Quite a while back I read Jared's excellent
Guns, Germs and Steel (which I recommend to everyone), this was his book before that and one of the chapters gives essentially the same arguments as in
Guns, Germs and Steel but in a much less developed form.
The book begins by discussing the genetic similarity between Chimps and Humans (which was news when the book was written), including pointing out that at 1.6% it's less that the difference between many species we include in the same Genus - it's from this he gets the 'Third Chimpanzee' in the title.
The rest of the book is essentially divided into three sections: the first discusses the evolution of Homo Sapiens, the second looks at human behaviour from an evolutionary point of view and the third discusses potential reasons for our demise.
The first section is excellent, and well written, although it (obviously) lacks where recent finds are concerned. He mostly concentrates on the recent end of human evolution and speculates about what he calls The Great Leap Forward that happened about 40,000 years ago and is where Homo Sapiens suddenly started making the distinctive Cro Magnon style of tools.
The second is more patchy, although it contains some fascinating research and insight it also contains some truly bizzare claims - most notably the chapter in which he tries to explain human indulgence in drugs as a form of sexual selection; very odd.
The third is rather depressing, as you might expect. Covering the truly staggering history of human genocide and environmental destruction. He puts the case for humans as the cause for the extinction of Megafauna very well, and traces many cases of human caused extinction well before modern technology. Most horrifying, perhaps, is his collection of historical Genocides he concentrates in particular on the American Settlers slaughter of the Indian population.
It's a very readable book, Jared is a good writer, but one is not left with the same sense of having been taken on an intellectual roller-coaster by a master than
Guns, Germs and Steel imparts.
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