"When homo sapiens made their entrance 100,000 years ago they were confronted by a wide range of other early humans--homo erectus, who walked better and used fire; homo habilis who used tools; and of course the Neanderthals, who were brawny and strong. But shortly after their arrival, something happened that vaulted the species forward and made them the indisputable masters of the planet. This book is devoted to revealing just what that difference is. It explores how the physical traits and cognitive ability of homo sapiens distanced them from the rest of nature. Even more importantly, Masters of the Planet looks at how our early ancestors acquired these superior abilities; it shows that their strange and unprecedented mental facility is not, as most of us were taught, simply a basic competence that was refined over unimaginable eons by natural selection. Instead, it is an emergent capacity that was acquired quite recently and changed the world definitively"--
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This science book club pick attempts to answer why we emerged as the dominant species in the homo genus. For a book under 300 pages it sure seemed like a long book. Partly to blame is the dry writing. It's heavy on fossils and minutia on this or that two-million-year-old bone. I read every word of the first third of this book and then skimmed heavily. I was a little late picking up a copy of this and before I received it, I was dipping into another book that touches on the same theme. It's called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I can tell you from the first 70 pages of Sapiens that it's much better written than this one. Too bad we didn't pick that one instead (although, Sapiens would take a lot longer to read – it's thick). This guy, Tattersall, isn't much of a storyteller, which is what, I, the layman, would appreciate more. And, for the record, Neanderthals aren't ancestors of ours but ancestral cousins. Although, there's enough similarity between Neanderthals and homo sapiens that there was limited interbreeding between them (that could produce fertile offspring). Just a smidge of action there.
