Humans is the kind of book I would recommend to past, current, or prospective anthropology students. It’s definitely a bulky read, but it’s full of different perspective across the field of Physical Anthropology. I recommend reading by jumping around a bit, as there isn’t a linear narrative. I got more out of it by going topic to topic as I was interested.

This is a hefty tome, which I'm about to use as a guide to finding PhD advisors. It suggests not reading it cover to cover in the prelude, and yes that's the right thing to do. It's perfect for what I was doing (figuring out if this field is what I want from my life), but if you have no background, you're absolutely screwed. I encourage an interested reader to start with something easier and then attempt this collection. This should've been edited more heavily - people definitely felt free to express their thoughts, and it got pretty lengthy. It's just not super practical to read unless you're working in a related field. I love the one guy who cited his own work as a "game changer". Kudos to him for having the self-confidence to say that to everyone, but negative points for bashing religion without any nuance and overuse of parentheses.

Questions I like: advice, religion, amazing fact
Questions I dislike: time travel, are we special

4.5 stars for me, but know what you're getting into.

Humans edited by Sergio Almécija is a collection of responses of roughly 100 experts in the field of human evolution (anthropology, paleontology, genetics, behavior, etc), who respond to the same set of open-ended questions. Almécija, an assistant anthropology professor, asks these experts about their intellectual foundations (i.e. how they became interested in their field and who their influences are), opinions about human evolution past and present (e.g. game changing discoveries, predictions, amazing facts, etc), and advice to young intellectuals.

This casual survey of human evolution experts is unsurprisingly interesting given the obvious salience and impact of the topic. Unfortunately, I worry it may only be accessible to those who are already familiar with at least a portion of these experts or have some background in fields related to human evolution. Apart from the book's prelude, which provides a very condensed primer of human evolution 101, this book doesn't provide significant depth on any given body of work. It's a mixed and superficial grab bag that's often bogged down by ultracrepidarian cultural and political commentary, which Almécija's question set regrettably encourages. The format of the work is also fatiguingly repetitive. The work would be greatly improved if accompanied by some sort of quantitative or qualitative summary of the response and/or additional editorial remarks from Almécija.

On the plus side of things, Humans does provide exposure to a wide variety of different ideas in human evolution, which I guess is the main purpose of the effort. For the most part, it appears mostly mainstream ideas in these fields are represented. It would have been interesting to have elicited more heterodox and speculative models and compelled defense and attacks. There are also just domains that are neglected. So again, this isn't a great text for learning more or deeply about human evolution but it has some interesting content plus a novelty angle (peaking into the unvarnished thoughts of experts).

In justifying the book project, Almécija asserts that the book should function as an "encyclopedia of stories (and theories) about us," humanize research scientists, illustrate the broad relevance of human evolution, and provide "a new way to learn about human evolution." The work generally accomplishes the first two goal, though it is debatable whether the humanizing of research scientists will be appealing to reader given some of their grating perspectives. However, I would not recommend this book to reader looking to get a high-level perspective on human evolution. There are a lot of superior options in this regard some of which are recommended within Humans itself. Humans does indeed function reasonably well as a good suggested reading list. So if someone is inclined to pick up this book, I suggested flipping to your favorite researchers' responses and then go directly to the bibliography of readings.

Humans; Perspectives on Our Evolution from World Experts Edited by Sergio Almécija was not my cup of tea. Thank you for the arc but this was not for me!!

I am a Physical Anthropology professor and I’m telling you right now I will be recommending this book to my students. This is a wonderful compendium of thought from the greatest minds in the field and the framework for this is so unique. All of the questions used in this are questions I’m asked by my own students! Having this as a source for them to explore the answers by those who discovered the amazing things I teach them is such a boon. I will be buying a copy of this book as soon as it is published and telling my college library and my colleagues to get copies. Wonderful!

In my opinion, this book was ill-conceived from the start. The author asked countless anthropologists (and other scientists) a list of questions to which they could opt to respond. Still, after reading the replies from dozens of researchers, the topics became boring. The one thing I did come away with is that my regard for anthropology as a science was greatly diminished.