Are you part Neanderthal?

• BuyOrigin of Our Species by Chris Stringer
  Allen Lane, 333 pp, £20.00, June 2011, ISBN 978 1 84614 140 9

Lucky Chris Stringer, to have spent the last forty years immersed in new discoveries about the origin of our species. I don’t suppose that when he began his PhD research in 1970, setting off on a tour around the museums of Europe to measure as many skulls as he could get his hands on, he imagined that today he would need to be as conversant with mutations on the Y chromosome as he is with the shape of the pubic ramus (part of the pelvis). Or that we would now be able to establish the diet of our remote ancestors by analysing the chemistry of their bones, or to examine the structure of the minute inner ear bones of fossil skulls by means of computerised tomography. Or that it would now be possible to use luminescence techniques to date single grains of sand. Stringer’s mobile phone has more processing power than the multi-room University of Bristol computer he used in the 1970s to undertake one of the first applications of multivariate statistics on human fossils – something we would now expect undergraduates to do.