G. J. Sawyer

A coffee-table sized book that can’t quite decide if it’s pretty pictures or technical treatise. The Last Human actually does a pretty good job at both. Each humanish thing, from the 7 Mya Sahelanthropus tchadensis (which may date to before the divergence between great apes and human ancestors) to Homo neanderthalensis, gets a similar treatment – on the popular side, a short story describing a “day in the life” of whatever preHomo sapiens is under discussion and a color illustration of what it may have looked like – on the technical side, a description and interpretation of the fossil remains, a map of known sites, and age (including the method to determine it), associated tools, other animals living at the same time, paleoclimate, explanation of the taxonomic classification, and history of the fossil discovery.


Human paleontology is something everybody is interested in; I certainly can’t claim any expertise here, but it was instructive to have all this material in one handy reference source. It will be out of date fairly soon, of course (despite a 2007 publication date). The only obvious flaw I could find is the “short stories” sometimes do not mesh with the technical descriptions; for example, a “story” will depict something as fully bipedal while the technical description will note that the limb fossils support a normally quadrupedal gait with only occasional bipedalism. I suspect there may not have been much communication between the editors here.


This has a fairly high list price, which is not surprising given the number of color illustrations, but I was able to get mine on remainder for about 50% off. I’d recommend it if you have any interesting in the subject.… (meer)

An odd mix of fluff and highly technical jargon with little in between. The book consists of descriptions of 22 extinct human ancestors with each one starting off with a vignette of a day in the life of that species. What follows that is a description of the fossil fragments, where they were found (locality 247 of the Toros Menalla formation), an exhaustive list of other animal fossils that were found with the hominid fossils, etc. One thing that struck me is how few and fragmentary the fossils are that all this is based on. When we get to the Classification section we generally find that the author of this section has major issues with how the fossils have been classified and doubts that many of the 22 species listed are even valid.

Each species also has a reconstruction of his face based on a fossil skull, even though most of the species don't have complete skulls among their remains.… (meer)

Missing link has always been such an annoying term. This book beautifully illustrates why. In The Last Human, 22 transitional species of hominids are described and discussed. The entries are in chronological order, from Sahelanthropus to Homo sapien, with extra attention on some of the more popular species (especially Australopithecus afarensis, aka Lucy). The authors list the bones found and their locations, describe what the bones can tell us about the size, stature, appearance, and abilities of these ancestors.

In addition to parsing out the remains, the authors present incredibly life-like illustrations of each species. This is the most unique part of the book and is well worth the purchase price. The captions here were a bit aggravating (the author of captions engaged in quite a bit more conjecture than he did in the main texts). This book would be an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in physical anthropology or human origins and would be a great recommended text for an anthropology class. A basic understanding of osteology and anthropology are needed to fully enjoy this book.… (meer)