Viking snaps up Higham's take on archaeological discoveries about humanity

Viking will publish a book about the species of humans 50,000 years ago and how the genetic trajectory affects our health today by archaeological scientist Tom Higham.

World English rights were acquired to The World Before Us from Joanna Swainson at Hardman & Swainson. It will be published in hardback in spring 2021.

“50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world,” the synopsis reads. “There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, who occupied Europe, the Near East and parts of Eurasia; the enigmatic Homo floresiensis, or ‘Hobbits’, from the island of Flores; and Homo luzonesis, found in the Philippines, and even more diminutive than the Hobbits at less than four feet high. And then there are the Denisovans, discovered thanks to cutting-edge science in 2010 in a cave in Siberia, named after a local monk called Dennis.”

In The World Before Us, Oxford professor Higham follows the scientific and technological advancements – in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example – that “allowed each of these discoveries to be made and enabled us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived,” said Viking.

“The implications of these – and future – discoveries for us today are profound. We know which human groups today share which ancestors’ genes, and the impact this has; for example, genes from Denisovans explain why some people cope better with living at high altitude, and Type 2 Diabetes may have been an evolutionary advantage for Neanderthals, who, in times of nutritional stress, may have needed to retain more blood sugar than their 21st century Homo sapiens-descendants.”

Higham is professor of archaeological science at the University of Oxford and director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. He has worked on the remains of Richard III, the Elephant Man and Egyptian pharaohs. Since 2010 he has researched a new species of human, the Denisovans. This is his first trade book.

Viking's assistant editor Connor Brown said: “Fascinating on, among many other things, how we became the only humans on Earth and what it is like to be the person making a world-changing breakthrough in science, this is an expansive and peerlessly authoritative work with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves."

Higham added: “I want to convey to the reader the sheer excitement of discovery in the science of human evolution, whether that is in the laboratory or at the point of a trowel in an archaeological site. In the last two decades our understanding of who we are and how we evolved to become the last kind of human on Earth has been revolutionised by new scientific methods and archaeological discoveries. In this book I want to tell these stories first-hand from the perspective of the actual researchers doing the work. I also want to describe the different groups of humans we now know inhabited Earth 50,000 years ago, how they were discovered, how they lived, and finally how they disappeared from the world.”