Christopher Seddon

My interest in human prehistory goes back to the early 1990s, when I read Jared Diamond’s classic "The Third Chimpanzee". Another book I read around that time was Olaf Stapledon’s future history, "Last and First Men", with its breath-taking vision of 18 successive human species, all very different from Homo sapiens yet, ultimately, sharing much of what makes us human. I was intrigued by the realisation that in reality, Homo sapiens are not the “First Men”. We were preceded by many other hominins (to use the technical term), including Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals, all now extinct. What would it have been like to have lived in a time when there was more than one human species in existence? What were these other people like and how did they live?

For all volumes of literature devoted to human evolution and archaeology, I felt that something was missing: a single-volume work covering the entire human past from the first apes to the first cities. I felt that such a book should be written for the non-specialist, while at the same time, sufficiently comprehensive in scope, rigorous in content, and well-referenced to be regarded as a serious contribution to the field.

"Humans: from the beginning" is now in its fourth edition, reflecting the unstinting pace of new discoveries. It is accompanied by the first two books in the Prehistoric Investigations series - "Prehistoric Investigations" and "In Search of", the latter also available as a series of 12,000-word short reads. These books are far shorter than "Humans: from the beginning" and are more aimed at the general reader, but are no less rigorous than the longer work.

"Astronomy: from the beginning" ties into the above, covering the history of astronomy from prehistoric times to Sir Isaac Newton.