Today, humans are alone on the planet. Homo sapiens is the only remaining trace of an evolutionary story that stretches back millions of years. To us, this seems normal. We tend to think of it - when we think of it at all - as the result of our big brains, our inventiveness, the end of a clear march of progress. But in fact, nothing was inevitable about our dominance; and things could so easily have been different.

Recent discoveries have created a paradigm shift in our understanding of human evolution. In 2003, paleoanthropologists in Indonesia found the fossilised remains of a small species of archaic human, which came to be known as the Hobbit. The more the fossils were scrutinised, the more they challenged everything we thought we knew about the past. The three-foot-tall Hobbit used tools, hunted elephants, and travelled across oceans. The Hobbit showed that modern humans are less unique - and until recently were less alone - than we had believed. We now know that humans once shared the planet with a great number of closely related species - with strange creatures beyond count - who could do many of the same things as we can.

In STRANGE CREATURES BEYOND COUNT, Paige explores this radical new understanding of humankind, asking profound questions about what we can really know about ourselves and our history, and who gets to decide.