A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

by Adam Rutherford

The truth is that we all are a bit of everything, and we come from all over. Even if you live in the most remote parts of the Hebrides, or the edge of the Greek Aegean, we share an ancestor only a few hundred years ago. A thousand years ago, we Europeans share all of our ancestry. Triple that time and we share all our ancestry with everyone on Earth. We are all cousins, of some degree. I find this pleasing, a warm light for all mankind to share. Our DNA threads through all of us. Ancestry is messy and difficult. Genetics is messy and mathematical, but powerful if deployed in the right way. People are horny. Lives are complex. A secret history is truly hidden in the mosaics of our genomes, but caveat emptor. No scientific test exists that will tell you where the DNA that you would come to inherit was precisely located in the past. Human history is replete with the fluid movement of people, and tribes and countries and cultures and empires are never, ever permanent. Over a long enough timescale, not one of these descriptions of historical people holds steadfast, and only a thousand years ago your DNA began being threaded from millions from every culture, tribe and country.