Chris Stringer

HOMO BRITANNICUS tells the epic history of life in Britain, from man's very first footsteps to the present day. Drawing on all the latest evidence and techniques of investigation, Chris Stringer describes times when Britain was so tropical that man lived alongside hippos and sabre tooth tiger, times so cold we shared this land with reindeer and mammoth, and times colder still when we were forced to flee altogether. This is the first time we have known the full extent of this history: the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, led by Chris, has made discoveries that have stunned the world, pushing back the earliest date of arrival to 700,000 years ago. Our ancestors have been fighting a dramatic battle for survival here ever since.

In 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Africa and the Near East took flight and sought refuge in Europe. By the end of that year, some 1.8 million migrants had arrived in the EU, the vast majority having come across the Mediterranean. Since then, despite measures to host some of the people fleeing the Syrian war in Turkey and concurrent attempts to physically seal off some borders in Eastern Europe, the numbers of refugees traveling to Europe has continued to top half a million annually. A mass migration on a scale not witnessed in modern times is underway, and it has presented Europe with its greatest challenge of the twenty-first century.Asfa-Wossen Asserate argues here that building higher fences or finding more effective methods of integration will only, in the long term, perpetuate rather than solve the problems associated with these large numbers of displaced refugees. We need to realize that we are only treating the symptoms of an oncoming catastrophe and that, if we are to respond to mass migration, we will ultimately have to understand its causes. The New Mass Migration places its emphasis firmly on the causes of the refugee crisis, which are to be found not least in Europe itself, and charts ways in which we might deal with it effectively in the long term. --

Ever since the discovery of the bones of a pre-modern human in the Neander Valley, Germany, in 1856, the Neanderthals have provoked controversy. Who were these beetle-browed, heavy-limbed creatures, and how were they related to modern people? What caused their disappearance 35,000 years ago? Portrayed in endless cartoons and novels as club-wielding cavemen, the Neanderthals have become the archetype of all that is primitive and uncultured. Today Neanderthal specialists are locked in one of the fiercest debates in modern science. One side, the "multiregional" school, argues that the Neanderthals and their contemporaries elsewhere evolved semi-independently into modern humans. The other side, the "out of Africa" school, believes that the Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end, replaced by fully modern people coming ultimately from Africa. The latter camp, now gaining the upper hand, is led by Christopher Stringer. Here, in this long-awaited volume, he sets out his views for the first time, in conjunction with the archaeologist Clive Gamble. Step by step the authors put their case. The Neanderthals had an anatomy crucially different from our own, adapted to the cold of Ice Age Europe. Neanderthal behavior, captured in the archaeological record, similarly points to fundamental differences. New genetic evidence strongly suggests a single origin for modern humans in Africa. What, then, was the fate of the Neanderthals? Stringer and Gamble argue that, capable and intelligent as they were, they eventually proved no match for the better-organized, better-equipped newcomers. They did not evolve into modern humans: they simply died out. This important study, incorporating a photographic catalogue of key fossil finds, provides the most up-to-date account of current knowledge about the Neanderthals and their world. For anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, palaeontologists - for anyone interested in where we came from - it is essential reading.

In this ground-breaking book Chris Stringer sets out to answer all the big questions in the debate about our origins.

A leading researcher on human evolution proposes a new and controversial theory of how our species came to be In this groundbreaking and engaging work of science, world-renowned paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer sets out a new theory of humanity's origin, challenging both the multiregionalists (who hold that modern humans developed from ancient ancestors in different parts of the world) and his own "out of Africa" theory, which maintains that humans emerged rapidly in one small part of Africa and then spread to replace all other humans within and outside the continent. Stringer's new theory, based on archeological and genetic evidence, holds that distinct humans coexisted and competed across the African continent—exchanging genes, tools, and behavioral strategies. Stringer draws on analyses of old and new fossils from around the world, DNA studies of Neanderthals (using the full genome map) and other species, and recent archeological digs to unveil his new theory. He shows how the most sensational recent fossil findings fit with his model, and he questions previous concepts (including his own) of modernity and how it evolved. Lone Survivors will be the definitive account of who and what we were, and will change perceptions about our origins and about what it means to be human.

An account of the rise and eventual domination of humans examines the technology used to study fossilized remains, traces the evolution of apes and humans, and explains the development of human behaviors.