“First of all, we walk upright on two legs, the only mammal who does that, so we’re kind of bizarre out of the gate,” she mentioned. “And then there’s our combination of high intelligence and abilities to cooperate. There’s no other mammal that cooperates with such intensity.”
Turner’s e book describes the important thing milestones that our prehuman ancestors achieved on the way in which to turning into Homo sapiens. The liveliness of her account is previewed by her chapter titles: 1. “We Stand Up.” 2. “We Smash Rocks.” 3. “We Get Swelled Heads.” 4. “We Take a Hike.” 5. “We Invent Barbecue.” 6. “We Start Talking (And Never Shut Up).” and seven. “We Become Storytellers.”
Throughout the e book, Turner makes use of humor and references to issues comparable to video video games and the Lord of the Rings fantasy sequence to assist clarify what she calls “a very heavy topic.”
“Our ancestors struggled to survive and often got weeded out by disasters, disease, accidents and predators,” she mentioned.
For instance, Nariokotome Boy, a Homo erectus found in 1984, apparently died younger as a results of a gum an infection.
These life-or-death struggles occurred in East Africa, the place a large rainforest progressively become a combined habitat of woodlands, lakes, swamps, grasslands and different areas. Turner’s e book exhibits how the challenges of atmosphere, local weather swings, predators and meals extraction helped drive our evolution.
“I have a lot of respect for our ancient ancestors,” she mentioned. “You would not want to walk across the Serengeti, among all these bigger, fiercer animals, with just a stone in your hand, and yet our ancestors managed to survive there and in many other environments.”
How scientists piece collectively human evolution by fossils is, Turner explains, “like trying to figure out a movie plot based on a few screenshots. … Every discovery, like that of Nariokotome Boy, adds another image that helps us understand how we changed, mentally and physically, over the past 5 to 7 million years.”
As along with her earlier books about animals, Turner writes in a method that encourages readers to perceive the attitude of different species. From how she describes Lucy, a fossil that is about 3.2 million years outdated, you possibly can think about being an Australopith who used easy instruments and maybe climbed into a tree at night time, with fellow Australopiths, for security. About a million years after Lucy’s type lived, you possibly can see how vital it was for Homo erectus to talk and cooperate in searching over giant stretches of land.
Although we don’t know precisely when our ancestors found out how to management hearth, Turner helps you respect all the advantages of a campfire, together with heat, cooked meals and peaceable dialog.
“There’s been a lot of appropriate and overdue appreciation of diversity,” Turner mentioned. “I also think we should appreciate human universals — how we all came from the same place and have these common abilities that were carved into us through millions of years of evolution.”