Us: The New Story of Human Evolution
About this audiobook
“The best book on human evolution this century." —Agustín Fuentes, author of The Creative Spark
The award-winning author of First Steps returns with a revelatory tour of the latest scientific discoveries in paleontology and archaeology to challenge the idea of human exceptionalism, presenting a more complex—and fascinating—portrait of "us."
As our knowledge and understanding of the past has deepened, one thing has remained constant: our belief that we humans are special. But recent scientific discoveries in the fossil record challenge this notion.
Our species did not experience some magical leap forward from ape-like ancestor to sentient being, Jeremy DeSilva argues. In Us, he uses the latest fossil, genetic, and archaeological discoveries to dismantle the myth of human exceptionalism, showing how traits we prize as uniquely human—from creating art to feeling empathy—have deep roots in our extinct relatives and primate cousins. What makes us human is in fact a suite of characteristics patched together through cultural diffusion, biological evolution, and the genetic absorption of Neandertals, Denisovans, and other non-sapiens cousins into our gene pool. Some abilities we inherited; some were borrowed and refined. But very few are truly ours.
Witty and compelling, Us takes us to the discovery sites of extraordinary human fossils and the scientists who are unearthing them; to molecular laboratories squeezing ancient DNA from half-a-million-year-old fossils, and atom-smashing facilities where high-powered X-rays look deep within the bones of long extinct ancestors. It reveals how they communicated, worked together, and solved problems—strategies that helped them survive and that may provide important clues for overcoming our ecological challenges.
We are at a new dawn in understanding human evolution. Us brings us face-to-face with our ancestors as never before. It is a vivid, humbling, and profoundly connected view of who we are and where we come from: a new story of Us.
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About the author
Jeremy “Jerry” DeSilva is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the evolution of early human ancestors (hominins). He is part of a research team that discovered and described two ancient members of the human family tree—Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi. He has studied wild chimpanzees in Western Uganda and digs for ancient human fossils at sites in Eastern and South Africa. From 1998-2003, Jerry worked as an educator at the Boston Museum of Science and continues to be passionate about science education. He is the author of the 2021 book First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human. Jerry lives in Norwich, Vermont, with his wife Erin and their twins Ben and Josie.
