Who We Are and How We Got Here

Huge advances in our ability to sequence ancient DNA have revolutionised what we know about the earliest human populations. David Reich explains the science, and tells the emerging story of our complex and often surprising ancestry - the extraordinary ancient migrations and mixtures of populations that have made us who we are.

The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises.

The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA.

What will we discover next?

Reich's book reads like notes from the frontline of the 'Ancient DNA Revolution' with all the spellbinding drama and intrigue that comes with such a huge transformation in our understanding of human history.

Autorentext

David Reich is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In 2015 he was highlighted by Nature magazine as one of "10 people who matter" in all of science for his role in transforming the field of ancient DNA "from niche pursuit to industrial process." In 2017 he was awarded the Dan David Prize in the Archaeological and Natural Sciences for the computational discovery of intermixing between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Inhalt

• Introduction

• Part I - The Deep History of Our Species

• 1: How the Genome Explains Who We Are

• 2: Interbreeding with Neanderthals

• 3: Ancient DNA Opens the Floodgates

• Part II - How We Got to Where We Are Today

• 4: Humanity's Ghosts

• 5: The Making of Modern Europe

• 6: The Collision that Formed India

• 7: In Search of American Ancestors

• 8: The Genomic Origins of East Asians

• 9: Rejoining Africa to the Human Story

• Part III -The Disruptive Genome

• 10: The Genomics of Inequality

• 11: The Genomics of Race and Identity

• 12: The Future of Ancient DNA