A Letter to Layla: Travels to our deep past and near future by Ramona Koval

A Letter to Layla is very much a book of our times. Its impetus lies in our rapidly changing climate, and it concludes with the unexpected impact of Covid-19. In between, the book explores both our distant past and our future.

Well known for her past career as an ABC broadcaster, Ramona Koval turns her talent for in-depth interviews and her training in science into an engaging and illuminating book. Combining interviews with her own research, Koval asks what it means to be human and if our origin sheds light on our capacity to navigate a troubling and problematic future.

It’s difficult to know where to start with such a broad question, but Koval begins with our nearest relatives: the chimpanzees. She illustrates the tensions between those who wish to see humans (and therefore primates) as something special and those who see every species as distinctive in its own right, with equal standing. In one interview, Koval suggests that humans might have extra skills that other apes don’t have, prompting a defensive response that the other apes have extra skills that we don’t either.

The tendency to see other apes as some kind of primitive version of ourselves is deep-seated: as if they were ancestors rather than fourth cousins many times removed. Other apes offer an insight into our shared family history, but tell us no more about our ancestors than we reveal about theirs. Koval recalls the old Irish joke about someone asking for directions and being told, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.’ Knowing the right question is half the challenge.

Koval moves on to the fossil record whose traces tell us much about our own physical evolution but less about our social and behavioural adaptations. It’s easy to forget just how variable behaviour is compared to anatomy. Behaviour is the flexible front line of adaptation, dragging reluctant anatomical change behind it.

Human fossils can tell us when our ancestors stood on two legs and when their brains enlarged, but they don’t tell us when they developed language or what they thought. Fossils can only hint at major social developments. Koval describes an eroded and nearly toothless Homo erectus jaw as evidence of emerging human sociality. Without teeth, he must have been cared for by others to survive.

The genetic record is similarly erratic, offering tantalising possibilities, like the mysterious Denisovans, whose traces remain in our genetic code but are otherwise known only from one little finger and some teeth. How did we lose all our Homo cousins over just a few hundred thousand years? What happened to the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and the ‘hobbits’? Will we become, like the coelacanth fish or the gingko trees, the last long-lived relic of a once great lineage, or are we just the brief final flash of an unsuccessful evolutionary experiment?

Koval turns to art for an insight into the human psyche, illuminating a dark and intriguing corner of our history. Here we can see the stories told by our ancestors in their own images. But stories are given meaning as much by the receiver as by the creator. The ancient cave art of Chauvet Pont-d’Arc, like that of Indonesia or Australia, remains as mysterious as it is beautiful.

Koval does a fine job of revealing the complexities and conflicts inherent in using such patchy data to reconstruct a plausible prehistory for our species. The divisions between disciplines are as wide as the gulf between a layperson’s quest for concrete answers and a scientist’s unwillingness to give them. While the interview technique allows personal and individual insights, it also feels a little thin at times, like listening to just one part of an orchestral symphony. The collaborative, communal advancement of scientific knowledge is difficult to capture in this form.

If Koval was occasionally frustrated by the reluctance of scientists to elaborate on matters outside their sphere of expertise, she must have been startled by the lack of caution about humanity’s future exhibited by some of those she interviewed. I’m not entirely convinced that those overtly pursuing immortality or cryogenesis are the most informative people to ask about the future. I might have preferred more staid sources – like science fiction writers or even futurists.

From eugenics and genetic engineering to robotics and artificial intelligence, Koval explores the potential of what it means to create the human or to move beyond it. Mark Sagar’s BabyX avoiding the uncanny by mimicking a baby’s facial cues and interactions is particularly compelling, even if it does flow seamlessly and disturbingly into robotic warfare.

Koval uses a similarly engaging device in her own book, by including intermittent interactions with her granddaughter, the titular Layla. Her bond with Layla provides the nexus around which Koval builds her case for the importance of human social connections, as well as humorous light relief and pearls of infant wisdom. In the end, our humanity depends on our ability to empathise with and learn from others.

What we will learn from the Covid-19 pandemic is anyone’s guess. But, like Ramona Koval’s book, our current circumstances are compelling us to stare the future in the face, and to reconsider not only who we are as humans but who we need to be to survive.