This new work by Marianne Sommer traces the different ways in which the human biological past has been studied, conceptualized and used over the past century. Like Sommer's earlier Bones and Ochre (2008), this book follows a tripartite structure, sequentially examining the ‘interpenetrating scientific, public, and popular work’ of Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), Julian Huxley (1887–1975) and Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (1922–). Rather than just provide straight biographies, these case studies are taken to correspond with changing research programmes, institutional structures, scientific objects (fossils, populations and genes), ideas of human phylogeny, forms of popularization and political ideologies. The book therefore embeds the biographical approach within wider social, cultural and institutional contexts, examining the changing means of knowing the human past and the entanglements between individuals, institutions and scientific practices.

The first case study is of Henry Fairfield Osborn, the imperious president of New York's American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) between 1908 and 1933. In Osborn we meet an elite figure who used natural science – particularly vertebrate palaeontology and palaeoanthropology – to legitimize conservative hierarchies, especially those based on race and gender. The characterization of Osborn will be familiar to many readers from the works of Ronald Rainger, Brian Regal and Clare Areson Clarke, although what does stand out in the focus on the impact of Osborn's popularization efforts, which has often been an open question in previous studies of his career. The chapters on the publication history and reception of Men of the Old Stone Age (1915) and on how Osborn's theories of human evolution were manifested in the AMNH's Hall of the Age of Man are particularly strong, showing the variety of understandings of the prehistoric human past in the period.

The discussion of Julian Huxley moves to the mid-twentieth century, and orients around Huxley's promotion of the evolutionary synthesis and ‘scientific humanism’. As well as examining Huxley's publications, Sommer shows how his organizational work at London Zoo and UNESCO was also crucial for working out and promoting his scientific and humanistic theories. Chapter 7, on the management of London Zoo, is a particular highlight. This shows how animals and sites in the zoo were presented to inculcate a sense of scientific humanism: architecture, guidebooks and interpretation provided lessons for the visitors, as they were encouraged to understand animals, environments and their own bodies, and thereby gain knowledge of evolution and biology, and take heed of warnings against human destructiveness.

Part Three, on the Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and the Genographic Project, examines the rise of molecular perspectives in biology and anthropology over the past few decades as a new means of knowing ‘history within’. In this section, we see how molecular genetics, combined with big data and commercial interests, have opened new narratives on the deep human past. These are shown to utilize novel research practices and vast quantities of information, but nevertheless still often categorize this data into frameworks informed by older biological and culturalist categories (indeed, Sommer argues that the presentation of human culture and biology in these more recent contexts is often more reductionist than the views of preceding figures, Huxley in particular). Particularly interesting here is Chapter 14, which examines the commoditization of genetic ancestry tests and the multiple ways they are engaged with by customers, ranging from the playful to the often tense and political.

The structure of the work is well suited to show both disjunctions and continuities across the twentieth century. Sommer demonstrates how a series of new scientific objects and practices were deployed, which successively claimed to be superior both to those of their predecessors and to other sciences of the time. New methods and objects were consistently presented as allowing deeper knowledge of the human past, but still created similar ‘epic’ narratives of deep origins and human nature with lessons for present society. Following a methodology informed by James Secord's model of ‘knowledge in transit’, Sommer also draws out the public dimensions of these researches. Relations between art, science, history, politics and literature are presented as crucial for constituting these narratives, with murals, illustrations, fictional works (or ‘fictional strategies’ within ostensibly factual books) being integral to both the discussion and the practice of science. The commonalities between the three case studies are also well argued, as are the shifts, particularly in their political and social programmes: conservative anti-degenerational discourse in the case of Osborn, a mid-twentieth-century managerial and technocratic liberalism in the case of Huxley, and a more democratic (yet nevertheless still strongly biologically rooted) pan-humanist concern in the case of Cavalli-Sforza.

This is a highly recommended book, which this short review can only give a brief account of. Each of the three sections could easily have been expanded into a stand-alone monograph – and if there was a flaw, it is that the amount of research and the denseness of the primary material means that certain strands of analysis could not be covered in the depth that they perhaps deserve. The book will nevertheless be of great interest to historians of the biological and anthropological sciences, and to those interested in the history of ideas of humanity and human difference and in the public and popular role of science in the twentieth century.