Home: How Habitat Made Us Human, by John S Allen - book review: A scientific look at being human that fails to enlighten

Instead of delivering on the subtitle, the book is more “A Natural History of Home”

The search for “what made us human” has recently become something of a parlour game. We've had art (Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct), sexual selection (Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind) and the baby sling (yes, you read that right – Timothy Taylor's The Artificial Ape). Perhaps anyone can play?

Now here comes John S Allen with Home. Before we dive into this perhaps it's worth asking the question: is it possible that what made us human was “all of the above”, but that these innovations all lay downstream from something more fundamental? When the first proto-humans evolved around two-to-three million years ago the world was fabulously rich with resources that could be exploited by a creature with behavioural and mental flexibility.

Billions of years of geological churn had produced minerals neatly sifted, ready for us to use: flint, chalk, iron ore, oil, gas etc, even a few metals in their native state, and the natural world provided tough materials: wood, leather, fibres, bone. All it needed was for a creature to break with the rigid behavioural repertoire of all the other animals for a tide of innovation to begin. Whatever it was that made us human was whatever enabled this plasticity of behaviour. As Auden put it: “Finally, there came a creature/On whom the years could model any feature”.

But Home's subtitle is misleading: it never begins to tell us “how habitat made us human” in the way that the aforecited books do. What made us human is the result of a process of gene/culture co-evolution but that is to restate the question rather than give an answer. Some aspects of that co-evolution are known, others hinted at, but you won't find much about them here. The human brain grew by a factor of three times over 2.5-3 million years: what drove that huge growth?

Instead of delivering on the subtitle, the book is more “A Natural History of Home”. I can imagine a Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space) making something of that, but Allen has an itch he can't scratch properly. One chapter is literally about home improvement: “Most people seek home improvement by visiting stores such as Ikea...”

“In looking at home from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective, I have tried to get at something more universal,” he writes in the Epilogue. Evolutionary perspective? There is a chapter of standard textbook stuff on human evolution up to Homo erectus (the homes of which are somewhat lost to us), 1.8 million years ago, followed by a chapter on Neanderthals all about their burial practices. Well, a cemetery is not a home, to coin a phrase we've never needed before.

Basic Books, £19.99. Order for £17.99 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030