Picture a Neanderthal.
Perhaps you are thinking of a hulking, stooping, club-wielding, hairy cave-
man—the defining image of brawn, not brains. That’s the cartoon we get from
popular culture. But the brain of a real Neanderthal was 11 percent bigger
than ours. Neanderthals walked with their heads held high, used sophisticated
stone tools, cooked food, used language, and made art. And unless all of your
recent ancestors were African, you share some of their genes. Neanderthals and
early humans interbred at several different times. Some of those genes helped
humans adapt to new diets, diseases, and environmental conditions as they
spread throughout the world.
Many of us want to know about our ancestry. We want to know our personal
past and that of our group, back to the origin of our species and beyond. Many
cultures have origin myths. Darwin began to replace such stories about the ori-
gin of humans with testable, scientific hypotheses. In the time since his book The
Descent of Man was published in 1871 [9], evolutionary studies in paleontology,
anatomy, developmental biology, genetics, behavior, and now genomics have
revealed more and more about our origins, our relationships to other species,
and the evolution of our extraordinary characteristics.
All of evolutionary biology—everything in this book—helps illuminate where
we came from and who we are.After 3,500,000 years of evolution, art first appeared on Earth. These exquisite
paintings of animals in a cave in Lascaux, France, are about 17,000 years old.
Rock art and carved figures dating back to 38,000 years ago reveal that mental
capacities in humans had evolved to a level unprecedented in the history of
the planet.The evolutionary synthesis
Story of
Homo sapiens
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