Frank Westerman

Frank Westerman is a Dutch journalist and literary nonfiction writer whose books combine travel, history, reportage, and scientific inquiry. We, Hominids begins with an ancient skull and follows the changing search for human origins across museums, excavation sites, laboratories, and competing schools of interpretation. Sam Garrett translated the book from Dutch. Head of Zeus issued the 2022 English edition, followed by Bloomsbury’s Apollo imprint. Westerman introduces fossil hunters and paleoanthropologists while asking how technology, colonial history, gender, and the assumptions of each era shape accounts of human ancestry. The book’s subtitle, An Anthropological Detective Story, accurately describes its method: evidence is examined, older conclusions are challenged, and certainty repeatedly gives way to revision. Garrett, an award-winning Dutch-to-English translator, carries Westerman’s mixture of essay, travelogue, and narrative investigation into English. We, Hominids belongs to a body of work in which Westerman uses a concrete object or historical puzzle to test larger stories societies tell about themselves.