When we were not alone

摘要

ASK any well-informed human living up to 40,000 years or so ago if they were the only intelligent being around, and they would have answered, "No". That is because at that (geologically) recent time, our ancestors would still have been sharing Earth with several other human groups. In a very real sense, we were not alone. Today we are. The Neanderthals who roamed Europe and western Asia are long gone. So are the Denisovans of east Asia, the "hobbits" of Flores Island in Indonesia and many more. Who were they? What were they like? What happened to them? Archaeologist Tom Higham at the University of Oxford tackles these questions in his first book for a popular audience, The World Before Us: How science is revealing a new story of our human origins. It is a slightly misleading main title because Higham barely discusses the world before Homo sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago: you won't find Lucy or any other ape-like australopithecines. But he does deliver on the subtitle, with a fascinating insight into groups belonging to the same Homo genus as us that lived alongside us for much of their existence.