The Humans Who Went Extinct, (Paperback)

from FicusFan

I was interested in this book because I thought from the title it would be about the Neanderthals. It really wasn't. They are minor offstage characters. I was disappointed. Although the book is short, and not too technical, it is full of repetition, often used as justification for a viewpoint. It...

from jasonlf

This book addresses the question of why the neanderthals died out while homo sapiens survived. It rejects the genetic superiority of the later and is scathing on the thesis that homo sapiens played a causal role in the extinction of the neanderthals. Instead, Finlayson argues that the main culpri...

from Jewsbury

This book is about us, and our evolutionary history. Not surprisingly, the paleontological record is quite incomplete. We have found very few hominid fossils. Thus the discovered evidence is inconclusive. We could naively link the fossil evidence in the simplest way and pretend this is the story....

from AnnieMod

Despite its subtitle, this is not a book about the Neanderthals. They do feature in the story and the question of why they died out is somewhat answered - but as a part of the much bigger questions of why we survived and so many other races did not. Finlayson goes through all the available info...

from MiaCulpa

A rather disappointing read for me as The Humans Who Went Extinct spent more time covering proto humans rather than neanderthals, the very topic of this book. Finlayson's general thesis is that luck played a huge part in why we are now here while neanderthals aren't. The Humans Who Went Extinct i...