ANCESTRAL ROOTS

Oxford archaeology and anthropology lecturer Timothy Clack is definitely a glass half-full person. Dripping wet after a downpour and packed like a sardine on the London Underground, he poses the question: “Is it just me or is everything shit?”

He looks at modern-day life and sees poverty, environmental destruction, violence and unhappiness.

To explain this, he goes back in our evolutionary history. Can the “selfish gene”, and our hunter-gatherer past be responsible?

It’s a very accessible book, packed with fascinating titbits, including a survey in which women approached men offering casual sex with no strings. Apparently, not many were interested.

It poses interesting questions, but I was left dissatisfied with the answers, finding it difficult to untangle statements like “All animals are machines interested exclusively in their continued existence”. Is that an analogy, or a statement of fact?

And there is a dreadful error at the start of Chapter 2, where he talks about ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ Aldous Huxley, confusing the 20th-century author of Brave New World with the Victorian Thomas Huxley, who famously told Bishop Wilberforce: “I would rather be descended from an ape than from an ignorant prelate,” or words to that effect.

It’s an easy slip for an absent-minded academic to make, even in the city which hosted the world’s most famous Darwin debate, but surely Macmillan Science publishers should have picked it up.