The story called man. Frank Westerman's riveting new book

'Yes. I envisioned our trip differently. We were going to look for little people and big rats, dwarf elephants and giant storks, for what is considered normal and what is not.'

When Frank Westerman (1964) in the research for his book We, the human finally visits the Indonesian island of Flores in the company of his daughter, they come across the mass graves in which the dozens of communist islanders murdered by General Suharto's in 1966 are buried. On this same island, the body of a primordial human only a metre long was found in 2003, amid particularly large or small animal skeletons. What does this mirror world say about who we are and where we come from? Westerman wondered through this find, the trigger for this book.

Scavenger hunt

His quest leads from crashing aeroplanes, university guest lectures and excursions on the Maasvlakte via steppe horses, shark teeth and the urge to convert to an impressive finale on the island of Flores. The students with whom he began his quest may have long since left Westerman behind, but not what he taught them: with any quest, you can include its progression in your reportage as a common thread. 'Who knows, I could come up with a build-up in which making of and frame narrative coincided.'

Indeed, that structure, an aspect in which Westerman shows himself to be a master in all his books, forms the extraordinary skeleton of We, the human. Man may be an animal, but that does not mean it is indistinguishable from other species in nothing, Westerman shows. If homo sapiens is not the only species that does not just research its origins and ancestry, it is the only one that has narrative at its disposal to describe and interpret the world, in fiction or fact.

Doomed

And what Westerman also shows is that humans are by no means a better species than other animals - even hominids fight each other. Westerman's whirlwind tour leads to the conclusion that 'we are doomed to keep revising what we think we know. Only fiction can make reality seem right - temporarily. All other kinds of description will always have an open-endedness, which is always the beginning of something new. Version after version. Deletion, as a figure of style, is what distinguishes us as a species.'

That may certainly be true, engaging non-fiction like this is not only enriching on the road to greater knowledge, but also very successful as a written story.

Frank Westerman, We, the human, Querido Fosfor, €20