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See more: An illustrated version of this article will be published within the next two weeks on our CultureLab books and arts blog

EIGHTEENTH-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus defined over 10,000 species during his career. Few gave him as little trouble as our own. Homo, nosce te ipsum – Man, know thyself – he wrote in 1735, presumably suggesting that no one could seriously confuse our species with another. Around a century after he penned this definition-cum-decree, the first Neanderthal fossils turned up. It was an early sign that human taxonomy was a lot more complicated than Linnaeus suspected.

In a sense, then, Ian Tattersall’s new book, Masters of the Planet, could be seen as a guide for the perplexed student of human origins. Tattersall, an emeritus curator of anthropology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, guides the reader through roughly 7 million years of our prehistory, carefully explaining how each of the few dozen species of hominin we have identified so far fit into our current picture of human evolution.

The walkthrough begins, appropriately enough, with walking – our distinctive upright stance was probably the earliest important hominin innovation – and ends with a beginning: the origin of language.

Along the way, Tattersall weaves a history of palaeoanthropology into the text, showing that though fossils may provide the bulk of the evidence for human origins, few of the details are set in stone. Even after 200 years of study, new finds can still yield surprising revelations. For example, a long-standing belief that new hominin species are a catalyst for technological innovation has been thoroughly debunked by fossil finds. The first stone tools are associated with small-brained australopiths that had lived in Africa for tens of thousands of years – they did not suddenly appear when the big-brained Homo genus arrived on the scene.

Of course, there is a downside to building a narrative on these ever-shifting sands. Tattersall’s book is a snapshot of our family tree as it looked around a year ago, and even in the brief interval since then the picture has changed in some dramatic ways. Most obviously, the 2-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba skeletons (pictured), found in South Africa in 2008, have been fully analysed. Now seen by some as a pivotal species that connects the two major hominin groups – the ape-like australopiths and the genus Homo – Tattersall banishes it to a small side branch in our evolutionary tree and makes only a fleeting mention in his text.

Some theories do stand the test of time, though. Recent genetic evidence shows Homo sapiens interbred both with Neanderthals and the enigmatic Denisovans of Siberia, blurring the boundaries between our species and some of its nearest relations.

But these sexual revelations should not distract from a deeper truth. The physical differences may be small, but Tattersall says that culturally and intellectually there is no contest: nearly 280 years on from Linnaeus, our species remains as distinct from all others as suggested by his curious taxonomic definition.