Reconstruction of Australopithecus afarensis
Frank Nowikowski/Alamy
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
This month I’m looking at the big picture of how and why hominins like us evolved. This is one of the bigger questions we can ask about human evolution. How come we’re like this? Animal life had been trucking along on Earth for over half a billion years, without throwing up anything quite like Homo sapiens: a bunch…