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Branching Out

Could multiple species of early hominids have existed side by side? By Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey H. Schwartz. his undeniably informative and beautifully illustrated book has pretensions to be more. It aspires to be iconoclastic and revolutionary -- what the publisher calls a ''radical reinterpretation.'' The straw man that the authors enthusiastically demolish, and repeatedly attribute to the ornithologist Ernst Mayr and the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, is the idea that fossil hominids are arranged in an evolutionary order, each one evolving into the next until the penultimate one finally turns into us. It would follow from this view -- if anybody held it in the extreme form energetically savaged by Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey H. Schwartz in ''Extinct Humans'' -- that you need only know how old a fossil is to classify it: if it's a million years old it must be Homo erectus. Their own view is that there have been more than 15 species of humans, many of which coexisted with one another, and all of which are now extinct except Homo sapiens.

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