Book Review: The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals by Silvana Condemi

This is a decidedly odd book. Was there a "secret" hominid that the world overlooked? While the Neanderthals get all the limelight, perhaps there was another lost species of human lurking in the background. The science seems settled - yes there was - so this book tells us how scientists reached that conclusion.

Except, it isn't really clear who this book is aimed at. Part of it is very casually written - a hint of pop science and a healthy dollop of the personal lives of the scientists. The other part is a rather dense and unforgiving science book which is slightly beyond casual readers like me.

I was suddenly bombarded with sentences about the "tiny epiphysis (tip) of the distal phalanx" and how "the famous Denisova 3, was found in a stratigraphic position" and that "Exogenous DNA comes from the numerous necrophagous organisms that attack the remains after death."

There's very little ramp-up to the science and it suffers from the "Average Familiarity Fallacy" that non-experts have a working understand of the intricacies of a complex field.

It is interesting, and parts of it are downright fascinating:

The team of researchers found that the site’s hunter-gatherers cooked giant carp of up to 6.5 feet (2 m) long, which they caught in a nearby lake. Several burnt flint microartifacts suggest they made fires. In the same layers as the burnt flints, the researchers collected around 40,000 pharyngeal teeth, carp teeth that are found at the bottom of their mouths. These teeth are all that remain of the carp, as heat softens the cartilaginous bones of fish and eradicates the possibility of their preservation. The discovery of these teeth suggests the fish were cooked at a controlled temperature rather than being grilled.

Even if we don’t know how the occupants of GBY made their fires, we do know that they stewed fish. Using X-ray diffraction, researchers established that the thermal expansion of the nanocrystals that make up the tooth enamel suggests their exposure to low to moderate heat: specifically, lower than 932°F (500°C), whereas a wood fire produces temperatures of between 1,472°F and 1,832°F (800°C and 1,000°C). It’s likely that prehistoric people cooked carp en papillote, probably by burying them near their fires after wrapping them in giant water lily leaves collected from the nearby lake.

I mean! Wow! That's some brilliant detective work.

Sadly, there is quite a lot of dusty old bones to wade through before you hit the good stuff. In the end, I found myself confused as to how different Neanderthals and Denisovans actually were.

The (pre-release) copy of the eBook commits the error of relegating all the images to the back. Several paragraphs are crying out for immediately viewable illustrations to help make sense of the text.

If you have a reasonable familiarity with palaeontology you'll probably enjoy this greatly - but it is a little too taxing for those of us with less evolved brains.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.