Book Reviewed: The Accidental Homo Sapiens: Genetics, Behavior, and Free Will by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle

How early Homo Sapiens became the unique modern species This book presents the ancient history of homo sapiens where culture, ideas, technology, and behavior played a significant role in their evolution: Natural Selection was not the major force. The focus is the cognitive emergence of symbolic thought, communication, languages, creating cultural values, scientific, philosophical, and theological enquiry, and making sense of the larger picture of our existence in the cosmos. According to the author, genetic influence is not wholly responsible but the cultural and environmental impact is also significant. The ecological of small and isolated population, later migrations, chance mutations, and unpredictable environmental shifts eventually led to the present hominid species. The path to us was not inevitable, because several traits and evolutionary possibilities never happened. The author has missed some key publications in recent years that are relevant to this book. The origin story of Homo Sapiens contains several partly connected populations across Africa (a metapopulation or “pan-African” model) whose interactions, local adaptations and occasional mixing produced the anatomy and behaviors were from one or more dispersals carried by the descendants from Africa. This largest continent with diverse regional ecologies provided opportunities to independently evolve into several closely related hominid species. There are several closely related “early” Home Sapiens that have not been identified because of lack of fossilized specimens. late Middle Pleistocene Africa (781,000 to 126,000 years ago) hosted several semi-isolated, closely related populations (different regions, sometimes diverged for tens to hundreds of thousands of years) that exchanged genes episodically; modern humans emerged from that structured network rather than from a single isolated population. There is no evidence for a simple “one-place, one-time” origin story for Homo sapiens. A range of behavior and choice like our moral, ethical, and personal behavior lies along a normal distribution statistic. Some sections in this book are dense due to the aspects of population genetics, statistics (Bell curve – normal distribution), and philosophy of “free will” explored in the evolution of homo sapiens. Especially the idea of “free will” which is loaded with neurobiology, physics, and philosophy addressed by several other authors recently is lightly overseen in this book.