Tattersall, curator in the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, opens his book with a description of viewing Ice Age cave paintings in Combarelles in France. His astonishment and awe at the expert executions of various Pleistocene animals are evident. He sees not only accurate depictions, but understands that the paintings must have held deep symbolic meaning for the people who created and saw them.

From another cave at Font de Gaume, also in France, is one drawing of a male reindeer licking the forehead of a female reindeer. A line drawing in the book of the painting shows tenderness. In other caves, there are footprints that seem to belong to a child and some places where a child's hand is outlined on the cave wall. Exactly what these and other cave paintings mean is something he speculates on only to the degree of stating that other things beside the old idea of hunting magic must be going on.

To be human is to have the ability to think in terms of symbols and to manipulate them, according to the author. This is the true hallmark of humanity, an emergent ability arising from an enlarged, asymmetrical brain. There is no evidence that this was planned, nor is it the result of some inexorable process directing humans toward perfection.

The early part of the book is given to examining the mental and learning abilities of other primates, particularly chimpanzees. Experiments designed to see how far chimp tool-making abilities go show that while they are bright animals, there is an unbridgeable cognitive gap between humans and chimps, our closest relatives. The difference is perhaps one more of degrees than of absolutes, but there is no arguing, according to Tattersall, that even the brightest chimp lacks the ability to communicate symbolically. Chimps in the wild, he says, will sometimes swallow whole a particular fruit they would normally not even eat as a means of ridding themselves of intestinal parasites, but cannot understand either what is bothering them or how the fruit relieves the problem.

A chapter titled "Evolution--What For?" discusses the nature and history of evolutionary theory. He takes to task the ideas behind sociobiology--"the immortal gene"--and argues for the validity of punctuated equilibrium. It is clear that species have long periods of stability with little or no evolutionary change (though, frankly, I don't know that many these days argue against that). Again, he stresses that evolution is purposeless, that selection may work at population level, but certainly works at levels about the genetic.

The rest of the book is a discussion of the fossil and archaeological record from the earliest humans to the Ice Age cultures. His one shortfall in this--IMHO--seems to be an overemphasis on the record of Europe, though he explicitly states that while modern humans with consciousness that can deal in terms of symbol could not have arisen there, Europe seems to be the place where the records are most abundant. There is a sympathetic and interesting discussion of Neanderthals, the large-brained beings who while clever were not quite human and probably had no speech. He concludes:

"Even the Neanderthals, complex and admirable as they may have been, were probably limited to an intuitive level of understanding of the world about them. Neanderthals were expert craftsmen in stone and were adept at learning by imitation, even if they individually showed rather little originality and inventiveness. They were evidently capable of empathy and may even have wept as they interred that body on its bed of flowers at Shinadar [in Israel]; and there can be little doubt they had quite sophisticated ways of communicating with each other. All this, however, was in every likelihood achieved in the absence of symbolic reasoning..."
p. 229

One of the many paradoxes about humans Tattersall discusses is that while we long to understand our origins, understanding our evolutionary history does not tell us anything about ourselves we cannot understand by observing ourselves today. It is not the purview of the paleoanthropologist to describe the human condition (or non-condition, because it is so hard to define) but that of psychologists and writers. In perhaps another paradox, he ends his book with a bit of speculation of the evolutionary future of Homo sapiens--though this contains no surprises.

The writing is clear and easy to read though Tattersall's ideas do provoke thought. I could not help get a feeling of sadness, though I'm not sure where this comes from. Perhaps it is no more than the knowledge that we humans, quirky, self-contradictory beasts that we are, are capable of unspeakable horrors at the same time we are capable of love and compassion.

At the risk of making an unconscionably long review even longer, I have to note that jacket blurb says Tattersall is responsible for the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, something I was unaware of when I saw the hall earlier this year. It is a wonderful series of exhibits, even humorous. I highly recommend a visit for anyone who is around or is planning to be around New York any time soon. And the dinosaurs are cool, too.

Recommended: Yes