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

by Adam Rutherford

But, according to the genetics, there wasn’t a point where a group of genetically similar people spread into the extremities of the British Isles and settled into a culture that we now call Celtic. That word is a modern invention of a presumed people that isn’t reflected in Britain’s DNA.

Celtics didn't exist

The answer was merely 600 years ago. Sometime at the end of the thirteenth century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry,

One fifth of people alive a millennium ago in Europe are the ancestors of no one alive today. Their lines of descent petered out at some point, when they or one of their progeny did not leave any of their own. Conversely, the remaining 80 per cent are the ancestor of everyone living today. All lines of ancestry coalesce on every individual in the tenth century. One

The first is that 100,000 years ago we were all African. At that time, there were no Homo sapiens anywhere on Earth apart from in Africa,

As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.

We are naturally plagued by the tyranny of a discontinuous mind, as Richard Dawkins so eloquently said.

But science is the opposite of common sense. It’s a set of methodological tools that attempt to extract objective reality from how we perceive it.

Mobility of human species and our excellence at sex have placed the common origin of all humans alive at only 3,400 years ago, or thereabouts.

Alfred Sturtevant, one of the giants of genetics in the first half of the twentieth century, had first suggested tongue rolling as a Mendelian trait in 1940, a single allele bestowing the ability on its bearer or not. After the twin studies he, like a good scientist should, changed his mind, and said in 1965 that he was ‘embarrassed to see it listed in some current works as an established Mendelian case’. It is still taught in schools today.

It pleases me that every one of us shares an ancestor who, in the words of Joseph Chang, sowed rice on the banks of the Yangtze or who laboured to build the pyramids.