HOMO BRITANNICUS: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain by Chris Stringer (5-Oct-2006) Hardcover

This is an excellent book, and well worth the read. To me it is an original subject area - some subjects are over represented on the Popular Science bookshelf, this was the first book that I had seen on this subject.4 stars, because I found the structure of the book rather confusing. I rarely knew the focus of the chapter that I was reading. Is the book organised by theme or chronologically? Some topics seemed to arise again and again, spread across many chapters, but would have been better together. I'm not saying that I could organise the book better - maybe restructuring so that prehistoric technologies, modern dating technologies, migrations, DNA, sea levels, fauna, fossil evidence, etc. are treated more comprehensively would render other aspects of the book less coherent.The author has a lot of information to share, and has concentrated on squeezing factual information into the text at the expense of narration, portraits or suspense. However, the book is quite short, so there was plenty of room to add some literary style (160 pages if you ignore the last chapter on climate change which is in the wrong book, and the short biographies of the author's colleagues).A very informative book, that I would definitely recommend. The issues I have highlighted are probably because the author is a full time scientist and part time author, not vice-verse. Unlike some full time science writers, the author is careful to emphasise the limits of knowledge, areas of uncertainty and to avoid colourful speculation. For the same reason, the author has a more extensive knowledge of the subject than a populist writer could attain.

My initial thoughts upon completing this book were that it was too short and over all too quickly. So I guess on the positive side it was an easy read and not a slog. But I expected more. There's a prologue in which Stringer summarises the book's aims, an introduction in which he details the work of early antiquarians, a final chapter in which Stringer talks about climate change over the entirety of human history and going into the future, and a final section in which all of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain members talk about what they do. So only pages 35 to 159 actually discuss early human occupation in Britain. Of a 242 page book. That's only 124 pages on the book's actual subject, strictly speaking. Needless to say I feel a little disappointed about that. I was hoping for a really thorough read about Neanderthals, homo erectus, and homo sapiens in Britain in the stone age. It'd be okay if all of these add-ons were small additions to a much larger, meatier main text, but the main text is so short. Stringer discusses climate, flora, fauna, and archaeological work, but I was hoping for more on the actual people. What Stringer does write is clear, accessible, and lucid, and does provide a focus on specifically British material, and one can hardly sniff at Stringer's extensive professional credentials... I just wish there had been more of it.

This is an excellent book on an important subject although I agree that the general reader could be led through the themes a little clearer. A pity it has not been updated with a second edition as the final essays indicate that a great deal of work is likely to have taken place over the last 15+ years.As the author's object was to present the results of the AHOB (Ancient Human Occupation of Britain) project it is not surprising that the results of the group are heavily referred to. They have clearly added enormously to our knowledge of paleolithic Britain. the final 40 pages add a great deal of information and should not be missed. All these short essays are well-written and describe many techniques used in fascinating detail, using their experience of AHOB sites for illustration. Not a perfect work of literature but a natural 5 star book.

I can recommend about three-quarters of this book. Where Chris Stringer, author of "Homo Britannicus", sticks to his subject matter, he is lucid, well-informed (he should be, having participated in a great many of the investigations described) and able to inform his readership, without either patronising, or descending into impenetrable academic waffle. The subtitle, which possibly wasn't his doing, is pretty daft: "The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain". I don't see anything especially unbelievable about it, even if some of Stringer's predecessors, notably Buckland, might have disagreed with me about that. There is a double chronology involved here: that of the development of human existence on these shores (continually interrupted by the glacial phases of the Pleistocene), along with that of the palaeontology which has sought to map that development. While the book is structured, very coherently, around the prehistoric chronology, Stringer does also provide a clear account of the sequence of discoveries which contributed to the science.There are problems, however. Stringer drops hints about a "global warming" obsession a couple of times in the earlier chapters, but nothing could prepare me for the extended rant about "global warming" which fills the final chapter. Stringer, writing (or being published, anyway) in 2006, had clearly swallowed every implausible, wildly over-the-top claim from the alarmist fraternity and regurgitated it whole. Not only does that demonstrate an alarming level of gullibility on his part, since not one of the dire outcomes which he predicts has remotely come to pass, but it does also suggest an astonishing absence of self-awareness. Stringer spends a fair amount of time (rather superfluously) tackling "Piltdown Man", a controversy which ceased to be controversial sixty years ago, when the Piltdown finds were proved to be fakes. The "global warming" scam is every bit as criminally dishonest as Piltdown, but, unlike Piltdown, it has cost lives; yet Stringer pontificates in favour of today's fraud, which is not so much Piltdown II as Piltdown Cubed. I hope he feels pretty silly by now, post-Climategate and seven years on from his book.The Kindle edition isn't great, with errors of editing and intrusive hyphens in words that don't need them. The maps are tiny on a Kindle, very hard to read and, in one case, completely illegible.All in all, I'd suggest that you don't bother buying this in any format. It's probably in your local library - and skip that dire final chapter.