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

by Adam Rutherford

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting.

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.

Your genome is the totality of your DNA, 3 billion letters of it, and due to the way it comes together—by the mysterious (from a biological point of view) business of sex—it is unique to you.

As we will see, modern genetics has shown how we continue to get the whole concept of race so spectacularly wrong.

Humans love telling stories. We’re a species that craves narrative, and more specifically, narrative satisfaction—explanation, a way of making sense of things, and the ineffable complexities of being human—beginnings, middles, and ends.

All scientists think that their field is the one that is least well represented in the media, but I’m a scientist and a writer, and I believe that human genetics stands out above all as one destined to be misunderstood, I think because we are culturally programmed to misunderstand it.

But you have far less in common with your ancestors than you may realize, and there are people in your family from whom you have inherited no genes at all, and who therefore have no meaningful genetic link to you, even though in a genealogical sense you are most definitely descended from them.

Each chapter in this book tells a different story about history and about genetics, of battles lost and won, of invaders, marauders, murder, migration, agriculture, disease, kings and queens, plague, and plenty of deviant sex.

Life is transition: The only things that are truly static are already dead.

immodest instruments of biological transition.

Alas, we are no more or less evolved than any creature. Uniqueness is terribly overrated. We’re only as unique as every other species, each uniquely evolved to extract the best possible hope for our genes to be passed on into infinity given the present unique circumstances.

Rosalind Franklin,

Thank you! I was afraid her name would be omitted from this list

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

Dozens of lines of evidence bellow incontrovertibly that we are an ape, with an ape ancestor common to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.

The more we learn, the messier the picture becomes.

The classification of animals is also a frequently unsatisfactory business, but to tell the story of our species we need to dive in and hope for the best.

Membership of a genus doesn’t necessarily show relatedness between the members, but instead shows that members are more similar to each other than they are to organisms not in that genus. This is the best system we have.

Around a million years ago, somewhere in Africa, a group of humans lived who were to be separated into us, the Neanderthals, and the Denisovans.

The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago.

As long as we have been erect, mobile, and frisky, the branches have been entangled

various animals, swine, goats, sheep, llamas

"animals," should really be "animals:"

Farming today is industrial, and dominated by monolithic corporations who control almost all the food we eat. But this book is not about that.

Yeah that's Michael Pollan's book

Arguing about agriculture is a European preoccupation.

I need not point out that being redheaded is not a maladaptive condition. It’s a very lovely condition.

Someone has a kink

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.

Because every person has so many lines of ancestry above them, a branch from everyone will cross at some point.

genealogical proximity sets off the Sifjaspellsspillir alarm—the incest spoiler.

The historian Procopius details some of the devastation of Constantinople in his book Secret History, written at the time. He suggests that when it was at its most virulent, 10,000 people per day were dying, though modern historians estimate a more conservative but no less baffling 5,000 every day.

Re: bubonic plague -- c/w/ COVID-19? (2016 pub date on this book -- oh shit he had NO IDEA what was coming)

“catastrophe cemetery,”

and it was only after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that this pandemic was crushed.

Literally KILL IT WITH FIRE

Pandemics are always just around the corner, but it’s now unlikely that plague will devastate the lands as it did repeatedly in history.

Too soon / WANNA BET??

and with threshing oar, drove their ships to new land.

There he goes again with the pop-culture references

We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.

This type of genetic astrology, though unscientific and distasteful to my palate, is really just a bit of meaningless fantasy; its real damage is that it undermines scientific literacy in the general public.

Accu-Metrics Lab manager Kyle Tsui told the Telegram that the “test that we do is not a legal test. . . . You can’t use it as any evidence whatsoever, it’s just for informational purposes. You can’t take it to court and so forth.”

WTF does "informational purposes" even mean!??

Attempting to conflate tribal status with DNA denies the cultural affinity that people have with their tribes. It suggests a kind of purity that genetics cannot support, a type of essentialism that resembles scientific racism.

the Holy Prepuce, better known as Jesus’ foreskin.†

Chang factored that into a further study of common ancestry beyond Europe, and concluded in 2003 that the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.

We rely on the press and media to report and translate these complex stories, which are exclusively published in technical language in academic journals that are only intended to be read by other experts in the same fields. This is how scientific research is reported.

You are asked to fast for an hour beforehand, which allows your mouth to be mostly free of the DNA of the food you put in it, and then you are asked to conjure up quite a volume of saliva.

Imagines cannibals messing up their 23andMe tests

the all-important wetness of your earwax.

GCV

I do have brown eyes, something that I had established a few years ago, with the less exciting technology of a mirror. Nevertheless, it is nice to have it confirmed at a molecular biological level.

The Forer effect is a psychological phenomenon where people conclude that broadly true statements are accurate for themselves personally, when they are in fact generically true for many people.

Mice are the human geneticist’s first choice model organism (with a big nod to the fruit fly, and also the rat, nematode worm, and zebrafish).

Don’t forget Xenopus laevis!

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 meters only really tests how good you are at running as fast as you can over a hundred meters.

Yes. And?

fairly low-level racism

You mean chronic systemic racism?

Racism is hateful bullying, and a means of reinforcing self-identity at the expense of others: Whatever you are, you’re not one of us.

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.

Darwin was similarly distracted from his medical studies in Edinburgh by taxidermy