Java Man by Garniss Curtis, Carl Swisher and Roger Lewin, Little, Brown, £18.99, ISBN 0316648604
WE ARE certain as anyone can ever be in biology that modern humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than any other living animal. We are also reasonably sure that it was in Africa that the earliest exclusively human ancestor split off from our common precursor between 8 and 5 million years ago. What is much less certain is when-and in what form-our ancestors first ventured out of Africa. Java Man aims to solve that mystery.
Discoveries of important fossil evidence for human origins quite…
