A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution

Changes in the environment drive evolution, and evidence suggests that our ancestors evolved to use cultural adaptations to survive environmental fluctuations of great severity. In A Story of Us, Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson explain the evidence and ideas that provide an account of how they coped, using short descriptive stories to illustrate life at different stages of our evolutionary history.

Lesley Newson, Research Associate, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, Peter Richerson, Distinguished Professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis

Lesley Newson is Research Associate at the University of California, Davis. Her first career was as a science communicator. She was a writer and producer of radio and television science programs for the BBC and has also written a number of books, including Devastation! the World's Worst Natural Disasters (DK Publishing, 1998) and All About People (Scholastic, 1995). In her mid-40s, her growing interest in human evolution caused her to try a career change. In 2002, she received a PhD for her investigation of potential evolutionary explanations for the recent rapid change in people's beliefs about childbearing. This work led to her meeting, collaborating with, and eventually marrying her co-author. She continues to study the evolution of modern culture today.

Peter J. Richerson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. During his first career, he studied the ecology of lakes, but he also became increasingly interested in human evolution. Beginning in the 1970s, he and colleague Rob Boyd were among the scholars who laid the foundation of cultural evolutionary theory. This work has been hugely influential in the development of "dual-inheritance theory," which looks at how genes and culture co-evolve. His books with Rob Boyd include Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) and Not by Genes Alone (2005) (University of Chicago Press, 2005). His current research is focused on cultural evolution, the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture.