Charles Darwin once wrote that the correct way to understand ourselves is by ‘Looking at Man, as a Naturalist would at any other Mammiferous animal’. Henry Gee has taken this advice to heart in a series of splendid books, culminating in The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. What do all animals (not just the mammiferous ones) have in common? They go extinct. So, he argues, will we – and before very long in terms of the timescales of evolution.

In order to set the scene for the decline of the human species, Gee gives us a brief overview of its rise. He covers ground that has been well trodden by others, but presents a familiar tale in absorbing fashion. His account is boosted by the relatively recent discovery of evidence of a frankly mind-blowing number of near-human rivals that were around on Earth until very recently. These range from the long-familiar Neanderthals of Europe to the Hobbit-like Homo floresiensis of southeast Asia. Gee points out that ‘species succeed when they have sparring partners’. But our sparring partners have gone, very probably as a result of the invasion by Homo sapiens of their territories.

This takeover is all the more remarkable because DNA evidence shows that at least once in human evolution the Homo sapiens population was reduced to a handful of individuals, at most a few thousand, whose descendants spread out from Africa to fill all available niches, leaving no room for Neanderthals,