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Human, Robert Winston (Editor)
Dorling Kindersley
Reviewed by Chris Lonsdale (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Life for our distant ancestors was a camping trip that never ended – and without any of the accessories and freeze-dried foods considered essential today. 

The upright ape species into which we evolved, Homo sapiens, was scratching around for survival, hunting and gathering and forever moving camp, about 150,000 years ago.

We were, as consulting editor Robert Winston (the fertility research professor and furry, genial host of BBC human medical and social series) says, an endangered species – weak, not especially fast moving, with no big teeth, and the added burden of vulnerable, slow-developing offspring. We were teetering at the end of a line of chimpanzee-like creatures that had emerged five to 15 million years earlier and standing – just – unprotected on the African savanna.

But there were two things that propelled humans on the journey – meteoric by evolutionary standards – to where we are today: our sociability, which was not entirely unique, and the mysterious enlargement of our brain, which was.

By the time humans formed substantial settlements, just the time-line dot of 10,000 years ago, the two qualities of sociability and the power of complex, symbological communication – about objects and concepts that are not necessarily present, or even real – the stage was set for our journey to be phenomenally accelerated.

Millions of years to fashion stone tools; 100,000 years to learn to build crude shelters; 200 years to get to the Moon.
The exponential graph is so steep that no one knows where it is leading. Some say Man's inquisitiveness will be his undoing, his self-destruction. But there are other qualities of the human spirit, both moral and aesthetic, that work in counter-balance. The inclination to pick at a problem also carries the capacity to solve it.

This hefty and beautiful book melds the elements that have shaped humans and humanity – especially the latter because we are far, far more than individual assemblies of cells and chemicals.

We are the same, but widely different. The complex patterns of behaviour and experience that have been handed down through the generations have split into a million components, but are still part of the one body of knowledge.

With graphics so clear and three-dimensional that they seem to pop out of the page, and startling photography, this 500-page monster is handily divided into seven sections: Origins, Body, Mind, Life Cycle, Society, Culture, and the combined Peoples and Future.

Each section, colour-coded at the margin, is broken into bite-sized displays of text and pictures, which means it can be picked up and read in meaningful portions indefinitely. Its place on the coffee table could well become permanent.

And nor is this remarkable book all serious. The text is simple to read and follow, sometimes showing wry humour, and spiced with amusing sidebar anecdotes of science and history. It is impossible to avoid learning something interesting every time you pick it, browsing however haphazardly.

Did you know, for instance, that the body has 25 trillion red blood cells; that the first two stages of love – lust and attraction, last for 18 months to three years (long enough for a baby to get a fair chance of survival) – and are replaced by a more enduring attachment; and that the two-fingered salute has a long and proud history (after the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, British archers would wave their two string-pulling fingers at the French, who had a habit of cutting them off captives).

It will take a long time to get through this appealing book, so this review is a tad premature. It would be more appropriate after five or 10 years' enjoyment.