How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth - Lone Survivors

There is a lot of thought-provoking information buried in this book. At times though, it would have been nice to have more detailed charts of timelines and evolutionary trees for we visual types. I'm rather dissatified with the Kindle version of teh book as the are many references to fact on certain pages numbers - we I cannot see!

A fascinating read, especially coming from someone who's been in the field finding answers to the pressing questions about our origins. Stringer's updated perspective on "out of Africa" suggests a new wave of discoveries to come.

The book is well researched and documented. It should be of interest to all students of human origins.

Highly recommended as a comprehensive readable review

of current paleoanthropological findings.

B. O'R

Lone Survivor, titled Origin of Our Species in the UK, is an up-to-date overview of the science and speculation about our species' nature and survival. I found it well written and enjoyable but confusing at times because of a lack of headings of the different sections in the chapters. Springer changes topics and develops ideas within each chapter that could have been emphasized and organized by sub-headings.
The author deals mainly with the origins, cultures and travels of Erectus, Heidelbergensis, the Neanderthals and Sapiens. So, the book is focused on our species as the "lone survivor" with passing references to much earlier species. Springer also pays attention to the Neanderthals and, I believe, is up-to-date in the DNA science. I especially liked Springer's theory that cultures both grow and degenerate, explaining that physical and cultural changes may not be linear. He touches on art, language, and possible spiritual beliefs. Only occasionally did the author's suppositions not get labelled as such. For example, he mentioned that we are the only species to remember our dreams...
While this book is not a pure academic presentation nor a basic book nor summer beach read, it is written by an experienced scientist who is still entranced with his subject. I came away from this book with much more knowledge, the feeling that I had almost been in a conversation with the author and an admiration for the multiple hominids that walked all over this planet.
This book is worth a read and re-read! It has, by the way, a great bibliography. For more reviews, please check with the storeUK.

Informative. Takes the reader on an intellectual tour of the history of the theory of human evolution over the decades, mostly from about 1970 to 2010 or so. The book discusses the discovery of various skulls, partial skeletons, jaw bones, femurs, and so forth and their various interpretations. It also discusses the evolution of the various methods of fossil dating such as Carbon 14 and potassium-argon.

The book focuses principally on human species evolution over the past 2 million years and especially over about the last 400,000 years -- that is, the era of the split of Homo heidelbergensis into Homo neandertalensis (I.e., Neandertals) and Homo sapiens. There is an evolutionary tree on page 271 that doesn't quite agree with other such trees that I have found in other books.

There are also a couple of chapters on speculations on the development of human behaviors over the millennia. I wasn't all that impressed with those parts of the book. The author describes several conclusions or conjectures that have been made regarding human behaviors based on some pretty slender evidence, I felt. Keep in mind -- all these conclusions have been made based on the investigation of just a few dozen skulls, jaw bones, and other bones. No complete skeletons of any of the Homo sapiens ancestors have ever been found. Nonetheless, it was interesting to read what various scientists have been discussing on the subject.

Interesting viewpoints however a little heavy on hypothesis, psychology and 'conclusions'. Theories fascinate and educate me, these fascinate but border on entertainment. Latest example I find as I near the end of the book is found on page 218. (I have other books I want to read on topic but feel compelled to complete reading my books]

Page 218
=A linguist hypothesizes
=Glottogonists disagrees strongly
=Author concludes this is not an area in which 'we' can draw a firm conclusion
=BUT a psychologist has analyzed and concludes......
=Author "as Atkinson maintains that would be consistent....."

Where do I go with this info, where does it belong in my quest to understand factual and theoretical evolution?

Books in paleoanthropology that I have read so far could be classified into one of two categories: Either they attempted to answer the question, “Where do we come from?” and thus tried to find the earliest human progenitor, a search which technically can be answered quite quickly: Home erectus was the earliest species in the family homo. But then, of course comes the question, who were their ancestors, and so we come to the family of the Australopithecines from whom they apparently descended from. But there, the quest is not over yet, as there had been again species that came before them and so in practice, we get descriptions of a skull or a bone from a specimen with a spectacular sounding name and an age that is extremely old, sometimes so old, that they are older than six million years, thus making it possible that the individual in question might not just be our ancestor, but also the ancestor of chimpanzees, or even the one from gorillas. So would by itself be an interesting finding, however, as nobody is looking “only” for the ancestors of modern gorillas, these finds are almost always sold as “earliest human”, so much that the question cannot be answered with any certainty - yet.
Or they try to answer the other question why Neanderthals died out. The answers there go then from Homo sapiens directly killing them of, to Homo sapiens indirectly being responsible for their cousins demise, e.g. as modern humans had dogs that Homo neanderthalensis did not, to Homo neanderthalensis being at the wrong time at the wrong place, as the last glacial maximum was a severe one and the Neanderthals could eventually not cling on anymore.
Now this book is on first glance about another question, “Why are we the only surviving Homo species on earth?” but of course after a little thinking, or reading, it becomes clear that it belongs actually to the second class, as it generally tries to answer the question, why other Homo species died out, and not only specifically why Neanderthals did so. It hence approaches the question from another angle, not looking at why Neanderthals were inferior to us, but at why we were superior to them and all the other Homo families that might have been out there. And there might have been out there a lot of other species as only the genetic analysis from a tooth and a finger bone from Siberia made clear, as this was an individual, that was as far away from us as from Neanderthals, if maybe a little closer to Neanderthals. Consequently, there might at one time have been a lot of cousins of Homo sapiens alive, and why only we survived is what this book looks at.
Or it ostensibly does so, as the only thing that really happens is Chris Stringer adding fact after fact, chapter after chapter, without ever coming to a point, without even once using a fact later on. I remember once reading about a volcanic eruption, which was fascinating to read, as its exact date is known. Consequently, if ever there is debris from the eruption found in a layer of a dig, one can exactly date this layer as well. This way of dating, however, is then never used and never appears again in the book. And so on. I must confess, I started to get terribly bored with the book. You could at the same time read an encyclopedia. But out of a reason, I kept holding on. I don't remember why exactly. Maybe I was just really interested in the answer, or I hoped that it would get better. But as a gesture of goodwill to myself, I let myself, always after finishing one chapter, read another book, and then coming back to read another chapter in this book. As a consequence, I don't remember what was writing in the first couple of chapters, some facts or others, I suppose, but the details of which are lost to me. I was thinking that I would finish reading the book like this, and that my review would concentrate on the last chapter, as the chapters before were already sinking into oblivion.
Until I got to 30% in the book. I exactly remember the location on my Kindle, as here, Chris Stringer suddenly and out of the blue, stated the apparent thesis of the book. And just as suddenly, I was interested in the book again, and finished it in one go. Now, I thought, I can consider all subsequent facts against this one thesis and see, if they strengthen or rather weaken it. Or so I thought. To my surprise, during the next ten percent, the facts contradicted the thesis. After 40%, Chris Stringer stated the thesis again, and now it became clear, this this was not his thesis but Richard G. Klein's thesis, and Chris Stringer would not subscribe to it entirely, but modify it. Therefore, for the rest of the book he mentions his reservations with the thesis and states, how it should be adapted to agree with the findings in the field.
What both of them agree on is that during the last 100'000 to 200'000 years, there was a “symbol revolution”, a time when humans started to think much more abstractly and added much more symbols to their behavior, from the usage of pigments, sea shells as chains or pendants to the ceremonial burials of their dead. The milestone of abstraction during the symbol revolution was of course the development of language, where words that have nothing to do with things came to signify these things. The symbol revolution in human history must have been as important as the other revolutions that came after it, if not even more so; the agricultural revolution, the metallurgical revolution and the industrial revolution. It essentially made humans modern, much more so than skeletal and other physical adaptations.
Now, as most findings of this modern behavior have been located in Europe from Cro-Magnon populations, Richard G. Klein maintains that the symbol revolution must have taken place shortly before modern humans left Africa about 50'000 years ago and quite suddenly. His thesis states that probably a gene mutation in the brain structure or a neurological pathway shortly before this time made humans become modern in their behavior, when they bodily had already evolved to modern standards, and made them as well emigrate from Africa.
Chris Stringer on the other hand says that this point of view is too Eurocentric. As Europe has most archeologists and most archeological expeditions, it is only logical that most findings will be concentrated in Europe. He thinks that the evolution of the modern human body was caused, not preceded by the symbol revolution. Once humans could accumulate in to bigger groups and gather more different foods with the help of increased knowledge, humans did not need their sturdy bodies anymore and could put preferences onto other sides. Hence the symbol revolution came before the bodily adaptations 200'000 years ago.
But why did we then, so far, not find comparable sides to Cro-Magnons in Africa? Chris Stringer mentions the case example of Tasmania. There, once the population had been separated from mainland Australia 12'000 years ago, life for them became much more simple, with an accompanied loss of a lot of knowledge, maybe even the capability to make fire. Hence, the isolation and decline in numbers of this population made them shed all but the essentials they needed for survival in Tasmania, even though they stayed, of course, modern. Similar events might have taken place in Africa all the time, with climate being favorable for some group or another to increase in numbers and specialize in knowledge, only for this knowledge to be mostly lost again, once the climate turned less favorable once more. Consequently, what we see is a consistent flaring up of modern behaviors, only to be eclipsed again by a changing climate, like a candle flickering in the wind. Only in the end, about 50'000 years ago, was a tipping point reached where humans formed a large enough network, which enabled some of them to further emigrate out of Africa. From then on, modern behavior would never be snuffed out again, but would rather become even more specialized and complex in the future.
This is a very interesting theory, one that can clearly explain were our modern behavior came from. But it is not the message of this book. It happens thus that the last concluding chapter does not mention this thesis anymore at all. Rather, Chris Stringer has taken the time to made amendments that we do not completely derive from an African ancestor, but that modern humans intermixed, first already in Africa, but then also once they had emigrated from there, with the different ancient homo species they encountered on the way, leading thus to a present content of five to ten percent of ancient DNA in our genome. On the other hand, he already showed indirectly throughout the book, why Homo sapiens never completely assimilated e.g. Homo neanderthalensis, but left it with few encounters, so that Neanderthals genes can be found only marginally in our current DNA:
Modern humans mostly split only 12'000 years ago, and witness how the different groups treated each other merely a hundred years ago, with among others Europeans displaying Africans in their zoos. Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis split about 400'000 years ago, and when they met again, they had been separated for about 350'000 years. Now, if you consider what 12'000 years can make, imagine how they must have treated each other after 350'000 years!
What becomes clear is that modern humans come mostly from Africa. And hence, it becomes clear that the book's ultimate purpose was not to present the symbol revolution, which saved it for me, but for which you probably have to go and read one of Richard G. Klein's books, but to demonstrate that Chris Stringer's Recent Out of Africa theory is still valid, up to five to ten percent, to which other Homo species outside of Africa have also left their traces in us. This is a pity because before, it has never been hinted at that Chris Stringer wanted to make this point. The book thus clearly lacks focus. It seems, Chris Stringer assumed that everybody knows already everything about paleoanthropology, up to five years ago, and now only needs updating. Therefore the mentioning of numerous facts, without coming to a point. An editor, who would have pointed out the importance of a red thread throughout the book would hence have greatly benefited the book. This editor, however, did apparently not exist.
To rate this book, I am now clearly torn between five stars for the contents, which are still fascinating to read, and at most three stars for the form and the (lack of) editing. Consequently, I will give it four stars and recommend it only to those people who possess an incessant motivation to read about the subject of paleoanthropology.

One might say that Chris Stringer has had the ideal career that he dreamed of achieving when, at the age of eighteen, he switched his major from medicine to anthropology and was accepted in the PhD program at Bristol University to study Neanderthals. Shortly after graduating he received a job offer at the Paleontology Department at the Natural History Museum in London, where he is still a researcher, and is now one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists.

Lone Survivors is the ideal book for any would-be fan of anthropology, wanting to get the latest news and discoveries on our ancient ancestors, as well as the perfect text for one either taking an anthropology course or perhaps contemplating switching majors, much as Stringer did. The book is an easy read in that Stringer's voice is conversational and pleasant, he breaks everything down to its base parts, and shows complex matters in a clear light. He has introductory chapters dedicated to the various methods of archaeology used in studying fossils, as well as dating them. Stringer also skillfully provides constant hints of matters he will be later discussing to entice and keep the reader hooked. By the end of the book the reader will feel well educated and well versed on our ancestors, as well as up to date on the latest findings in the world of anthropology.

Originally written on February 3, 2012 ©Alex C. Telander.

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This book seems clearly intended for a lay audience (no footnotes or endnotes, lots of background info), but seems to me to be suffering from a case of "expertitis." I got about halfway through the book and became so befuddled with the cloud of information that I just gave up. I agree with Velho that a stronger editor's hand was needed, at least to bring out the substructure of Stringer's discussion so that the educated layperson could actually track and remember it. On the macro-scale, the chapters give the reader some help, and on the micro-scale, Stringer's prose is comfortable and engaging. Unfortunately in between it gets very disorienting - like having a map with only countries and no towns, or only towns and no connecting streets. Once I began to feel that, I looked around more critically and noticed that the illustrations (mostly photos of fossil remains and a couple of maps) seemed just plopped into the book in random locations, often far from where their subject matter was discussed in the text; there should also have been many more illustrations, tightly linked to the text, given the many relatively unfamiliar names that came up in his argument. An editor should have caught that and with a little effort the book could have been greatly improved for its (apparent) target audience.

The title and reviews were alluring, but alas the material was too esoteric for me! As I got into the book I found it difficult to follow the somewhat repetitive minutia of the author's style. There was just too much detail.

This book was informative even if you follow the subject with interest. However there were times when he was difficult to follow seeming to jump around without letting you know where he was going. Will probably reread when I have the time in hopes of getting a better understanding of the material presented.

This is a terribly written book. The book lacks an overview and has way too much detail about which scientists advanced which theory based on what pieces of evidence. The forest is lost for the trees. I would not buy this book if you actually want to learn something about human origins that you can mentally retain unless you are a specialist.

Chris Stringer has spent his career studying human evolution in the field and it shows in this book, which is a must-read for anyone looking to update their knowledge in the area of paleo-anthropology. What's more, Stringer is that rare scientist who can actually write- the book's filled with some colorful personal anecdotes to back up some of the research. Definitely a necessary and enjoyable book on a topic that can often seem inaccessible and complicated.

“Lone Survivors” is about solving the puzzles of man’s evolution from his common ancestor with the chimpanze. Usually I am more interested in what is currently known than about science history, but this book is an exception. A number of things contribute to this: the quality of the writing, Stringer’s direct involvement in the history, the challenges faced, the cleverness and variety of techniques used to decipher the past. Still, despite Stringer’s efforts, it is easy to get lost, losing sight of the forest for the trees. I was fortunate in first reading Daniel E. Lieberman’s “ The Story of the Human Body”, which provides a higher level summary as well as providing more detail on the functionality of the evolutionary body changes.

Man’s cognitive/cultural evolution is not as well understood as the evolution of his body. Because clothing is unlikely to leave physical evidence behind, scientists have actually studied the evolution of body lice to determine when clothing might first have been used: unlike head lice, human body lice require clothing or bedding to survive, so by studying their DNA to determine approximately when they first evolved, the date of the introduction of clothing can be (very approximately) inferred.

Why did homo sapiens evolve in Africa? The likely explanation is that Africa provided an environment which encouraged a higher population density and a relatively more stable population. Both are important to the evolution and maintenance of culture. Africa had its own climate crises, but was relatively better off. Incidentally, life span is almost as important as density, both to take advantage of the experience of the elderly, and because the existence of grandparents expands the network of kinship relationships, e.g. 2nd cousins, smoothing the way for larger group cooperation.

A not-to-be-read-quickly book full of fascinating research on the origin of the modern human species. Both technical and understandable. It completely opened my ideas to the complexity of human development.

To date 48 reviews have been filed with the store RE Lone Survivors - rave reviews save two. With such incredible reviews I expected a rewarding intellectual experience. Not to be! I suspect the vast majority of those reviews were "friends" of the publisher or author. Allow me to give you an honest review of this book which is poorly written and full of errors.

The writing is as bad as any science book I have ever encountered -- verbose, grammatically faulty, disorganized. During a survey of five pages I found sentences of 46, 55 and 66 words - requiring the reader to repeatedly reread sentences to make sense of them. The author is incapable of writing a simple declarative sentence - every sentence in this book could have been written with more economy and precision. For example, he frequently gives modifiers ("quite", "fairly", "somewhat") to fudge the data and allow editorializing.

Is the author cannot place himself directly in the middle of a discovery or innovative idea he often demeans those who have ... or those who disagree with his own theories and he often casts dispersions on those "heretics". The author's chest-thumping and name-dropping are beyond disagreeable and downright despicable. Clearly Dr. Springer does not understand or appreciate the scientific process and, instead, politicizes the science.

Dr. Springer refuses to use recognized anatomical terms and favors slang ("upper jawbone, arm bone, gum" etc) therefore in his descriptions he stumbles all over himself and shows his own confusion regarding human anatomy.

There are numerous factual errors in this book. He repeatedly uses the term "Cro-Magnon" as if it were a separate species in the Homo lineage. In fact, Cro-Magnon has no anatomical definition and is merely an early form of the well established Homo sapiens lineage and represents hair-splitting in the extreme - read Art Sundel's one-star review for more on this topic. In discussing the Hobbits of Flores island he mentions the discovery of the remains of two species of saber tooth cats. Really? Saber tooth cats have never been found outside the Americas.

He mentions that Neanderthal consumed 250 Kcal daily. Wow! That is enough calories to feed 3.5 African elephants. Clearly this is a typo. But here is my point - this book was not proofed for errors, either scientific or textual. Instead this book is written in a slapdash manner - throw everything out there and let the reader sort it out the disorganized mess.

Horrible book. He drones on and on about useless information. The entire book can be summarized in about 2 sentences. He doesn't know how to write and should stick to studying fossils. Honestly, the fossils can probably write better than he can.

If this is the way paleoanthropologists write and communicate among themselves, it is understandable why they have so many deep-seated conflicts -- they can't possibly understand what the other views are because they are so poorly stated. They are talking to themselves in ways they themselves don't understand because they can't articulate them.

Sentences that continue on for more than half a page and paragraphs that are pages long manifest poor, miserable and non-understandable writing. This is how the entire book is written! Where was the editor? Was there an editor?

Read "The Incredible Human Journey..." by Alice Roberts if you want terse, spare writing about this general topic.

This book is disappointing. Stringer's 2002 survey article for the Royal Society is a landmark classic in the field, fair-minded, even though he is the leading figure in the Cro-Magnonist theory that Early Moderns evolved in Africa, went forth and ethnically cleansed the Old World of its archaics. To this, the Multiregionalists said, "Nonsense." In 2002 the French redated the 5 Cro-Magnon fossils (1 an infant) from c 28,000 BC to 25,700 BC. This placed the Cro-Magnon 5 about 20,000 years AFTER the Early Modern Mungo 3 in Australia and a similar distance from the Late Neanderthal achievements begining c 44,000 BC in Europe. Through Trinkhaus, we now know that the earliest Early Modern fossils in Europe begin c 34,000 BC (ie, the Mladecs and Oases).
They were less archaic morphologically than the Cro-Magnon 5. But cultural dummies. Since discovery of the Cro-Magnon 5 in 1868, not a single identifiable Cro-Magnon has been found. While we now have remains from some 500 Neanderthal individuals. Yet Stringer refers to "Cro-Magnon culture." There was no such thing. He misuses the most outrageous uncorrected misnomer in the field,"Aurignacian," as if it were a synonym for "Cro-Magnon," a far stretch indeed. Cro-Magnon is a morphological description. Aurignacian is an improperly placed stone-tool industry that, on redating, was found to be maybe 20,000 years off the mark used by backward cave people in a fairly recent time. Chris Stringer never develops the theme of LONE SURVIVOR in his narrative. Instead, he putters around with many minor studies, ignoring the major ones. He totally ignores race, racial subsets, the Third Man DNA trajectory in Europe, neither Early Modern nor Late Neanderthal, such as Arago 13. He is a fine writer in a field that lacks them, but LONE SURVIVOR is a denial that his pet theory has gone down in flames. We expected more from him and his high reputation and considerable skills.
-- For more on this period, cf my serial weblog at [...].
Al Sundel

this is a too broad coverage of everyone's different view, different work and all sides. It is without any guidance as to how the author evaluates all the different discovery's put forward. No idea what the Author thinks about the meaning of the present data. Only useful as a list of names and subjects.

I ordered and downloaded this book to my Kindle only to find that all I got was the cover art and and a few thousand blank pages. This is about the 10th time this has happend. The good news is that it is reasonably easy to return the downloads for full credit.

This is a really interesting book. Chris Stringer brings together the current available information and presents brief summaries of the top, often conflicting, theories. He also makes it clear when he is expressing his own views and ideas, and when these have changed through time.