Who We Are and How We Got Here Quotes

“There was never a single trunk population in the human past. It has been mixtures all the way down.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“The genome revolution has shown that we are not living in particularly special times when viewed from the perspective of the great sweep of the human past. Mixtures of highly divergent groups have happened time and again, homogenizing populations just as divergent from one another as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Prior to the genome revolution, I, like most others, had assumed that the big genetic clusters of populations we see today reflect the deep splits of the past. But in fact the big clusters today are themselves the result of mixtures of very different populations that existed earlier.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Seventy thousand years ago, the world was populated by very diverse human forms, and we have genomes from an increasing number of them, allowing us to peer back to a time when humanity was much more variable than it is today.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Ten generations back, for example, the number of ancestral stretches of DNA is around 757 but the number of ancestors is 1,024, guaranteeing that each person has several hundred ancestors from whom he or she has received no DNA whatsoever.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals. If we aspire to treat all individuals with respect regardless of the extraordinary differences that exist among individuals within a population, it should not be so much more of an effort to accommodate the smaller but still significant average differences across populations.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“Tracing back fifty thousand years in the past, our genome is scattered into more than one hundred thousand ancestral stretches of DNA, greater than the number of people who lived in any population at that time, so we inherit DNA from nearly everyone in our ancestral population who had a substantial number of offspring at times that remote in the past.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“The avalanche of new data that has become available in the wake of the genome revolution has shown just how wrong the tree metaphor is for summarizing the relationship among modern human populations.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“the multidimensionality of human traits, the great variation that exists among individuals, and the extent to which hard work and upbringing can compensate for genetic endowment, the only sensible approach is to celebrate every person and every population as an extraordinary realization of our human genius and to give each person every chance to succeed, regardless of the particular average combination of genetic propensities he or she happens to display. For me, the natural response to the”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“a result, the most efficient way for evolutionary forces to spread beneficial mutations has often been to invent mutations anew rather than to import them from other populations.44 The limited migration rates between some regions of Africa over the last few thousand years has resulted in what Ralph and Coop have described as a “tessellated” pattern of population structure in Africa. Tessellation is a mathematical term for a landscape of tiles—regions of genetic homogeneity demarcated by sharp boundaries—that is expected to form when the process of homogenization due to gene exchanges among neighbors competes with the process of generating new advantageous variations in each region.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“The right way to deal with the inevitable discovery of substantial differences across populations is to realize that their existence should not affect the way we conduct ourselves. As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Constant effort to struggle against our demons—against the social and behavioral habits that are built into our biology—is one of the ennobling behaviors of which we humans as a species are capable, and which has been critical to many of our triumphs and achievements”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.25 We now know that at least part of the explanation is dilution. Ancient DNA from Europeans who lived before nine thousand years ago shows that pre-farming Europeans had just as much Neanderthal ancestry as East Asians do today.26 The reduction in Neanderthal ancestry in present-day Europeans is due to the fact that they harbor some of their ancestry from a group of people who separated from all other non-Africans prior to the mixture with Neanderthals (the story of this early-splitting group revealed by ancient DNA is told in part II of this book). The spread of farmers with this inheritance diluted the Neanderthal ancestry in Europe, but not in East Asia.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago? Today, ancient DNA is enabling this kind of detailed reconstruction of deep relationships among ancient human populations.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“The Yamnaya—who the genetic data show were closely related to the source of the steppe ancestry in both India and Europe—are obvious candidates for spreading Indo-European languages to both these subcontinents of Eurasia.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“He acknowledged that the reliance on racial and ethnic categories is useful given our poor present knowledge, but predicted that the future will involve testing individuals directly for what mutations they have, and doing away altogether with racial classification as a basis for making individualized decisions about care.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Evidence of early modern humans outside of Africa well before fifty thousand years ago includes the morphologically modern skeletons in Skhul and Qafzeh in present-day Israel that date to between around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“So it is absolutely clear that modern humans arrived in East Asia and Australia around the same time as they came to Europe.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“the single most important source of ancestry across northern Europe today is the Yamnaya or groups closely related to them.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“If the ancient DNA studies of the last few years have shown anything clearly, it is that the geographic distribution of people living today is often misleading about the dwelling places of their ancestors.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“We are now producing data so fast that the time lag between data production and publication is longer than the time it takes to double the data in the field.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no one population is—or could be—“pure.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“But ancient DNA discoveries have rendered the serial founder model untenable. We now know that the present-day structure of populations does not reflect the one that existed many thousands of years ago.34”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“Constant effort to struggle against our demons—against the social and behavioral habits that are built into our biology—is one of the ennobling behaviors of which we humans as a species are capable, and which has been critical to many of our triumphs and achievements.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“The genomic evidence of the antiquity of inequality—between men and women, and between people of the same sex but with greater and lesser power—is sobering in light of the undeniable persistence of inequality today.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past