Homo sapiens

The memory of Tsutomu Yamaguchi will be with me for some time. Though wounded, he survived the Hiroshima atom bomb and returned to his home town, Nagasaki. Three days later, he survived another nuclear attack. He died in 2010, aged 93. This fat, complex, good-natured and intriguing book is full of such memorable material. Hanno Sauer is a German philosopher with an all-encompassing mind and a capacity to entertain. His arguments are sometimes clogged and improbable and I don’t find his primary thesis – basically that things can only get better – credible, but then I feel the same about most philosophers. The thesis is based on Sauer’s belief that

When I studied anthropology back in the early 1980s, Neanderthals were still largely the bulk-browed brutes of yore, grunting in smoky caves and loping across the tundra. Their vanishing from the fossil record some 40,000 years ago was a result of competition, along with a little interbreeding, with our own forebears. The story, as I received it then, retained something of the racially hierarchical views at large when the first fossilised bones were recovered in Germany, from near the Neander river, in 1856. Neanderthals were made extinct by an altogether smarter creature. It was inevitable — the clue was in the name: Homo sapiens. Neanderthals have come a long way