Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Human beings have always felt a need to understand our origins. In premodern times we had to rely upon myths and traditions handed down by our ancestors. In the West, we are mostly familiar with the stories in the Bible but of course other peoples and cultures had their own myths about the creation of the universe and humanity. Beginning around the time of the French and American revolutions, archaeology started to assist in explaining the distant past. Ancient languages were deciphered, literatures were compared and scholars were able to speculate on the nature of human cultures both before and after the invention of writing. However, the technologies which allow ancient human genomes to reveal the origins and migrations of peoples are, as Dr. Reich describes, comparable to the invention of the microscope in the amount of light that can be shed on human history and prehistory. While still in its infancy as a science, the genomic research performed by Dr. Reich and his colleagues has already upended theories of human origins from Europe to India with scientifically grounded accounts. The emphasis here is on scientific, in that, unlike debates over literary composition of ancient texts, the accounts of history derived from the genome are falsifiable. One could always sequence the genome of another ancient human and provide evidence that, say, Dr. Reich’s account of a population from the Eurasian steppe invading India around the time of the Vedic writings is not supported. One can read this book simply for its insights into prehistory as it supplies theories, some provisional, to account for all the major peoples of the world: European, South Asian, East Asian, Polynesian, African and Native Americans from North and South America. But one can also read the book for the excitement at the birth of a new science that promises to be as revelatory as the observations from satellites scanning distant galaxies for the origins of dark matter. Not since reading The Double Helix by James Watson, one of the discovers of DNA, have I been so captivated by the story of a new branch of knowledge coming into being. The book is written with a minimum of jargon and is accessible to the scientific laymen. Because of its captivating story and style I would strongly recommend this book to all mature readers. Just as understanding Darwinian evolution is essential to understanding human nature, so too understanding the prehistory of humanity as revealed by our genome will become an essential part of our global modern civilization’s self understanding.