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

by Adam Rutherford

The truth is that our pedigrees fold in on themselves, the branches loop back and become nets, and all of us who have ever lived have done so enmeshed in a web of ancestry. 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.

Ones for whom we have fossil remains from the period starting a million years ago can be called archaic humans, and there are a few. Homos ergaster, heidelbergensis, antecessor, and a few more are all present in different places, and with subtly different anatomical details during this period, and they are all thought to have evolved from earlier Homo erectus, the upright human.

Mind you, Darwin fretted about a lot of stuff, especially his health, his kids, and maybe with just cause. On occasion he would write a fit of histrionic despair, such as “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything,” and once, evoking the spirit of eugenics soon to be invented by his cousin, Francis Galton, about whom we will hear more later: We are a wretched family & ought to be exterminated.

Genetics has revealed that human variation and its distribution across the planet is more complex and demands more sophisticated squinting than any attempts to align it with crude and ill-defined terms like race, or even black, or white. It is for this reason that I am comfortable stating that from the point of view of a geneticist, race does not exist. It has no useful scientific value.

The skin tone of the people of the Andaman Islands is very similar to that of the people of central Africa, but they acquired that hue via different historical and biological routes. Some black Africans are evolved to process oxygen at high altitudes, as are some Tibetans, but most are not. “Black” is no more a race than “long-distance runner” is.

“For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable, and wrong.” H. L. Mencken

The egg that made you was made inside your mother’s ovaries while she was inside her mother. Your DNA was forged inside your grandmother.