David W. Tollen's Blog, page 11

A Chance to Win a Paperback Copy of The Jericho River

Happy New Year! Rockin’ Book Reviews, a great book site, is doing a contest/giveaway for a paperback copy of my book, The Jericho River, A Novel About the History of Western Civilization. It’s open to U.S. residents and runs until January 13, 2016. If you’d like to enter, click here and scroll down to the white giveaway box (“Physical Copy of The Jericho River”).

That same page has an author interview and a great review of the book, both by Lu Ann Worley.

This is How to Make History Interesting

Today, History News Network published my op-ed: This is How to Make History Interesting. It includes information gleaned from this blog on what interests history readers. Please check it out.

Midwest Book Reviews x2

Here’s a first, as my publicist puts it. Midwest Book Reviews has done a second review of The Jericho River (for the second edition):

Impressively well written and an exceptionally entertaining read from beginning to end, “The Jericho River” is enhanced with the inclusion of twenty-six vivid historical illustrations and three maps. An inherently fascinating and absorbing novel, “The Jericho Review” is highly recommended and certain to be an enduringly popular addition to community and academic library original fiction collections.

(Click here to see the page.)

Captive aboard the Dead Valencia

We recently loaned GeekNative.com an excerpt from The Jericho River. It’s a fun excerpt, and GeekNative is a great site, so please check it out if you get a chance:

Captive aboard the Dead Valencia, from The Jericho River

Black Europeans, Short Spaniards, Tall Swedes, Milk, and Recent Human Evolution

During the past year, genetic studies have revealed some surprises about European prehistory. One study in particular analyzed DNA from 230 skeletons, dating from 6600 B.C. to around 300 B.C. It tells us that Europeans evolved many familiar traits far more recently than we’d thought.

It’s a shame the paleolithic artist of this buffalo didn’t think to paint family and friends instead.

Here are three of the studies’ key discoveries:

Mysterious Height Divergence: The height of Europeans seems to have taken an odd turn around the time agriculture arrived — about 6000 B.C. Northern Europeans started getting taller, while southern Europeans started getting shorter. No one knows why or what role farming played, if any. (Tall migrants from the Russian steppes boosted northern height, but these Yamnaya people didn’t arrive until around 2800 B.C., more than 3,000 years after the trend began.)
Recent Black Europeans: Scientists have long believed Europe’s first Homo sapiens had dark skin, like their African forebears. These immigrants began evolving light skin shortly after their arrival, 45,000 years ago — according to the theory — to increase sun absorption in northern lands. Humans need sunlight to produce vitamin D, which protects bones from rickets. Recent analysis, however, reveals that, except in the far north, Europeans still had dark skin as late as 7000 B.C., more than 35,000 years after they arrived. Scientists now think that most of Europe’s hunter-gatherers got enough vitamin D from meat, even with limited sunlight. Instead, it was farming that most decisively led to pale Europeans, starting tens of thousands of years after the initial migration. Prehistoric farmers ate less meat than hunter-gatherers, so presumably they lost the vitamin D supplement they needed to make up for limited sunlight — and grew paler to compensate. (Lighter-skinned Middle Easterners began migrating to Europe around the same time, but scientists think natural selection played a far larger role than migration. Incidentally, my last post, The Backflow into Africa , mentions these Middle Eastern migrants, in the last paragraph.)
Recent Rise of Lactose Tolerance: Milk evolved to feed babies, and for most of prehistory, few or no adults could digest it. But most modern European adults can digest milk. Anthropologists have long thought lactose tolerance spread when farming began in Europe, around 6000 B.C., as cow’s milk and cheese offered new sources of calories. But recent analysis tell us European lactose tolerance didn’t spread until 4,000 years later, around 2000 B.C. No one knows why lactose tolerance appeared then, or why it didn’t appear earlier.

Europeans probably aren’t the only humans bearing the genetic markers of recent evolution. I suspect more exciting discoveries lie in our near future.

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SOURCES:

Photo: Bison from the great hall of polychromes, Altamira cave, Spain
Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians , Nature (2015)
How Europeans evolved white skin , Science (2015)

© 2015 by David W. Tollen. All rights reserved.

The Backflow into Africa

A 19th Century nobleman of Ethiopia — one of the lands most impacted by the backflow

We all know Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and then spread across the rest of the world. But scientists have recently demonstrated that, around 1000 B.C., an astoundingly large group came back. This “backflow” brought so many people from Eurasia that today’s East Africans get as much as 25% of their genes from Middle Eastern ancestors. In other words, about a quarter of their ancestors were Middle Eastern migrants. And even in far Western and Southern Africa, more than 3,000 miles away, the people get at least 5% of their genes from backflow migrants.

We know because of a genetic study on a man who died in East Africa around 2500 B.C. His genes tells us what the pre-backflow genome looked like, so scientists can compare that population to modern Africans.

What could have caused such vast numbers to move? No one knows.

Interestingly, the backflow migrants were related to the population that had migrated in large numbers from the Middle East to Europe around 5,000 B.C., bringing farming with them. So Europeans and Africans share the genes of these restless Middle Easterners — particularly Europeans on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, which has been partly isolated from the rest of the world for millennia and so preserves much of its original migrants’ genome.

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Illustration: A Nobleman of Tigre, T. Lefebvre and others, 1849

© 2015 by David W. Tollen. All rights reserved.

Yet Another Great Review for The Jericho River

The Jericho River just got a very thoughtful review and recommendation on NerdsOnEarth.com — penned by Michael Adkins. Here are some highlights:

Jason’s own history and his maturation is wonderfully done. He is, perhaps, my favorite YA protagonist to date as far as those two elements are concerned.

I was a little worried going in that the historical elements would eclipse all else …. But Tollen strikes a solid balance in my opinion. You … never once get the sense that you’re reading a text book or anything akin to one.


Another of Tollen’s books, Secrets of Hominea, is advertised just inside the rear cover, and I am inclined to pick it up when it releases based on his careful work between the covers of The Jericho River.

Check out the review — and a great website — if you get a chance!

As Mr. Adkins points out, you can buy The Jericho River in paperback or e-book at Amazon — and wherever books are sold.

Terrorists and Barbarians

Vive la France

In the wake of terrorist attacks like Friday’s mass killings in Paris, we often call our enemies “barbarians.” They are not. Barbarians like the Vikings, Huns, and Xiongnu lived on the fringes of civilization and preyed on their richer and more settled neighbors. But they did not hate their victims. If fact, they often admired them and adopted their ways. The barbarians were not intolerant. Nor were they even immoral by the standards of their times, since few pre-modern societies condemned violence against outsiders. Barbarian raiders were just opportunists; looting and pillaging offered their fastest route to wealth.

Terrorism is altogether different. It’s a product of civilization, which in the last few centuries has bred ideologies so intolerant they would have baffled the barbarians and even the civilized people of earlier times. Intolerance has always played a role in the history of civilization, but it only grew into a major force during modern centuries — ironically just when the barbarian threat faded away, due to the power of artillery and other civilized weapons. Mass intolerance erupted across Europe during the 16th and 17th Centuries, leading to millions of deaths in wars over the proper interpretation of Christianity. Horror at those wars led to a love of tolerance that has grown since then, but not enough to prevent new eruptions of intolerance, like the Terror of the French Revolution, the Holocaust, Cambodia’s Killing Fields, the Rwandan Genocide — and countless smaller massacres, like 9/11 and Friday’s attacks on Paris. All this intolerance springs from civilization’s ideologies, both political and religious: fascism, communism, anarchism, nationalism, Islam, Christianity, white supremacy, and many others. It attracts people filled with hate, and it gives them an outlet.

The barbarians actually presented a far greater threat to civilization. Civilization was weaker in those days, and the barbarians were far more numerous than terrorists ever could be. Lots of people are opportunists, but very few are mentally ill enough or evil enough to be terrorists. So long as they have no weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists can never hurt us the way the barbarians once did.

But terrorism is still the enemy, and we need to understand it. That enemy is not a barbaric threat from outside the walls of civilization but rather intolerance from within.

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PHOTO: The Eiffel Tower lit up at night, by Tryfon Kar, provided through Wikimedia Commons

© 2015 by David W. Tollen. All rights reserved.

New Review for The Jericho River

The Jericho River just got a great new review, at Reviews by Amos Lassen! “The adventure and the quest are so well done that we forget that this is a history lesson.“

Four Fantastic 5-Star Reviews Just this Month — Including from Listed Reviewers

My book, The Jericho River, received four fantastic new Amazon reviews just this month! Two are from listed reviewers. Here are some of the comments:

“Wow. Just, wow.”

“This is one of the most unusual novels I have ever read.“

“[H]old on for a trip that will capture your imagine in a way that dozens of history textbooks can never do,nor do they even try.“

“Many have … praised … the accurate historical content … While this is definitely important, for me it is the author’s imagination which makes this book so much fun …“

“[Y]ou may find that this book challenges – and expands – your thinking on the confluence of mythology, religion and science.”

“This book is a a very magical adventure: imaginative, entertaining and also very educational in more ways than anyone would suspect.“

“Tollen carries his plot and themes through to a most satisfying ending, creating a brilliant, rich tapestry. … [T]his book is an epic masterwork of Western Civilization …”

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© 2015 by David W. Tollen. All rights reserved.