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- Hardcover: 256 pages ;
Dimensions (in inches): 0.92 x 9.46 x 6.36
- Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr;
; 1st edition (January 1, 2003)
- ISBN: 069111532X
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Book
Description
Around
60,000 years ago, a man--identical to us in all important
respects--lived in Africa. Every person alive today is descended
from him. How did this real-life Adam wind up father of us
all?
What
happened to the descendants of other men who lived at the same
time? And why, if modern humans share a single prehistoric
ancestor, do we come in so many sizes, shapes, and races?
Showing how the secrets about our
ancestors are hidden in our genetic code, Spencer Wells reveals
how developments in the cutting-edge science of population
genetics have made it possible to create a family tree for the
whole of humanity. We now know not only where our ancestors
lived but who they fought, loved, and influenced.
Informed by this new science, The
Journey of Man is replete with astonishing information.
Wells tells us that we can trace our origins back to a single
Adam and Eve, but that Eve came first by some 80,000
years.
We hear how the male Y-chromosome
has been used to trace the spread of humanity from Africa into
Eurasia, why differing racial types emerged when mountain ranges
split population groups, and that the San Bushmen of the
Kalahari have some of the oldest genetic markers in the
world.
We learn, finally with absolute
certainty, that Neanderthals are not our ancestors and that the
entire genetic diversity of Native Americans can be accounted
for by just ten individuals.
It is an enthralling, epic tour
through the history and development of early humankind--as well
as an accessible look at the analysis of human genetics that is
giving us definitive answers to questions we have asked for
centuries, questions now more compelling than ever.
Spencer
Wells traces human evolution back to our very first ancestor
in The Journey of Man. Along the way, he sums up the
explosive effect of new techniques in genetics on the field of
evolutionary biology and all available evidence from the
fossil record.
Wells's
seemingly sexist title is purposeful: he argues that the Y
chromosome gives us a unique opportunity to follow our
migratory heritage back to a sort of Adam, just as earlier
work in mitochondrial DNA allowed the identification of Eve,
mother of all Homo sapiens.
While his
descriptions of the advances made by such luminary scientists
as Richard Lewontin and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza can be dry,
Wells comes through with sparkling metaphors when it counts,
as when he compares genetic drift to a bouillabaisse recipe
handed down through a village's generations.
Though
finding our primal male is an exciting prospect, the real
revolution Wells describes is racial. Or rather, nonracial, as
he reiterates the scientific truth that our notions of what
makes us different from each other are purely cultural, not
based in biology.
The case
for an "out of Africa" scenario of human migration
is solid in this book, though Wells makes it clear when he is
hypothesizing anything controversial. Readers interested in a
fairly technical, but not overwhelming, summary of the
remarkable conclusions of 21st-century human evolutionary
biology will find The Journey of Man a perfect primer. --Therese
Littleton
From
the Inside Flap
"Written
with much verve, easy to read, and up-to-date on many important
developments." (Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Stanford
University, author of The History and Geography of Human
Genes and Genes, Peoples, and Languages.)
"Spencer Wells, whose genetic
work has contributed to our understanding of human prehistory,
has provided the lay reader with an account of the spread and
mixing of the human species from its origin in Africa that is
both scientifically accurate and accessible to the
nonscientist.
In
achieving that accessibility, he has not made the common error
of confusing simple explanations with simplistic ones. Most
important, Wells has the intellectual integrity, all too rare in
popularizations of science, to distinguish what is really known
from what is only speculation." (Richard Lewontin, Harvard
University, author of It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of
the Human Genome and Other Illusions.)
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