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

by Adam Rutherford

Nowadays, only the wilfully ignorant dismiss the truth that we evolved from earlier ancestors.

there’s an absence of Danish DNA despite a long adventure here. This says something about their 200-year rule. They didn’t integrate. They may have shaped the lands and defined and defended borders, and given us the days of the week (and hundreds of other words: ‘a berserk freckly husband is a blundering guest in hell’), but they don’t appear to have left any distinctive DNA.

You are of royal descent, because everyone is. You are of Viking descent, because everyone is. You are of Saracen, Roman, Goth, Hun, Jewish descent, because, well you get the idea. All Europeans are descended from exactly the same people, and not that long ago.

If you’re a human being on Earth, you almost certainly have Nefertiti, Confucius or anyone we can actually name from ancient history in your tree, if they left children. The further back we go, the more the certainty of ancestry increases, though the knowledge of our ancestors decreases. It is simultaneously wonderful, trivial, meaningless and fun.

Human history is replete with the fluid movement of people, and tribes and countries and cultures and empires are never, ever permanent.

Often it’s asserted that IQ only measures how good you are at IQ tests, which is glibly true, in the same way that running the hundred metres only really tests how good you are at running as fast as you can over a hundred metres.

there are no essential genetic elements for any particular group of people who might be identified as a ‘race’. As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.

The British never did adopt a eugenics policy, despite England being the intellectual birthplace of the idea.

But in the USA, and a few other countries (notably Sweden), the forced, involuntary and often secret sterilization of undesirables was embraced enthusiastically. From 1907 when Indiana passed the first mandate, until 1963, forced sterilization was legally administered in thirty-one states, with California the most vigorous adopter. The most recent cases of forced sterilization in that famously liberal state occurred in 2010.

Genetically, two black people are more likely to be more different to each other than a black person and a white person.

In other words, while the physical differences are clearly visible between a white and a black person, the total amount of difference is much smaller than between two black people.

Genetics has shown that people are different, and these differences cluster according to geography and culture, but never in a way that aligns with the traditional concepts of human races.

Things are often not as they appear to us, but we invented and developed the scientific process to correct our subjective failings: