Review : Our kind of people

Robert Foley’s Humans before Humanity (Blackwell, £12.99, ISBN 0 631
20528 4) offers answers to questions about our origins. Moving away from the
notion of humanity as a special case, he shows how the environments in which
hominid species lived provided all the impetus required for our
evolution—no exceptional circumstances were needed. For the paperback, he
has added a guide to hominid names and fossil discovery.