To the OP, I would read this website in its entirety:
http://www.humanjourney.us/Excerpt from intro:
Introduction to The Human JourneyThe parent Institute of this project, The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, was founded on providing the basis of information available to the general public, primarily about what it means to be human: our capacities, our weaknesses, our potential. This project is under the direction of Robert Ornstein with contributions from associates of ISHK: Click to see the list of names.
We inaugurate this website – the story of our journey – with a long view of the deep background of our species, the forces that made us, some significant steps along the way, and a view to the future.
If we don’t know our history, social and biological, we can’t adapt fully to a world that we made.
Of course one website, especially one helmed by a small group of people in a small institute, can’t be comprehensive. We’re concentrating on a few areas where information isn’t represented well. And there is so much work published, streamed along the internet, that we’ve also recommended many of the most useful works in print, on the web and on disk.
Where to begin is always a question. Where, do we say, humanity began? And what made those early ancestors “human”? We’re not going to be overly precise in this since there isn’t much evidence, and it’s scattered throughout the world. We first present a brief overview of the ancestors of modern human beings with a set of illustrations and timelines so one can keep the complex history better in mind. We have reviewed selected works of particular relevance to our evolutionary journey. Throughout this website we have links to other websites, and book recommendations for those wishing to go further.
So its beginnings are not at the origin of the universe, or the billions of years of the development of life from the primordial slush (everyone says “primordial soup,” but that’s too appetizing). And, of course, there has been an explosion of interest in early human beings, with the development of genetic testing, carbon-dating and countless archaeological field workers. We are going to choose a few points of interest that are of the most importance to our past and future. Where there is superior work by a large organization, we’ll point you to it, and for all important work, we’ll provide a summary and illustrations as well as, of course, links.
The future depends on how we understand who we are, and how the past has made us so: what is unchanging about Human Nature, and what we CAN and MUST change to face a world that is far different from our ancestors’.
