While probably written for middle schoolers, I borrowed this for my 6 year old friend who was asking "how did humans start?"
Great tracking of changes over the millenia in primates who figure as the beginning steps to our physical presence, starting in the Cretaceous period/Paleocene. Sorry to mislead you with those time designations, but fortunately (for me) they only show up in the sidebars about specific fossil discoveries. I had a hard time conceptualizing the enormous timeframe, and associated names, which have no meaning or association for me outside of fossils. Very useful was a chart at the end of the book placing each of the hominin fossils in 7 separate spans of 1 million years each. It also includes some developmental lines which died out, to show we weren't a predetermined end.
Some positives, from my perspective, were mention that Ardipithecus males must have helped care for children and were not aggressive, based on their teeth; that there must have been teamwork and care of sick and elderly (based on healed broken bones, worn teeth, & arthritis), inclusion of herbal medicine use and spiritual beliefs (obviously not in any detail, but based on what was included in graves),. Another positive is mention (after so many pages that make it seem like our current civilizations are a peak development) that we are not done evolving.
Negatives for me were the words "altering nature" and "control" as the purpose, or method, of domestication. There may have been more "working together' happening than we use now. The book also missed the boat in not recognizing that garlic, mustard, and onions had medicinal qualities and were not just present as spices since they "had little nutritional value." ( )