[haberman]

Can you recommend a good primer on what we know about evolution and the history of our species, and the supporting evidence?

I thought The Selfish Gene would be this, but it seemed primarily focused on more abstract/philosophical questions, like group selection vs. gene selection. I'm more interested in concrete information about what our DNA and the fossil record can credibly establish. I want to know what facts are indisputably known, and which are more speculative.

[sigil]

It sounds like there's precious little certainty to be had [1]:

So far, nobody has recovered ancient DNA from archaic human skeletal remains in Africa. The 2000-year-old Ballito Bay boy is not the oldest, but there are no DNA results from truly archaic specimens, like the Kabwe skull from Zambia. As a result, we don’t have the kind of record within Africa that geneticists have built for Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia...

Morphology does not tell the story of modern human origins...Did short faces and rounded braincases really make a difference to the survival and success of modern humans? Maybe they were chance legacies of the population that gave rise to our gene pool. We don’t know.

Conclusion:

We have to discover more fossils. That’s the way that we will start to solve these new problems and shed light on old mysteries.

[1] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-orig... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234903

[burfog]

Short faces and rounded braincases would affect the surface-to-volume ratio. This would help with cold-weather survival.

[bobcostas55]

It's not out until March, but _Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past_ sounds like what you're looking for.

[doctoboggan]

It might not be what you were thinking, but the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt has 2 very good videos on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiQaabX3_o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs

His stuff is well sourced and generally reliable.