Four books on human origins and evolution

AS long ago as 1758, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus formally bundled apes, monkeys and us into the order of primates. Criticised for treating humans as just another animal to be classified, Linnaeus defended his action. He challenged his detractors to demonstrate any significant anatomical differences between us and them. He was on solid ground: the similarity between chimps, orang-utans and humans had been well established by anatomists such as the London physician Edward Tyson in the 17th century. A hundred years later, Charles Darwin endorsed Linnaeus’s primates as a natural phylogenetic grouping even before much was known about the…