Mapping Human History: Discovering Our Past Through Our Genes Book

As the subtitle of Mapping Human History tells us, Steve Olson's fascinating new book is about Discovering the Past through our Genes. One of the few things to separate us humans from the chimps is our curiosity about ourselves and our history. Until very recently we have been frustrated by our own prehistoric ancestors’ failure to record where exactly they came from or where they were going to. The archaeological record only provides the bare bones and stones of the story. Thanks, however, to the modern scientific miracle of biomolecular gene mapping, we can now track the movements of our ancestors and relatives in surprising detail. Just as forensic science can catch out an American president's peccadillo with an intern, so can we catch out our predecessors who left genetic evidence of the seed they scattered as they migrated around the Earth. We all carry our family history with us in almost every cell of our bodies. As a professional science journalist who has worked for the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Genomic Research in Washington DC, Olson is very well placed to communicate the scientific details of this emerging story in an eminently readable form for the general reader. Mapping Human History is a well-researched exploration (with full notes of sources and index) of our current understanding of the diaspora of modern humans out of Africa, a mere 100,000 or so years ago. As he is at pains to point out, every single one of the six billion people on the planet today is descended from the small group of anatomically modern humans who once lived in eastern Africa--we are all Africans despite the superficial differences which racists try to make a meal of. While telling the remarkable stories of the travels of different populations around the world, which have resulted in the huge range of cultural differences, Olson constantly reminds us of our biological connectedness one with another.--Douglas PalmerRead More