Darwin's Children

From Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Frances FitzGerald, a captivating journey through six million years of human evolution—and the brilliant, stubborn, and all-too-human researchers who pieced the story of our ancient origins together.

From the first discovery of Neanderthal bones in a German quarry to today’s extraction of DNA from ancient “ghost populations,” scientists have been piecing together the story of human evolution since the end of the 18th century. But as Frances FitzGerald reveals, the story of these scientists themselves—the passionate, brilliant, and often contentious researchers who have dedicated their lives to understanding our origins—is just as interesting, and perhaps even more revealing.

Darwin’s Children traces this remarkable history through the people who shaped it: the 19th century plowmen digging up stone tools in the British countryside; the Christians who struggled to accept evidence that humans descended from apes; the fossil hunters who spent decades searching empty African deserts for proof of their theories; and the geneticists who unlocked the secrets of interbreeding between ancient human species. At every turn, their work sparked intense debate—not just about evidence and interpretation, but about what it means to be human.

The story unfolds through the researchers themselves—those who insisted humans could never have descended from apes, those who faked evidence to prove their theories, those who refused to believe in Neanderthals, and those whose discoveries upended everything we thought we knew. As genetic evidence reveals an increasingly complex picture of human origins—with multiple species interbreeding and evolving simultaneously—FitzGerald shows how each generation’s theories reflected their own time and culture. In the end, the search for our origins reveals as much about ourselves as it does about our ancestors.