Masters of the Planet

Yesterday I wrote about Chris Stringer's modified version of human evolution. Today, let's have a look at Ian Tattersall's new book, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (Macsci). Tatersall's boo, like Sringer's, is a good overview of the newer evidence in the constantly changing field, but he goes back earlier and provides a much broader context for human evolution. His main thesis is that the features that made modern humans unique have two main characteristics: 1) they were sufficient and causal in the process of making that one species "master of the planet" and 2) the transition to fully modern form, with respect to those features, is relatively late. Tattersall argues for a late and rather sudden development of symbolic abilities and language (I disagree with this) and seems to agree with Klein in something like a "single gene" theory describing this transition as sudden and dramatic. So, I basically disagree with his thesis, but if you want a good source to find out about the "symbolic explosion" version of modern humans, this is accessible and the documentation is pretty thorough.