3.0

This was an interesting overview of human evolution. Finlayson does not go into a lot of details about the various known species of early humans, but tends to talk about generalities and the big picture. It's a fairly short book and he covers a huge amount of prehistory, so he necessarily doesn't examine things in great depth. The thing that spoiled it for me was the author's tone when talking about other paleontologists; he's always griping that they're overusing the small amount of evidence they have to make sweeping declarations about what these species did and what they were like. Which may well be true, but he sounds so terribly stuck on himself and his theories that those parts were unpleasant to read.