Paige Madison: Strange Creatures, Fester Einband

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Before Homo sapiens dominated the planet, there were many other kinds of human

Homo sapiens is the only remaining trace of an evolutionary story that stretches back millions of years. We think of this as the inevitable end to a neat march of progress, but in fact, things could easily have been different.

It turns out that modern humans are less unique - and until recently were less alone - than we had believed. In 2003, archaeologists in Indonesia found the fossilised remains of a small species of archaic human, which came to be known as the Hobbit. The three-foot-tall Hobbit used tools, hunted elephants, and travelled across oceans, challenging much of what we thought we knew about the past. We now know that humans once shared the planet with a great number of relatives - with many strange creatures - who could do a lot of the same things as we can.

In exploring these discoveries, Strange Creatures unravels the linear view of evolution, showing that our journey as humans to dominating the planet was much more complicated and messy than we think. It asks profound questions about what we can know about our history, what makes us human, and who gets to decide.