A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

by Adam Rutherford

We only have to go back a few dozen centuries to see that most of the 7 billion of us alive today are descended from a tiny handful of people, the population of a village.

For the sake of perspective, life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago, as far as we know, in pockets in the east and north of Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

In the words of Dr. Seuss: Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

We are the species that looked in the mirror, but it wasn’t vanity that prompted us to interrogate our own bodies and our evolution. It was curiosity.