John Gribbin & Jeremy Cherfas. The First Chimpanzee (2001)

John Gribbin & Jeremy Cherfas. The First Chimpanzee (2001)  I read this book twice. The ratings indicate that I mellowed some. I've combined them, and made some light edits. 2026-08-24

First review (2004):  The authors contend that humans evolved before chimps, i.e., that chimps are more recent derivatives of the common ancestor. They outline their case in the first couple of chapters, and that’s really all they need: I’m convinced.

     At least I’m convinced that it’s a tenable theory. I can’t judge its soundness, but the rest of the book seems to me to be mostly padding, so I haven’t read it. The style is workmanlike, which means it doesn’t engage, and almost all the information is old news, some of it so old that it’s no longer useful. For example, the authors persist in using the blueprint metaphor for the genome, although this metaphor does nothing to help their case and in fact raises questions they haven’t addressed. Maybe they address them later, but the outline of their case gives no hint of this. I’m surprised at the date of the book: by 2001 many of the notions presented by Gribbin and Cherfas were outdated. * 

Second Review (2007) An extended (and unnecessarily long IMO) argument that humans, chimps, and gorillas shared a common hominid ancestor some 3 to 4 M years ago. In other words, the chimp-gorilla line did not split from the human line before the evolution of hominids, but afterwards. That would make chimps and gorillas hominids. This hypothesis was developed by Sarich and Wilson in the late 1960s, when the molecular clock was first calibrated.
     The argument rests on molecular biology, and the development of the molecular clock. It’s been shown that DNA/RNA and hence proteins evolve at surprisingly steady rates. This enables the calculation not of dates but of ratios of time spans, and hence of the relative positions of divergence points in the evolutionary trees of related species. Fossil evidence has calibrated the molecular clock pretty accurately for non-human genera, and for vertebrates and chordates generally, so that its application to the primate group should be a no-brainer. However, it seems that paleontologists don’t like to have their speculations checked by objective evidence from a different discipline. Even amongst themselves, they get rather testy when a colleague finds a fossil that requires “re-evaluation” of existing guesses.
     Along the way, Gribbin and Cherfas provide reams of more or less interesting data, the most important of which is that the sum total of all humanoid fossils could be laid out on a dining room table. Most of them are teeth.
     Insofar as I can judge the evidence, I go with Gribbin and Cherfas. Well enough written, but somewhat whingey in the final chapters, where they discuss the reception of the Sarich-Wilson hypothesis **½ (2007)