Quotes from Stephen Oppenheimer

Were they like Star Trek's Star-Base 9, polyglot

Since bears and coastal humans have an omnivorous diet that overlaps considerably, the bear story may be pointing us to the route that could have been taken by humans 12,000–15,000 years ago.

We differ from other large mammals, but not much from rodents, in the great variety of habitats we now occupy and in the population densities we have achieved. In

In Africa by 1.2 million years ago the brains of Homo rhodesiense had grown to within 6 per cent of the volume of modern humans. Around 300,000 years ago, the climate-driven brain-growth machine reached a plateau of size 11 per cent above that of today's people. Since then our brains and bodies have got smaller. The

Perhaps, as with cars, there was a law of diminishing evolutionary return, and it was no longer economical to build models with ever larger engines.

Genetic palaeontology brings clarity to a field of near-medieval confusion. The

Admittedly there could have been interbreeding between archaic and modern Homo sapiens, but there is no convincing evidence for this in our male and female gene lines. So

If one were to rely solely on radiocarbon dating, the whole human world would seem to have started just over 40,000 years ago. Only

A multidisciplinary synthesis is difficult enough if the disciplines are singing different songs, but if they are in different auditoriums . . .

It turns out that, far from the world being a common genetic melting pot with massive to-and-fro prehistoric movements and mixings, the majority of the members of the modern human diaspora have conservatively stayed put in the colonies their ancestors first established. They