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In The Unstoppable Human Species, John Shea explains how the earliest humans achieved mastery over all but the most severe, biosphere-level, extinction threats. He explores how and why we humans owe our survival skills to our global geographic range, a diaspora that was achieved during prehistoric times. By developing and integrating a suite of Ancestral Survival Skills, humans overcame survival challenges better than other hominins, and settled in previously unoccupied habitats. But how did they do it? How did early humans endure long enough to become our ancestors? Shea places 'how did they survive?' questions front and centre in prehistory. Using an explicitly scientific, comparative, and hypothesis-testing approach, The Unstoppable Human Species critically examines much 'archaeological mythology' about prehistoric humans. Written in clear and engaging language, Shea's volume offers an original and thought-provoking perspective on human evolution. Moving beyond unproductive archaeological debates about prehistoric population movements, The Unstoppable Human Species generates new and interesting questions about human evolution.
1. Introduction
2. Hard evidence
3. Who are these people?
4. How did they get here?
5. Ancient Africans
6. Going east: Southern Asia
7. Down Under: Southeastern Asians and Sahulians
8. Neanderthal Country
9. Going North: early Eurasians
10. A brave new world: Pleistocene Americans
11. Movable feasts: food producers and migrations
12. Distant horizons and stars beckon: Oceanic islands and beyond
13. Unstoppable? Human extinction
14. Conclusion
John J. Shea is Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, New York. He is the author of Stone Tools in the Paleolithic and Neolithic Near East: A Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Stone Tools in Human Evolution: Behavioral Differences Among Technological Primates (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Prehistoric Stone Tools of Eastern Africa: A Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2020). A palaeoanthropologist, archaeologist, and an experienced practitioner of ancestral survival skills, Shea's demonstrations of stoneworking appear in numerous television documentaries and in the United States National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
