Lone Survivors: An Extensive Overview of Homosapiens Nature

Picking up this book, I assumed I knew what I was about to read, a comprehensive review of Homo sapiens, and how they became the last remaining of the Genus Homo. I was thoroughly impressed with the way Chris Stringer brought together his book, it not only provided an in depth analysis of Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis, but his book provided a look at popular theories, methods of testing, and his own opinions.

Chris Stringer is a world-renowned paleoanthropologist, he is a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society. To start off his book, “Lone Survivors,” Chris Stringer discusses his collection of the mass amount of information on human evolution on neanderthals that is lingering out in the world, and his desire to bring it all together. Personally, I liked the way that Stringer brought in the debates that are currently circulating in the academic world over human evolution. In his book, he discusses popular theories, even though he doesn’t necessarily agree with them, in that, I find strength. A thing I thoroughly enjoyed about reading “Lone Survivors,” is that it is written from his point of view. Stringer writes in both an informal and formal method, that relates to both a general audience and fellow researchers. Chris Stringer began his studies over evolution in 1971 and set about collecting as much evidence over neanderthals as he could. Stringer has confidence in that modern humans moved throughout Africa (a theory known as Out of Africa, or OOA) sharing their copious amounts of ideas, tools, interbreeding, and even some behavioral traits/strategies. Stringer makes a very compelling argument that modern humans descended from the small population of people who left Africa anywhere from fifty to sixty thousand years ago. He includes the DNA findings of both Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, and how interbreeding must have occurred for this to happen. Stringer is convinced over the analysis of his research that anatomically modern humans evolved out of a relatively small area in Africa, and quite rapidly, (20-35). This is contrary to the popular belief that the first modern humans migrated throughout Africa, and as they evolved they learned new things. This is in contrast to Stringers theory which states that special traits evolved in specific regions, and was then distributed throughout Africa, and Europe by Homo sapiens. Stringer hypothesizes that populations reached a critical point in Africa where diffusion, and the exchange of resources, and crafts were exchanged between people, and was essential to the survival. If these traits/skills were considered “advantageous” to the individual, they were kept. In his book, he examines the model of multiregionalism versus the Recent African Origin model. Multiregionalism is the thought that human evolution has been within a single, continuous human species, that had its origins at the start of the Pleistocene two million years ago. During his research, a colleague of Stringer, and Stringer himself held a conference in order to determine the belief among several other paleoanthropologists, Stringer came to the conclusion that most anthropologists favored the idea of Recent African Origin. A strength of Stringer is that he was not only able to collect an extensive amount of research, but he was also able to relate that to his audience in a way that was completely comprehensible. Stringer defines his concepts both clearly, and concisely. He discusses much of his research, and his work, but is careful to explain things so that the audience can follow along with what he is reading. He nicely covers the work of anthropologists over evolution within the last million or so years and provides details over what the latest fossil evidence, and blends together both scientific dating techniques and theories very well throughout his book. He gives a very cause, and effect view on where theories originate, and out of what evidence these theories are derived from, I found this to be very helpful. He concluded that Homo sapiens while coexisting among others of the genus Homo, have eventually replaced all others, with the learning of new skills, and new technologies, and essentially became the “lone survivor.”

In my opinion, the limitations presented in Lone Survivors is that at the beginning of the book. Stringer sets forth a set of questions he intends to answer throughout the book, a list of about 16 very intensive questions. While he attempts to do so, I personally feel that it brings about more questions. These questions which are still heavily debated today, an example of these questions include: “why did the Neanderthals go extinct?” Today, we see that we still cannot answer some of the questions Stringer presented at the beginning of his book, simply because there is not enough evidence to do so. Although these are limitations, Stringer does recognize that humans still have so much to learn about from where they came from. If you would like to gather extensive knowledge of both the testing methods available for pre-historic remains, and the ideas surrounding the relationship between Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis, then this is the book to read. Stringer provides discussions over the types of tests available for dating, and advances in science that allowed for all of this to be possible.