Sublime

Homo sapiens appartient lui aussi à une famille. Un fait banal, qui a été l’un des secrets les mieux gardés de l’histoire. Homo sapiens a longtemps préféré se croire à part des autres animaux : un orphelin sans famille, privé de frères et sœurs et de cousins et, surtout, sans parents. Or, ce n’est pas le cas. Qu’on le veuille ou non, nous sommes me

He held center stage through the 1850s; he had overshadowed them all—Silliman, Dana, Henry, Hall, Gray. The voice of Charles Darwin was still to be heard.

It turned out that 1–4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.

I was expecting a wealth of amateur historians, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the fur trade and fresh insights to borrow, but the first twenty people I talked to had never heard of Joe Walker. Reading history books, it turned out, was not a popular

These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships and competed for status and power – but so did chimpanzees, baboons and elephants. There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write histo

It also seems likely that the arrival of Homo sapiens led to the rapid extinction of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe and Asia for around ten thousand years, roughly forty thousand to fifty thousand years ago. The Neanderthals went extinct around forty thousand years ago, but