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The Powerful Primate: How Homo Sapiens Came to Dominate the Planet

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Why are humans the most feared predator in the world?

 

Over five million years ago, a group of primates discovered tools. Perhaps it was a large rock, ideal for cracking nuts, or a stick to extract honey from a beehive. Regardless, the future of our planet was changed forever.

 

Slowly, the primate evolved, abandoning the trees for solid ground and four legs for two – and the tools changed with it. Stones were sharpened, then attached to sticks, before stone gave way to bronze, iron, steel. With axes came agriculture and the first permanent human settlements, which soon became villages, towns and cities. Sticks and stones transformed into gunpowder, the printing press, combustion engine, electric light, antibiotics and finally the computer. Through sheer invention, Homo sapiens had conquered the planet.

 

Tracing the evolution of humans into the planet’s apex predator – the foremost ‘bullies of the natural world’ – Roland Ennos explores the miraculous and devastating power of human technology from the earliest tools to the present day.

Author: Ennos Roland
Publisher: ONEWORLD PUBLICATIONS
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9781836431305
Cover: Hardback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2026

Roland Ennos is a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull. He is the author of successful textbooks on plants, biomechanics and statistics, while his popular book Trees, which is published by the Natural History Museum, is now in its second edition in both the UK and US. He is an enthusiast for natural history, archaeology and early music, and lives with his partner and several hundred ferns near Hull, in East Yorkshire.

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