During the past few weeks I have tried to step back from adding new material to my book to gain a better perspective on how I'm telling the story I want to convey. Much of what I'm writing concerns recent discoveries to explain how we know what we say we know about evolution, but the framework from which all that hangs is a combination of historical and scientific narrative.
Nowhere is it more important to be conscious of this than in the chapter on human evolution. I have done my best to avoid illustrating evolution as development towards a given point, that our species in particular was destined to exist, but the relative poverty of my language doesn't make this easy. It has been traditional to employ terms like "higher" and "lower" to give species a place in the grand evolutionary scheme, but that is not my goal at all.
Reading popular summaries of human evolution and watching documentaries have helped me to identify different narratives (as well as how to avoid certain pitfalls in my own work). Another resource I have just stumbled across is the episode "The Meat Eating Ape" from Desmond Morris' The Human Animal, which is simultaneously interesting, amusingly outdated, and bewildering. I have included it below;