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Walking with Cavemen: Eye-to-eye with your ancestors by John Lynch and Louise Barrett, Headline, 拢20,ISBN 0755311779 Reviewed by Douglas Palmer

HOW do we know how we got to be the humans we are? Stones and bones are part of the answer, but the talent to interpret this morass of scrappy information is a rare thing. It is even rarer to find it combined with the ability to extrapolate from ape behaviour to early ancestor. This, happily, is the forte of biological anthropologist Louise Barrett. She is as well placed as anyone to give this state-of-the-art interpretation of the record. With John Lynch, she tackles that most fundamental of questions: what is it that makes us human?

We are the sole survivors of more than 14 closely related species distributed over the past 7 million years. The fossil and genetic record of our relatedness to this evolutionary past is undeniable. The old answer that humans were the first tool makers has long fallen by the wayside, now that we have questions about the evolution of consciousness, about language and social behaviour. Did all these attributes arrive with Homo sapiens or did our extinct relatives share them? Is there a Rubicon between them and us?

In Walking with Cavemen, Lynch and Barrett give dramatised snapshots of the everyday story of seven of our extinct relatives, from Lucy and her kind (Australopithecus afarensis) to early modern humans. The storyline follows that of the companion BBC TV series, supplemented with information about important and recent finds, such as the 7-million-year old Sahelanthropus tchadensis, announced in July 2002. So there are numerous excellent photographs, many of them are extremely powerful because of the high quality of the prosthetics, which must have been hell for the actors who had to rush about in full body suits.