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Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Q&A with Chip Walter, author of Last Ape Standing Photo by Richard Kelly Photography 1.: Your previous book, Thumbs, Toes and Tears, helped explain human nature by looking at traits that are unique to humans and then exploring how they came to be. Since that book was written, it’s become increasingly clear that many other species of humans co-existed and competed in the past, and that now all of them are gone, but one. Us. Why have we survived when so many others failed? Chip Walter: It’s fascinating how that happened because on the surface it really doesn’t make any evolutionary sense. Our direct line of ancestors faced a dilemma more than a million years ago that could have ended them right there and then. Their brains were growing larger AND they had taken to walking upright at the same time. Both adaptations were helpful except for one problem: walking upright narrows the birth canal and that makes it difficult to bring larger brained babies to full term. The solution was to bring the babies into the world prematurely, and extend their childhood longer AFTER birth. You wouldn’t think that bringing increasingly helpless preemies into existence and then lengthening the time it takes for them to have the next generation of children wouldn’t seem to be a very effective survival strategy. Might be smarter to shorten childhood and have more babies faster. If you were a betting ape in those days, you wouldn’t have given our direct ancestors much of chance. But the creativity and inventiveness our uniquely long childhoods make possible are the reasons, ultimately; that we survived when so many others were shown the evolutionary door. 2.: You say that at one point the human race had been whittled down to near extinction, and only a few thousand of us remained. Why? How did we bounce back? CW: Around 75,000 years ago the genetic evidence indicates we were, at best, down to a few thousand childbearing Homo sapiens. This would mean there were fewer of us than there are wild chimpanzees on Earth right now. The planet was in the grip of a very nasty ice age that had dried out most of Africa. Pockets of Homo sapiens existed in South Africa and maybe a few other locations. Around this time there was also an immense volcanic eruption in Indonesia and the Homo sapiens in Africa were in the path of the ash cloud. (Other human species were not down wind or in the direct path.) Ironically, around the same time you begin to see the first glimmers of human creativity and symbolic thinking which is necessary for things like art, sculpture and language. Those extra skills apparently helped us bounce back, generate newer, better survival strategies and share innovative ideas. 3.: You have a chapter in the book entitled “The Moral Primate." You point out that most other animals aren’t, don’t worry about being fair, but we struggle with good and evil all the time. Where does our sense of morality come from? CW: One of the outcomes of a longer childhood for us was that our ancestors found themselves faced with two BIG problems. They had already been forced out of the jungle into the savannas of Africa. Savannas are far more dangerous places to live and survive—more predators, less available food, greater distances to cover. On top of this, they now had to deal with raising these “early-born†infants and children who required their care for longer and longer periods of time. So how do you deal with that without getting wiped out? You bond, you rely upon one another more than ever to help keep the whole troop alive. BUT it’s not quite that simple because at the same time you also have to compete with the very same people you rely on for help. You contend with them for mates, for food, for power and status within the troop. This is one of the great paradoxes of the human condition. We all must both compete and cooperate with one another. This raised the first “moral†questions. Do you put yourself first, or do you put others in the group first? Do you kill, bully or hurt another to get more food, a mate, more power in the short term, and if so, what are the long term consequences? You could be killed or bullied yourself, or tossed from the group, the equivalent of suicide on the savanna. Longer term, you might need that person’s help some day. Maybe thinking a little less selfishly would be a good idea? So we evolved a basic moral code, one in which we want to be treated by others the way we treat them—the golden rule, which is universal and expressed in virtually every human culture on earth.
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About the Author
Chip Walter is the founder of the popular website AllThingsHuman.net, a former CNN bureau chief, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. His articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Slate,and numerous other publications and websites. He is author of three books, most recentlyThumbs, Toes, and Tears, and his writing has been published in eight languages. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife Cyndy and their four children.Visit his website at www.chipwalter.com.
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Product details
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (February 18, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1620405210
ISBN-13: 978-1620405215
Product Dimensions:
5.7 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 0.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
168 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,015,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
What I expected was a lot more detail on the approximate twenty-seven "human" species that the author, Chip Walter, mentions, perhaps with drawings of what the species looked like, maps of ranges, and other various concrete details. What I got was some "gosh-wow!" big science speculation/insight. I like "gosh-wow" science, but I wanted to see more of the details, although, frankly, the details I want are probably beyond the information we have available.The material is organized into broad thematic/chronological units chapter by chapter. Thus, the first chapter is a reflection on the deep time of the "Human Evolution Calendar" and the gradual development of brain size, walking ability and other details of the human anatomy. Walter does provide a nice chart showing his view of what species evolved into what species in this chapter, although I wondered about his loose definition of "human." How three feet tall creatures with the 1/3 our brain capacities are human is not clear. Walter includes the robustus group in his definition of human. There may be a good reason for doing this, but I wasn't clear what the ground was, albeit for purposes of the book and stretching our imagination, it does make a point.Succeeding chapters discuss the importance of neoteny and childhood. Neoteny involves the preservation of childish features in older individuals. In the human species, the movement to bipedalism and the increase in brain size meant that human species had to have more development of children outside the womb. According to Walter, the extended period of childhood made human species more individual, more flexible, and more able to learn. Walter also ascribes much of the homo sapien form to radical neoteny as compared to other species. Further, Walter makes the interesting argument that the reason for sapiens success over that of the neanderthals was simply that sapiens had longer childhoods, which made for more flexibility and creativity.Flexibility and individuality meant that even greater brain power was needed to deal with social interactions. Social interactions for developing humans might have been more important than speed or strength, and that set up a feedback loop for brain development. Walter also theorizes that brain power in the form of imagination is a kind of display behavior that shows reproductive fitness, like the Impala's "stotting" behavior.Walter has some fascinating insights as to interspecies interaction. It seems clear based on lice that humans have that our species met another human species intimately enough to share lice. Likewise, it is clear that we share some genes with Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovan species. This is all fascinating, and provisional as imaginable since all we have as hard evidence is a couple of molars and a finger tip. That we can do this much analysis with so little is mind-bending.Two more fascinating insights. First, Walter has a description of the genetic bottleneck seventy thousand years ago in Africa when sapiens were reduced to less than ten thousand individuals. Walter speculates that this was due to the Toba eruption. Other species of humans were not affected because the ash might have blown west from Indonesia, blanketing Africa, but leaving Europe and Asia relatively unaffected. Walter explains:"Given these apparently enthusiastic migrations, you might think that as a species we were finally off and running, but there was that wintry climate that was setting in. By seventy thousand years ago it was in full, frigid swing and had begun to systematically rub out life everywhere on the planet. (We are living right now in what scientists call a slim “interglacial†period of this ice epoch, a bit of information that is itself chilling.) Genetic studies confirm that during this time Homo sapiens underwent what scientists call a “bottleneck event.†That is to say, we had been worn down to something like ten thousand total adult members, a troop or tribe here or there, scraping out a living, probably along ocean shorelines and receding lake beds. Ice ages rarely result in cold weather in Africa. Instead they parch the land, turn rivers into dry wadis, evaporate lakes, and wipe out the sustenance each provides. During some of these periods, the Nile itself was reduced to swamp and muck. Even today the continent is filled with ancient lake beds scarred by desiccated mud cracks that testify to exactly how arid the landscape had become. Whichever humans survived the first waves of these droughts, they had tools, but little else, and when water disappeared, so did the other animals, nuts, tubers, and fruit that supported them. Being at the top of the food chain did them little good once the chain itself was demolished."Another interesting bit of speculation is Walter's speculation that human self-identity emerged only within the last 50,000 years:"To understand why we have come to operate this way, think of social interaction as a kind of rapidly changing ecosystem made up of a mix of personalities that requires constant adaptation to the shifting agendas, relationships, alliances, and power struggles within the group. In the highly social and very bright species that preceded us, part of the battle for individuals would have been to keep motives and relationships straight in their own minds. Those among our ancestors who could successfully track and recall the behaviors of their friends and enemies would have excelled, survived, and passed their genes along.To manage this, they must have learned to symbolize different personalities. Maybe Goog tended to be aggressive; Targ, helpful and friendly; Moop, well organized and smart. This would have helped them “slot†others into organizational categories so they could deal with them in ways they saw fit, depending on their own personalities. Since these relationships only matter in so far as they are connected to you, along the way it would have been impossible not to eventually apply the same index to you. We became to ourselves another person in our social ecology.As evolution continually favored smarter and increasingly self–aware creatures from Homo erectus to ergaster to heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens eventually emerged. Both we and Neanderthals developed large brains and complex prefrontal cortices, but we developed in different parts of the world, under entirely different circumstances, split from a common ancestor.g We both may have developed spoken language, but very different kinds. We were both self–aware and capable of symbolizing, but to what extent remains unclear. Neanderthals may never have developed a highly complex and fully symbolic inner world, and Homo sapiens may not have pulled off this level of cerebral legerdemain themselves until fifty thousand years ago, maybe later."Walter offers some speculation as to what the world might have looked to these individuals:"Mithen imagines Neanderthals took a different path and evolved a complex combination of iconic gestures (think of the “crazy†gesture we use, an index finger twirling beside our head), songlike sounds to express emotions (more complex versions of the cooing and keening sounds we make), outright song and highly expressive dance movements (à la ballet and Broadway), all in concert to communicate on levels so intricate that they are beyond what we can even imagine.These weren’t muddled, caveman efforts to ape our Homo sapiens language, according to Mithen. He believes and makes a compelling argument that Neanderthals were musical and gestural virtuosos compared with us and the other human species that came before them. While we specialized in using our brains and vocal gifts as ways to deliver packets of symbols made of sound, Neanderthals evolved hyperrefined senses of sound, movement, and emotion."Walter ends with some speculation about future human evolution. He speculates that such evolution might involve further augmentation of intelligence and memory via cybernetics. At this point, the book becomes a useful guideline for science fiction writers.Walter is an excellent writer. He makes his arguments in a lucid and coherent fashion.
Utterly fascinating exposition of the latest theories on the evolution of modern Homo Sapiens, from the earliest fossilized traces to the present day. Not just the how, but the why, and told in a straightforward prose unfettered by the usual 7-syllable words anthropologists love to use to convince through obfuscation and confusion.What differentiates us from our past - and from our fellow denizens of the planet. How the people we once thought of as ignorant savages, the Neanderthals, left their heritage behind for us to enjoy - through interbreeding. Most of us whose ancestry is of the northern hemisphere still carry their DNA in our cells - from one to four percent.Why childhood is so much longer for us than for our cousins the primates, and why we are born utterly helpless - as well as upside-down (or at least compared to other animals).Sadly, the author gets bogged down in the latter part of the book, expounding at great length on the mysteries of the current human brain, and in a disconcertingly repetitive manner entirely out of character. As another reviewer wrote, it is almost as if there was a word count goal and the last part of the book was written to that end rather than to the subject at hand. Psychobabble is still psychobabble, whether in the guise of paleoanthropology or of psychiatry.Enjoy! But when you get bogged down in the last chapters, don't feel you've missed anything when you close the book in frustration - you'll have read the best part.
Last Ape Standing by Chip Walter"Last Ape Standing" is a journey into human evolution. Science writer, producer of award-winning science documentaries and professor at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and Entertainment Technology Center, Chip Walter provides readers an interesting story of how we came to be. The book focuses on paleoanthropology and an engaging narrative that speculates to the best of our current knowledge how out of the twenty-seven human species, Homo sapiens came to be. This interesting 240-page book is composed of the following eight chapters: 1. The Battle for Survival, 2. The Invention of Childhood) Or Why It Hurts to Have a Baby), 3. Learning Machines, 4. Tangled Webs - the Moral Primate, 5. The Everywhere Ape, 6. Cousin Creatures, 7. Beauties in the Beast, and 8. The Voice Inside Your Head.Positives:1. Engaging and accessible prose.2. The fascinating topic of human evolution.3. Good use of charts and diagrams.4. The author makes clear what we do know versus what we don't know and to what degree; which only highlights the need for even more science. "Yet the best genetic evidence is currently so foggy that it places the time we and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor somewhere between four and seven million years ago, rather a loose estimate. So neither the fossil record nor genetic science can provide anything very detailed about the precise time of our emergence."5. The author does a good job of making the material accessible by using effective analogies. The use of the Human Evolutionary Calendar really helps the reader to keep timelines in perspective.6. Interesting studies and findings, "Studies reveal that knuckle-walking chimpanzees burn up to 35 percent more energy than we humans do as we stroll blithely down the street."7. The impact of neoteny. "The dictionary defines neoteny as `the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal'."8. A focus on paleoanthropology. "Even if a scientist has nothing more than a single, ancient molar or bicuspid to work with--which, in paleoanthropology, is often the case--it's remarkable how illuminating a tooth can be."9. The importance of the acquisition of language.10. The brain. "The purpose of brains generally is to organize the waves of sensory phenomena that nature's cerebrally gifted creatures experience." Good stuff.11. How the epigenome changes your brain. Interesting section.12. The evolution of the moral ape.13. Recent discoveries that have rocked the scientific world, "The remarkable thing about heidelbergensis, so named because the first specimen was found near Heidelberg, Germany, is that it is the species from which both we and Neanderthals descended. That news has utterly rearranged the human family tree."14. The importance of genetics. "Each of these species lived when we Homo sapiens did, and DNA evidence indicates that at least one also mated with us, and with Neanderthals. Human species embraced one another; it seems, in more than a metaphorical way when they had the chance."15. Hobbits! "The current consensus is that the last hobbit departed about seventeen thousand years ago, but some have speculated they may have lived on."16. Neanderthals! "Both we and Neanderthals carry the FOXP2 gene in our chromosomes, a snippet of DNA key to the development of speech (but not the language genes as some have characterized it; there is no language gene)." Many interesting theories on the demise of the Neanderthals.17. Human sexuality. "Several studies have revealed that men of nearly every culture are attracted to women whose waists are about 70 percent of the size of their hips."18. Creativity. "There is no getting around the conclusion that creativity, though it may once have been evolutionary filigree, has become the force that defines our species, and the behavior that separates us from all other living things."19. Self awareness. "As evolution continually favored smarter and increasingly self-aware creatures from Homo erectus to ergaster to heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens eventually emerged."20. Fascinating insight into autism and schizophrenia and how they relate. "Like schizophrenia, autism runs along a spectrum from mild to severe, and some of the underlying symptoms for it are similar: difficulty socializing with others, a tendency to become obsessed with specific behaviors, sometimes self-injury or the need for repetitive rituals that might involve entertainment, food, or dress."21. Links to notes and a formal bibliography.22. Excellent appendices.Negatives:1. Great charts and diagrams but they didn't translate as well on the Kindle. You may be better served getting the book instead of the digital version.2. The chapter on morality though interesting is covered much better in other books.3. More citations would have been helpful.4. A bit repetitive.5. Light on genetics.6. I liked the book quite a bit but I didn't love it. I can't put my fingers on it but the parts seem greater than the whole.7. A section/appendix on how to determine the age of bones would have been value added.In summary, this is a good book. Human evolution is a fascinating topic and new research adds fuel to the interest. Walter does a really good job of making the material accessible to the masses. He covers the most important species and focuses on the brain and paleoanthropology. I'm a big Kindle fan but the graphs and diagrams are not as effective digitally. The book is light on genetics and the chapter on morality could have been much better. That being said, I enjoyed the book and recommend it.Further suggestions: "Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters" by Donald R. Prothero, "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution" by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, "Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors" by Nicholas Wade, "The Age of Everything: How Science Explores the Past" by Mathew Hedman, "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design" by Michael Shermer, "Deep Ancestry: The Landmark DNA Quest to Decipher Our Distant Past" by Spencer Wells, "Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature" by Brian Switek, "Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry A. Coyne, "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll, "Your Inner Fish" by Neil Shubin, "Relics of Eden" by Daniel J. Fairbanks, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond, "Only a Theory" by Kenneth R. Miller, and "Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution" by Nick Lane.
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