Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Review

When our distant ape ancestors got together and decided one day, roughly 10 million years ago, that they should evolve into humans, did they have an instruction manual that told them which two things to rub together to get there? No! They had to put pretty much everything they encountered into their mouths, one at a time, to figure out which was tasty and which was deadly poison. There was a lot of hard work, repetition, and death that turned out to be completely unnecessary in hindsight. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey does its very best to recreate much of that maddening blindness and futility and some of the associated sense of discovery in a beautiful prehistoric world, becoming an apt metaphor in the process.

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