Ian Tattersall

50,000 years ago – merely a blip in evolutionary time – our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their own precursors had been doing for millions of years. Yet something about our species separated it from the pack, and led to its survival while the rest became …

One of the most remarkable fossil finds in history occurred in Laetoli, Tanzania, in 1974, when anthropologist Andrew Hill (diving to the ground to avoid a lump of elephant dung thrown by a colleague) came face to face with a set of ancient footprints captured in stone--the earliest recorded steps of our far-off human …

Traces the path of human evolution from the simplest forms, through the development of primates, to the rise of modern humankind and highlights such topics as dating methods, fossil discoveries, and primitive toolmaking.