Geoscientist Online

Alice Roberts
Published by: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978-1-4088-0288-5
Publication date: April, 2010
List price: £9.99
376 pp

www.bloomsbury.com

Dr Alice Roberts is quite well known for her TV work in connection with Coast and for her own series Don’t Die Young, which drew on her expertise as medical doctor and anatomist based at Bristol University. In The Incredible Human Journey, which was shown on the BBC in 2009, she turns her attention to palaeoanthropology and attempts to tell the story of how Homo sapiens has colonised Earth during the past 200,000 years. Although accompanying a big budget TV series, the book is unlike many of its natural history contemporaries in that it has shunned the formulaic approach of filling its pages with a catalogue of beautiful glossy photographs. But don’t let that put you off. It may be true that a picture tells a thousand words, but Roberts’s story – and that is just what this is, a good story – does a perfectly good job on its own.

The story begins with our origins in Africa and traces the radiation of Homo sapiens around the coast of the Middle East to SE Asia and Australasia, then to the west and into Europe, before finally making landfall in the Americas. Each chapter provides not only a detailed account of the fossil, archaeological and genetic evidence that has enabled researchers to reconstruct how, why and when each stage of the journey took place, but also a tale of human endeavour and resourcefulness told chiefly through the developments of tool kits, survival in adverse climactic conditions and the spread of agriculture. But it is not all anatomy, genetics and carbon dating, as Roberts counterpoints the anthropological narrative with her own journey to many of the places featured in the book. This is also an account of her own experiences with primitive peoples, her own thoughts on the characters who made many of the key discoveries, and her own wonder at being able to tread the same ground as our ancient ancestors. Her agreeably light-hearted style and natural talent for teaching make both the science and her journey hugely accessible.

All in all, Roberts takes us on a fascinating tour of the world and human pre-history; part travelogue, part detective mystery, always compelling. However, not all the questions raised during the telling are solved convincingly, while others remain completely unresolved. But far from being a frustrating outcome this actually enables the reader to participate in the debate. For me the hook that first snared was the realisation that Neanderthals were already living quite happily in Europe when H. sapiens arrived, a fact that is all the more puzzling by their seemingly inexplicable demise, leaving “us” to multiply without competition. But there are numerous other conundrums. Why do Peking Man tool kits appear so primitive? Did climate change stimulate the spread of agriculture? Is it really possible that pre-Clovis culture reached America by crossing the Atlantic?

This enthralling field of natural history is inextricably linked to the ancestry of each of us. We should all be dipping into The Incredible Human Journey to find out more, if only to have a much better appreciation of who we are, and where we have come from.

Sean Mulshaw
Wokingham, Berkshire