Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human [Hardcover]

Leakey once suffered from 'lack of credentials' in his work as an paleoanthropologist. Drawn to this work by a fascination with our past instead of by an academic background, he's shamed his critics with stunning finds, excellent logic in assessing their value, and the presentation talents shown here. The lack of academic constraints frees him to bring fossils to life in speculative scenarios no schooled scientist would dare. He does it here with plausible accounts of our ancestors possible lifestyles. The guild scientists may complain that 'there isn't enough evidence' to draw these scenes, but Leakey is careful to point to the evidence, drawing many elements together to produce these scenes. They are vivid and thought provoking in portrayal and need no more defense than that. And they are supported by fine illustrations of many aspects of paleoanthropology.

Leakey's examination of language development occupies a significant part of his discourse. These arguments are worthy of your close inspection. Verbal communication has long been viewed as the sole distinction between humans and the other animals. Leakey shows how even this feature cannot be considered a sharp demarcation. He examines the function of language over the course of human evolution, concluding that language and our oversize brains result from a continuous feedback loop.

There are few shortcomings in this book. Foremost is a lack of bibliography [yes, this remains a shortcoming even while defending Leakey's 'non-academic' background]. It would be nice to further pursue details of some of the contentious issues. Lewin's own BONES OF CONTENTION makes a fine starting point. It lacks however, any mention of Owen Lovejoy's thesis on bipedalism related in Johanson's LUCY, the most succinct depiction of human evolution in print. Leakey uses Harry Jerison as a source for brain/language interaction, but you'll look long to find Jerison's BRAIN SIZE AND THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. The lack of a reading list can be overcome with a bit of work on your part. There are many good titles available and the effort will expand your view of our origins. Start here, you will not find many other works that will touch your own humanity as closely as this one does.

Best of all, this time he takes us along on the adventure of discovery. Leakey is no closeted academic; he can find food and water as the ancient hunter-gatherers did, with no modern tools, in what looks to the untrained eye like a dry wasteland. He understands the politics of the illegal ivory trade as well as the interpretation of fossils. He was not stopped in either his explorations of human origins or his quest to save African wildlife by years of kidney failure, near-fatal pneumonia, death threats from poachers, or even the loss of his legs in a plane crash. He covers the science in full detail, yet the reader has a sense of immediacy one never gets from the academic literature. We are parties to acrimonious debate and feel the thrill of pouncing on the apparent error of a rival. We spend months in the bush, and are immersed in a lifelong search that yields, after innumerable frustrations, to the occasional astonishing discovery.

There are a few shortcomings; Leakey glosses over some of the points he made eloquently in the first book which turned out, in retrospect, to be radically incorrect. The photographs, critical to understanding the discussion, are grouped together and hard to relate to the appropriate text, and the critical diagrams of the human evolutionary tree are small and difficult to read. But overall, the theory is so cogently explained, and the narrative has such a sense of realism, that we feel we could do it ourselves, flying over the Great Rift, sifting through ancient sand and rock, pushing back the frontiers of time to discover ourselves.