skulls. Fascinatingly, some of these skulls "contain a second molar that has three roots. In non-Asian Homo sapiens this is very rare, seen in less than 3.5 per cent of people, but in Asian people and Native Americans it is much more common: up to 40 per cent of people have it." Fascinatingly, Tibetans have a variant of the EPAS1 gene that is crucial for their ability to deal with the low level of oxygen at high altitudes. It is almost certain that they inherited this variant of EPAS1 from Denisovans (the same variant was found in the DNA of a Denisovan girl). Another fascinating likely genetic legacy of the Denisovans is in the Greenland Inuit - they have variants of two genes that increase the levels of brown fat in adults (fat that is used for generating heat rather than for storing energy). Almost 100% of the Greenland Inuit population has these variants, but they are extremely rare in other human populations - but they are very similar to Denisovan genes. Lastly, it seems as though inhabitants of Island Southeast Asia inherited many Denisovan genes related to immunity - perhaps Denisovans, who had been inhabiting that part of the tropics long before modern humans arrived, passed on immunity-related genes that were useful for surviving the diseases in that part of the world.

Fascinatingly, Higham also talks about research that indicates that there were at least three distinct populations of Denisovans. These populations were very different from each other, perhaps so much that one of them could even be called a different species. Due to the large differences in these populations' genetics, researchers have apparently been able to figure out from the DNA of modern Papuans that there were at least 2 introgressions (interbreeding events) of Denisovans into that population of people, and that these two introgressions were different from the introgression that introduced Denisovan DNA into East Asians. Furthermore, genetic analysis has also indicated that Denisovans themselves likely interbred with other, unknown archaic hominins in their past before interbreeding with humans, meaning that many populations of humans have also inherited genes from those unknown archaic humans.

In summary, as our ancestors left Africa, they didn't spread out into a void. In other words, even though we often interpret leaving Africa as an indication of our intelligence and readiness to conquer the world, earlier hominin species had already done this. As humans entered Europe, they encountered groups of Neanderthals. In South and East Asia, they encountered Denisovans. In Southeast Asia, they encountered not only Denisovans but also Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, and likely several other ancient hominins. Even within Africa, humans were coexisting with other ancient hominins (although Higham doesn't talk much about this). Our ancestors mated with many of these other ancient hominins, leaving us with a permanent genetic legacy. Denisovan genes helped Tibetans live on their high plateau, helped Melanesians and others adapt to the diseases of tropical Southeast Asia, and possibly helped Inuits live in the far north. Neanderthal genes gave us a number of traits including lighter skin and a propensity for diabetes. They also possibly passed on new technologies and innovations to us. What if certain technologies, such as painting or sewing, are actually originally Neanderthal technology and not human technology? In Melanesians, the percent of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA reaches 7.5%, more than the genetic contribution of a great-great-grandparent. Furthermore, the science of our extinct relatives is in its infancy - it was only discovered that humans contained Neanderthal DNA in 2010, the same year in which the first Denisovan genome was sequenced. In the coming years, it is almost guaranteed that researchers will discover new species of ancient hominin and new relations between us and them.

As I said in the beginning, this book really made me question what it means to be human. First of all, it helped me appreciate how similar all modern humans are to each other. Although modern humans are very diverse, we are all basically siblings compared to how different we were from other hominin species. And even then, we were similar enough to these other hominins to be able to mate with them and possibly learn from them. I learned that I myself have not only Neanderthal but also Denisovan ancestors. Those ancestors may have influenced us more than just genetically, perhaps passing on technological and cultural innovations that affect us to this day. To me this shows that we need to broaden our idea of what it means to be human beyond "Homo sapiens" to at least include our genus as a whole. It seems like a fluke of history that we are now the only surviving hominin. There was a time when there were many species of hominin, including Homo sapiens, living together. Unfortunately we still know almost nothing about those times, but after reading this book I am eagerly waiting for archaeologists to make more discoveries.

[Henry Gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in the 1980s when I was doing my PhD on how to tell the difference between Ice-Age cows (Bos) and Ice-age bison, and if I had a pound for every time I heard the joke ‘what’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison?’, I’d have £874, there was a big problem about dating. That is, it was very hard to put a reliable date on any finds that were more antique than about 47,000 years — the effective limit of radiocarbon dating. If you had volcanic rocks, sure, there was potassium-argon dating, because volcanic rocks contain radioactive potassium that decays reliably into argon, so you could get a fix on the date of the eruption that produced the layers of ash deposited on top of (or underneath) a fossil. And if you had stalactites and stalagmites in a cave, you could measure the decay of radioactive uranium, in the hard chalky substance from which these structures are made, into other elements such as thorium or lead, and so get an idea of when the stalactite or stalagmite formed that capped (or underlay) the deposit in which your fossil was discovered. But if your bones came from an open-air site far from volcanoes, or caves, and were too old for radiocarbon dating to be of much use, you were in a pickle. This was certainly true of many of the cows and bison in Britain, in the Ice Age. If that wasn’t enough, I was limited to bones that were complete enough to be identifiable. Not a problem for cows and bison — museums up and down the UK are filled from rafters to basement with boxes marked ‘Bos or Bison?’, so I had plenty to work on and not once did I have to go out into the field to find any more. It’s a problem, though, for much rarer creatures in which some people incomprehensibly take an interest, such as the remains of early humans. But the same museums are also stuffed from rafters to basement with plastic bags full of tiny chips of bone, retrieved from digs, that could have come from anything, awaiting the invention of techniques that could reveal their secrets. At the end of the 1980s I left research and joined the Submerged Log Company. During that time I have witnessed a revolution in the science underpinning palaeontology and archaeology. Clearly, I was holding research down by staying. Over the past thirty years our ideas of the period between around 200,000 and 50,000 years ago — crucial to our knowledge of human evolution — has been not so much overturned as transformed and immeasurably enriched by new scientific developments. A key player has been Tom Higham, who, with colleagues at Oxford and around the world, has made carbon dating much more reliable, and has pioneered a method called ZooMS (Zooarchaeology with Mass Spectrometry), in which the identity of otherwise tiny fragments of bone can be established by extracting and sequencing the constituent amino-acids of any collagen they contain. Collagen is the raw material for carbon dating. Now it’s possible to read off the species whence a bone fragment came, as well as its age. The same is true for the genetic material, DNA. The sequencing of ancient DNA was pioneered by the remarkable Svante Pääbo whose book Neanderthal Man tells all. Higham’s The World Before Us is much the same. It’s an engaging personal tale of discovery, enriched by from-the-horse’s-mouth descriptions of the science and its importance. I should declare an interest here, as I play walk-on parts in both books, and indeed Pääbo features strongly in Higham’s account, especially concerning the revelations from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. It was here that the remains of a hitherto unknown yet extinct relative of humans was discovered. The Denisovans, close kin to the Neanderthals, lived in the region until around 50,000 years or so, but their DNA lives on, especially in people from Island Southeast Asia — just as the DNA of Neanderthals lives on in everyone without a purely African ancestry, signs of interbreeding in the long past. Denisovans are known almost exclusively from tiny fragments, but we know an amazing amount about them thanks to the DNA and collagen that these fragments contain. This would have been impossible without the science pioneered by Higham, Pääbo and their associates. I enjoyed The World Before Us hugely, and will treasure it as a personal account of an amazing period in archaeological science, but perhaps I am biased as I have a close interest in the science and know some of the protagonists personally. I wonder whether a less clued-up reader might find some of the more technical parts hard going, although I for one appreciated Higham’s description of Bayesian statistics, something that hitherto I have found as hard to grasp as a hot buttered ferret skittering down a drainpipe.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's probably a great book, but I personally did not enjoy reading it. It’s likely a “me” problem but having just read the Sense of Style by Steven Pinker, I was hyper-aware of what you shouldn’t do when writing a book, and while this book was well-written there were a lot of stylistic sins. Also, I expected to read a book about pre-history, but it was more a melange of pre-history, personal memoir and modern research methodology. Good storytelling can pull off the mix, but I just felt jerked around by the author’s stream of consciousness.

For example, in the chapter titled "DNA from dirt" in the middle of his story about trying to see if it was possible to measure DNA from dirt, he inserts a tangent that in one of the locations he was investigating, some other group had previously found flutes from 40,000 years ago. The flute fact blew my mind (I don't know much about pre-history), but I spent the whole anecdote trying to figure out how that related to DNA and dirt (was the dirt DNA about proving who made the flute? Was the flute used to date the dirt?) and just never found the connection. The flute tangent also included information of other sites where flutes were found, and how he had attended a conference where they had played a reconstruction of the flute. This was not a small tangent, nested inside another tangent of testing the method before getting to any actual results. I'm still not sure if DNA extracted from dirt has contributed to the field or not.

The other thing that bothered me, that I never would have noticed before Pinker's book, was the obscene amount of "professional narcissism". From the very beginning, every finding is associated to this or that person, from this or that university; many also come with a whole epic of false starts and plot twists, not to mention academic disagreements. Of course, sometimes such stories are great; I loved the one about Sam the master student who through sheer perseverance found a first-generation hominid hybrid in bags of 2000 animal bone shards. But more often than not it just added unnecessary text. I guess if the purpose of the book wasn’t about the findings but about the process, that would be fine, but then the chapters should have been organized accordingly; by method, by methods chronology, something.

One little throwaway line tripped me up a bit and made me question how the author reasons about his own field of research, again from that tangent about the flute: “our ancestors were not brutes in caves, they made art and music like us.” Yes, the flute proves that humans from 40,000 years ago had music, but at some point between when we split off from chimpanzees and them, some generation of our ancestors were in fact NOT making art and music. From how he phrases it, it’s almost a creationist understanding of evolution: …and on the seventh day, humans sprang into existence, playing flutes and painting walls…

On the plus side, there are some really interesting facts, and you get a better understanding of how tenuous many estimates are about anything pre-40,000 years ago, sometimes based on a single tooth. The advances in this field are really inspiring, and it’s incredible how much information can come from the faintest traces of previous existence.

[Bobby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the adventure Higham took me on, and the science inside the book is truly fascinating. DNA in dirt? Wow. I learned so much about so many different topics, and it's impressive how Higham was able to weave everything in.

That being said, there were times throughout the book where I just felt plain frustrated due to facts and explanations not being presented as clearly as they could have. For example, in the Genetic Revolution chapter, Higham writes "The second is the nuclear genome, which is found only in the cell nucleus. This is diploid or double-stranded DNA, which means we receive half of the DNA from our mother and half from our father" (p. 70). Diploid has nothing to do with being double-stranded, and double-strandedness has nothing to do with receiving a copy from each parent. This is misleading at best.

A few pages earlier, when explaining the gradual degradation of cytosine to uracil in ancient DNA, Higham notes that "cytosine, for example, can be converted chemically to uracil, which, when the DNA replicates, goes on to pair with adenine instead of guanine. Importantly, the frequency of these uracils in the DNA is highly correlated with time: the more ancient the bone, the more uracil substitutions it has" (p. 64). Makes sense. But then in the next sentence, he says, "When the DNA sequences are read in the laboratory, the enzyme that is used to translate the sequence will read a T across from that A, instead of the G that cytosine is always paired with" (p. 64). Huh? "Read a T across from that A, instead of the G"? This seems to imply that adenine is typically paired with guanine, and that cytosine degredation actually causes thymine to be read across from the A. But an A-T pairing is the base case; it's normal. And A-G doesn't occur either normally *or* in this unique C->U scenario. What he probably meant to say is that the DNA reader reads an A-T pairing in what should have been a C-G one. But this is far from being clear.

In the Disappearing From the World chapter, Higham notes "I do not think that we should not imagine both groups [Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens] living side-by-side" (p. 211). So...we *should* imagine them living side-by-side? The rest of the paragraph though seems to me to make the argument that we shouldn't: "[there was] broad contemporaneity in different parts of Europe but with a degree of separation being maintained between the different groups" (p. 211).

These were just the few of the instances that I can remember, and I wish they were clarified prior to publishing. It's still a fascinating read -- I didn't take the time to enumerate all the awesome stuff -- and you'll come away having learned a lot and with an appetite for more.