An important book... remarkably complete. For anyone interested in the subject of human origins, seldom has it been possible to find out so much between the covers of a popular work.

A masterful combination of careful scholarship and clever narrative... authoritative and delightful to read.

Wonderful reading, bringing vivacity to dusty boneyards... Impossible to put down.

At last! In their sane and lucid - and much needed - corrective to the torrent of overblown genetic rhetoric, Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin take the reader on a journey through humanity's seven ages

Bateson and Martin have delivered what others have claimed to provide: a solid, signposted road out of the trench war between nature and nurture

With a clarity of style that belies the complexity of the subject, Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin conduct us through the strategic highways adn tactical byways of individual life history

'Exhilarating'

'As enthralling in its own way as was Darwin's original'