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

by Adam Rutherford

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.

Anatomically modern humans’ tenure on Earth is equivalent to . . . the precise length of this phrase.

You carry an epic poem in your cells. It’s an incomparable, sprawling, unique, meandering saga.

The birth of genetics is synonymous with the birth of eugenics,

I will show you that despite what you might have read, genetics won’t tell you how smart your kids will be, or what sports they should play, or what gender person they might fancy, or how they will die, or why some people commit acts of heinous violence and murder. Just as important as what genetics can tell us is what it can’t.

Evolutionary shrub

Hobbits shared their island with rodents of unusual size, tiny hippos, and dwarf elephants.

We anatomically modern humans are generally thought to have evolved primarily in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago, and emerged out of Africa in our own exodus sometime in the last 100,000 years.

The migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa. Anatomically modern humans began their tenure on Earth primarily in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago, though more archaic Homo sapiens have been found as far away in time and space as 300,000 years ago in Morocco. Our ancestors had begun to trickle out of Africa at least 100,000 years ago. They met Neanderthals in Europe, and other human species en route, and according to our DNA, bred with many of them.

This is a seam that will run throughout this book, confronting and dispelling the culturally ubiquitous idea that genes are fate, and a certain type of any one gene will determine exactly what an individual is like. That this is a fallacy is universally known among geneticists, yet it is still an idea that carries a lot of cultural significance, fueled frequently by the media and an ultra-simplistic understanding of the absurd complexities of human biology.

So what happened? Humans are both horny and mobile.

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.

But the real kicker came with the revelation that Denisovan DNA was alive and well in contemporary Melanesians—the indigenous people of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a scattering of islands off the northeast coast of Australia.

We carry the past with us. There was no beginning, and there are no missing links, just the ebb and flow and ebb again of living through epochs. Those ancient people never went extinct—we just merged.

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.

Consistent with Painter's conclusions in The History of White People

Out of five, only the Colville Tribes did. Their representative, James Boyd, told The New York Times in 2015, “We were hesitant. Science hasn’t been good to us.”

It’s exciting to discover circus performers in one’s family tree, but I must be very careful not to fall into the trap I am decrying throughout this book, that DNA has some power to determine identity. The truth is that it means next to nothing. Ancestry is a matted web.

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.

Whoever he was, he murdered women, which doesn’t seem to me to be something worth celebrating.

The forensic report of how Catherine Eddowes had been dissected is truly sickening, and there is nothing to be gained from indulging such a description of violence against women in order to entertain.

The gloss of science won’t help if the rest of the evidence is wafer thin. And if you don’t publish in a way that others can check, you’ve simply got no game. This is not how we do it.

Six generations should contain 62 different people, as does mine, and our own queen’s today. Charles II’s has 32. Eight generations should contain 254 different people. Charles II’s has 82.

Over those three generations, fifth, sixth, and seventh, you should in principle have 112 women. Joanna of Castille occupied nine of those positions on her own across three generations. This is not desirable.

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 history of my field is inextricably intertwined with ideas that we now find toxic: racism, empire, prejudice, and eugenics.

Generally, eastern Asians have a far greater frequency of dry than anywhere else on Earth, and broadly the further east you go, the more likely you are to find dry wax ears, if indeed inspecting people’s ears is your business.

In Ashkenazi populations, which make up around a third of Jews in total, careful genetic counseling has effectively eradicated Tay-Sachs. I suppose you could call this a form of soft eugenics in its purest nonjudgmental sense. It was called a Jewish disease at first and that stuck, carried along by prejudice and ignorance. Now, because of an understanding of genetics and inheritance, it most certainly is not a Jewish disease at all.

Science sets aside the bias that we lug around, and separates what feels right from what is.

It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.

The real number is around 20,000. This is the same number of pieces as the four largest Lego sets combined.† The best experts in the world were all mistaken.

This was more akin to sorting out God’s massive and extremely chaotic filing cabinet. But of course that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Personally, I like that way better

Heritability is a measure of how much of the differences we see in a population can be accounted for by genetics, and how much is determined by the environment. Simple enough to say, but baffling once we look under the hood.

The only completed map is one of a dead planet, frozen in time. Our genetic map is changing continuously, with bodies dug up from the recent and ancient past, with continuing migration and the admixture of people of the world, and with the never-ending fight against cancers and other diseases that will, one day, be merely of interest to historians. We need geneticists and mathematicians and computer scientists and coders, archaeologists, doctors, and patients. Come with us.

Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it’s a dumb, simplistic question.

But perhaps exoneration via the complex and poorly understood root of genetics is missing the broader point that maybe we shouldn’t abuse children.

The writer and scientist P.Z. Myers added a succinct preemptive conclusion, one with which I wholeheartedly agree: I can predict exactly what will be found when they look at Adam Lanza’s DNA. It will be human. There will be tens of thousands of little nucleotide variations from reference standards scattered throughout the genome, because all of us carry these kinds of differences. The scientists will have no idea what 99% of the differences do.

We look to statistics for reassurance in these types of case. Here is one: 100 percent of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns. I can guarantee that even if there were a genotype shared by the mass shooters, which there will not be, none of the killings would have happened if they didn’t have guns.

The simple deterministic version of genetics is merely a new phrenology.

The principles still apply: It is not possible to predict the complex behaviors of someone solely by the bumps and bulges and basic morphology of the skull. And it’s not possible to do it with DNA either.

In science we simply lean in toward truth, every step inching us closer to the way things actually are, rather than how we perceive them to be, or would like them to be.

Gamow was a brilliant and influential physicist, whose work laid significant foundations for Big Bang cosmology. He also wrote a paper with his student Ralph Alpher, and added his friend Hans Bethe to the author list for the sole reason that it would read “Alpher Bethe Gamow,” and is known as the “aßy paper.” He tried unsuccessfully to escape Soviet Russia in 1932 in a canoe. Twice.