Before the Dawn Quotes

“Bantu”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“The chief has great mana,” “Pharaoh is the living Horus,” or “Henry is by the Grace of God”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Only some 3% of the DNA in the genome is devoted to genes; the rest of the DNA is mostly yards of filler material.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Among the !Kung, men are driven wild by a sizable protuberance of fat on a woman’s buttocks, presumably a signal of being able to nourish a child in difficult environments.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“It is a few selected genes, not the many neutral ones, that may account for the differences between continental races. Substantial evidence for this idea has now emerged from a genomewide survey by Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago. Devising a test to identify genes under recent selective pressure, he found roughly 200 such genes in Africans, in East Asians, and in Europeans. Each race’s set of selected genes overlapped very little with those of other races, just as would be expected if the populations on each continent had adapted independently to evolutionary pressures.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Our bones are more gracile than those of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, our personalities less aggressive, our societies more trusting and cohesive. An element of human choice, a preference for negotiation over annihilation, has perhaps been injected into the genome. And that might explain why there is an inescapable sense of progress about human evolution over the last 50,000 years: human choice has imposed a direction on the blind forces that hitherto have shaped evolution’s random walk.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Several primate species have communication systems of considerable sophistication. Gelada baboons have 22 different kinds of call, and gorillas have been recorded using some 30 different gestures.34 One of the best studied animal communication systems is the repertoire of alarm calls uttered by the vervet monkeys of East Africa. Vervets lead a perilous existence, at constant risk from eagles, leopards and snakes, and they possess a distinctive warning call for each. When researchers record one of these calls and play it back to other vervets, the monkeys reliably scan the skies in response to the eagle call, look down at the ground at the snake call, and leap into bushes at the leopard call.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“The most fundamental, a major shift from the ape brand of sociality, was the human nuclear family, which gave all males a chance at procreation along with incentives to cooperate with others in foraging and defense. A second element, developed from an instinct shared with other primates, was a sense of fairness and reciprocity, extended in human societies to a propensity for exchange and trade with other groups. A third element was language. And the fourth, a defense against the snares of language, was religion. All these behaviors are built on the basic calculus of social animals, that cooperation holds more advantages than competition.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“it’s possible that for many thousands of years all modern humans outside Africa, as well as those inside, had black skin.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“From the proportion of Mongol royal house Y chromosomes in their sample, Tyler-Smith and his colleagues have been able to calculate just how well Genghis succeeded in his procreative program. An astonishing 8% of males throughout the former lands of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan. This amounts to a total of 16 million men, or about 0.5% of the world’s total.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors