So You Think You’re Human? by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Oxford University Press, £14.99, ISBN 0192804170 Reviewed by Simon Ings
WE humans may like to think that we are unique, but our social skills, our inventiveness, our moral sense, our gift for languages, and more than 95 per cent of our genome are shared with other species. We are unique, “but not with any unique sort of uniqueness”.
In So You Think You’re Human? historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto describes how humanity first convinced itself of its own specialness, only to see that specialness whittled away on two fronts: by awkward findings from the natural world, and by bitter (broadly…
