Mar 25, 2013
Human beings are alone in the world. Homo sapiens are the only
remainders of genus homo. Our closest relatives are chimps and
bonobos, but many of our closer relatives have been lost to time.
In his book, Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How
and Why We Survived, science journalist and documentarian Chip
Walter explores how we came to stand alone and what happened to our
very distant cousins. From the publisher's description: "Drawing on
a wide variety of scientific disciplines, Walter reveals how a rare
evolutionary phenomenon led to the uniquely long childhoods that
make us so resourceful and emotionally complex. He looks at why we
developed a new kind of mind and how our highly social nature has
shaped our moral (and immoral) behavior. And in exploring the
traits that enabled our success, he plumbs the roots of our
creativity and investigates why we became self-aware in ways that
no other animal is. Along the way, Last Ape Standing profiles other
human species who evolved with us and who have also shaped our kind
in startling ways - the Neanderthals of Europe, the "Hobbits" of
Indonesia, the Denisovans of Siberia, and the recently discovered
Red Deer Cave people of China, who died off just as we stood at the
brink of civilizations eleven thousand years ago."