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After a grenade explosion in a room, could the exact position of each object prior to the explosion be reconstructed by piecing together the scattered remains and studying the shrapnel in the wall?
Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago?
Since 2009, though, whole-genome data have begun to challenge long-held views in archaeology, history, anthropology, and even linguistics—and to resolve controversies in those fields.
But this long-held view about “race” has just in the last few years been proven wrong—and the critique of concepts of race that the new data provide is very different from the classic one that has been developed by anthropologists over the last hundred years.
The world’s earliest known figurine is a roughly forty-thousand-year-old “lion-man” carved from a woolly mammoth tusk, found in Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany.
The intensification of evidence for modern human behavior after fifty thousand years ago is undeniable, and raises the question of whether biological change contributed to it.
In 2002, Pääbo and his colleagues discovered two mutations in the gene FOXP2 that seemed to be candidates for propelling the great changes that occurred after around fifty thousand years ago.
Our history may not be as simple as the story of a dominant group that was immediately successful wherever it went.
With this approach, we found that at least some Neanderthal-related genetic material came into the ancestors of present-day non-Africans eighty-six thousand to thirty-seven thousand years ago.20
His proximity in time to the mixing event makes it possible to obtain a more accurate date of fifty-four thousand to forty-nine thousand years ago.
So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.
But the data are sternly consistent: the evidence for Neanderthal interbreeding turns out to be everywhere.
Were the Neanderthals the only archaic humans who interbred with our ancestors? Or were there other major hybridizations in our past?
The avalanche of new data that has become available in the wake of the genome revolution has shown just how wrong the tree metaphor is for summarizing the relationship among modern human populations.
The genome revolution has taught us that great mixtures of highly divergent populations have occurred repeatedly.6 Instead of a tree, a better metaphor may be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past.
Human history is full of dead ends, and we should not expect the people who lived in any one place in the past to be the direct ancestors of those who live there today.
It is an extraordinary example of how technology—in this case, domestication—contributed to homogenization, not just culturally but genetically. It shows that what is happening with the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution in our own time is not unique in the history of our species.
Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.
The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.
Ancient DNA has established major migration and mixture between highly divergent populations as a key force shaping human prehistory, and ideologies that seek a return to a mythical purity are flying in the face of hard science.
In the oldest text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, the warrior god Indra rides against his impure enemies, or dasa, in a horse-drawn chariot, destroys their fortresses, or pur, and secures land and water for his people, the arya, or Aryans.1
Yet farming was not invented in India. Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia.
India may have been the first place where the Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided.
We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians.
And yet my perspective as a Jew made me empathize strongly with all the likely Romeos and Juliets over thousands of years of Indian history whose loves across ethnic lines have been quashed by caste.
The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.
A concern is that when members of groups are directly engaged in scientific investigation of their own history, people’s wish that certain things should be true often colors presentation of the findings.
a perennial debate among historians is the extent to which the human past is shaped by single individuals whose actions leave a disproportionate impact on subsequent generations. Star Cluster analysis provides objective information about the importance of extreme inequalities in power at different points in the past.
To understand who we are, we need to approach the past with humility and with an open mind, and to be ready to change our minds out of respect for the power of hard data.
The genomic evidence of the antiquity of inequality—between men and women, and between people of the same sex but with greater and lesser power—is sobering in light of the undeniable persistence of inequality today.
Constant effort to struggle against our demons—against the social and behavioral habits that are built into our biology—is one of the ennobling behaviors of which we humans as a species are capable, and which has been critical to many of our triumphs and achievements.
But ancient DNA discoveries have rendered the serial founder model untenable. We now know that the present-day structure of populations does not reflect the one that existed many thousands of years ago.34
We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no one population is—or could be—“pure.”
