A Journey Into What Makes us Human By Frank Westerman; translated by Sam Garrett Head of Zeus WE, HOMINIDS

Part personal voyage of discovery, part investigative journalism, Dutch former foreign correspondent Frank Westerman’s new book relates a global journey to seek answers to the riddle of human origins. At one point in his travels, Westerman reaches the Indonesian island of Flores. In 2003, archaeologists exploring a cave on the island discovered a skull and other bones of an ancient human relative. These were the remains of an adult female, an 18,000-year-old primordial fossil. She was very small, standing about a metre tall, with a cranial capacity roughly equivalent to that of a chimpanzee. Her feet were flat, well-suited for covering great distances. The archaeological team also found stone tools alongside the fossils, suggesting that she was in possession of considerable mental firepower.

For Westerman, ‘The Flores discovery teaches us what we didn’t know about our evolution and identity, where we came from and what is this Homo sapiens tree.’ This being may have constituted a new branch of the genus Homo, but no-one knows which branch that was. His assessment ties in with the extreme difficulty, one might even venture impossibility, of discovering the true origins of humanity. Westerman travels the globe on an anthropological detective adventure, on a search for the first human being. Yet any description of who we are and where we come from clashes with constantly changing theories of human evolution. ‘If the search for the human essence has made anything clear to me,’ he writes, ‘it is that we are doomed to go on revising what we think we know. The definitive version does not exist.’ Westerman’s acute sense of humour enlivens the narrative throughout, such as when he discovers from a DNA test that he is 1.1 per cent Neanderthal, sufficiently low, he emphasises, to avoid being the butt of student jokes when he worked as a lecturer at Leiden University.