About forty thousand years ago, a new kind of hominid suddenly appeared in Europe and Western Asia. This was a creature unlike any of the other hominids then existing - borderline Homo sapiens, and the enigmatic Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.Seymour W. Itzkoff focuses in Triumph of the Intelligent on the evolutionary dynamics that led to the production of ever more intelligent humans, finally culminating in this sudden spasm of reconstruction. Itzkoff has followed the evidence carefully, attempting to stay within the assignable limits of evolutionary theory to produce a most-probable model of the dynamics that extruded this enigmatic creature, Homo sapiens sapiens.