A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

Hardcover

Published Sept. 23, 2016 by Orion Publishing Co, imusti.

ISBN:: 978-0-297-60937-7
OCLC Number:: 958941321

(1 review)

In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species--births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away--until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story--from 100,000 years ago to the present. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived will upend your thinking on Neanderthals, evolution, royalty, race, and even redheads. (For example, we now know that at least four human species once roamed the earth.) Plus, here is the remarkable, controversial story of how our genes made their way to the Americas--one that's still being written, as ever more of us have our DNA sequenced. …

In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species--births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away--until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story--from 100,000 years ago to the present. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived will upend your thinking on Neanderthals, evolution, royalty, race, and even redheads. (For example, we now know that at least four human species once roamed the earth.) Plus, here is the remarkable, controversial story of how our genes made their way to the Americas--one that's still being written, as ever more of us have our DNA sequenced. Rutherford closes with "A Short Introduction to the Future of Humankind," filled with provocative questions that we're on the cusp of answering: Are we still in the grasp of natural selection? Are we evolving for better or worse? And . . . where do we go from here?

7 editions

Michael Gouker reviewed A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

Review of 'A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Impressive in its scale, varies between serious science and humorous storytelling. I filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge and learned I need to know even more. The chapter on genes and race is a brilliantly made compelling argument with a hidden deeper comparison I only grasped later (I love when that happens): Rutherford first shows how widely diverse his roots are, how tangled and twisted everyone is in general, makes the case for how genes cluster among groups and how they mostly do not (with language syntax transformations etc), and then later on I realized he was also showing how two people of almost the same roots (Galton & Darwin) are so different.