This book will change the attitude of many by revealing that, until very recently, we were not the only kind of human walking the Earth - it becomes clear that, actually, we have descended from one of several populations of humans that existed about 50,000 years ago.
The Neanderthals were just one of these varieties of human who separated from our lineage half a million years back, and died out in their last enclaves about 28,000 years ago. Popular misconceptions have led many to believe that they were lumbering dullards forced into extinction by fleet-footed and clever modern humans who came out of Africa 100,000 years ago. This is a simplistic view.
Finalyson, in his cool, objective, albeit materialistic, assessment, allows us a much wider perspective on events that contributed to the migration of the modern human into Europe, as well as what could have taken place when the two populations came into contact, and what eventually drove the Neanderthals into terminal decline.
Biological account of human evolution
It is a comprehensively biological account of human evolution, replete with challenging but persuasive insights into the whole range of evidence.
Throughout the book, Finlayson an evolutionary ecologist with a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and director of the Gibraltar Museum and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, shows how we owe our existence to chance.
From asteroid impacts to volcanic eruptions to simply being in the right place at the right time, we are here because of luck, he insists. Many highly successful lineages went extinct simply because their luck ran out - the Neanderthals and other populations of our proto-ancestors among them. More lineages of humans disappeared on the way than those that made it to today.
It was the people living in marginal environments who needed to be the most inventive, therefore the successful populations were always those living on the edge of others who monopolised the good-quality territory. It was on the periphery that the innovators were to be found.
Biology produced over millions of years
Finlayson sees the expansion of farming from about 9,000BC as marking the start of the 'illusion of progress' towards a world of unsustainable growth, a dream that has become a nightmare today as we procrastinate while the present state and future of our planet hang in the balance due to our voracity.
When we stop to think about what a tiny fraction of our evolutionary history has been taken up by our post-farming existence - a mere 10,000 years or so - it becomes obvious, he says, that our biological make-up was formed almost entirely in the millennia before farming, so that our technological and cultural achievements today are mismatched with our biology produced over millions of years.
He declares: 'Humans auto-domesticated themselves, inadvertently, while domesticating plants and animals.' However, latest research suggests otherwise. There is increasing evidence for intervention in the human story by advanced helpers who introduced agriculture and civilized codes in the Near East at that very time.
Elevation of the human status
The late Christian O’Brien, a Cambridge scholar and exploration geologist, proposed convincingly in the 1980s that members of a technologically superior race - known in the records of Sumeria, the world’s oldest known civilization, as the Anannage - were responsible for this elevation of the human status.
Ongoing research by the Golden Age Project in recent years suggests that the Anannage were the survivors of a civilization decimated by planetary catastrophe in about 10,400BC when cosmic debris collided with the Earth.
And isn't it intriguing to consider that, if several types of human existed on our world in the distant past, there could be similar that have evolved elsewhere in the universe, on another planet orbiting another sun?
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
Clive Finlayson
Oxford University Press UK £9.99 / US $16.95
ISBN 978-0-19-923919-1
Published November 2010
Geoff Ward - Geoff Ward, MA Lit., is a British journalist, media consultant, author and lecturer/tutor in literature and creative writing
