Strange Creations
Donna Kossy
£12.99 Feral House

HOW did human beings evolve? Where did we come from? These are questions almost everyone has toyed with at some time or other. Donna Kossy's Strange Creatures is about people who have spent rather more time on these problems than most, visiting some of the weirder reaches of the human imagination--the obsessions and cult religions that provide the raw material for lucrative books and profitable rackets.

Some of these theories about our origins are familiar. Take the belief that ancient astronauts colonised Earth or fertilised female hominids, thus spawning the human race. Or the phoney spiritualist Madame Blavatsky's "root races", a weird bunch headed by the Lemurians, who were 5 metres tall. Or the serpent people from Venus who bred humans as slaves. Creationists pop up, of course. There's also a section on the superficially attractive idea of aquatic apes, who took to the sea to escape predators and went back to the land later.

Kossy says, "I seek not to debunk strange ideas, but to present them as a necessary segment of the full spectrum of human thought." What a cop-out! At first passably interesting, these people and their ideas soon become tiresome.