the byways of evolution…

Book review:

Cave of Bones

by Lee Berger and John Hawks

Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2023

235 pages

We haven’t been alone since forever, more or less.

It’s way too easy to adopt the common misunderstanding that humans are soooo exceptional, uniquely better than all the other animals.

The emphasis is on “unique,” at the apex of a singular progression throughout all of our history.

It ain’t necessarily so.

Cave of Bones is full of countervailing evidence: Homo naledi in south Africa were building fires, burying their dead, and scratching lines on cave walls at about the same time—200,000 to 300,000 years ago—as early members of Homo sapiens were doing the same things.

Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger affirms that Homo naledi didn’t look like us, and were a separate species and “by almost any definition…not human.” Nevertheless, in the Rising Star cave system he and his team members found charcoal and armfuls of fossil bones and scratch marks and a rock shaped like a tool, all confirming that naledi left evidence of their human-like activities, and, yes, culture.

In his introduction, Berger confides a sobering reality: “We explore the places where things have died.” I’m glad I didn’t do that in my career work.

**Read Cave of Bones cover to cover. Learn some interesting stuff.**

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Book review: Lafayette by Harlow Unger

He was a great man. Also rich and lucky.

click here

As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”