Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

Okay, I admit it. When it comes to understanding the importance and methodology of genometic research and its influence on discovering the origins of humans and their long journey from then until now, I am a seething mass of ignorance. Human distribution has always fascinated me but being old I have relied almost exclusively on physical (archeology) evidence. The old saying that old dogs cannot learn new tricks is a complete myth and the same hold true that the understanding and acquisition of new knowledge falls into the same category as tricks.

I gleaned much information from this fine work and it has opened up a whole new world to me and indeed, has shed light on questions I have had for years. This work is well written and it presents information that can be understood by a person with a complete lack of scientific training. i.e. me.

Where we came from is vital as to where we are going and the more information we gather, the better off we will be.

I highly recommend this one.

"The problem is not just that people have mixed with their neighbors, blurring the genetic signatures of past events. It is actually far more difficult, in that we know, from ancient DNA, that the people who live in a particular place today almost never exclusively descend from the people who lived in the same place far in the past."

This book takes the reader on a guided journey through the history of humankind as if we were travelling back in a time machine. Using Anceint DNA and comparing it with diverse populations, living and long dead Reich gives a convincing argument for population migration, expansion, gene mixing and extinction around the globe. You may not agree with this or that thesis but I admire the undertaking as a whole. It lays out the landscape for others and his own lab to build upon.

I have followed many reviews, editorials and comments about "Who We Are" and I sometimes wonder whether we are reading the same book. Its seems everyone is poised to take pot shots at David Reich and much of it reflects very poorly on the authors. The most heated controversies surrounding this book are about Chapter 11 The Genomics of Race and Identity. Its too bad people cannot see there way clear to read the whole book and realize this Chapter out of context is just like quoting a line out of a whole Chapter and expecting it to stand alone. 253 "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." Some of the harshest critics come from the social sciences and that is also where my training is. I am ashamed at the fear mongering and name calling arising from same.

That said I count this as the best book to date on Ancient DNA, period. Whether you agree or disagree with Reich in general or on specifics this is the seminal work on the subject to date. There is no question that the Anceint DNA he and his team have extracted is rewriting the history of humankind. The reviewer who called this book dense---well all I can say is it does not get any easier to understand than this. Reich has a way of weaving his personal story and that of other researchers into what might be an otherwise dry topic. As others of noted this is free of jargon and is very accessible to scientist or layman alike. The maps and graphics are exceedingly helpful and well placed throughout the book.

Where some have called him arrogant I find him quite the opposite. 263 "The history of science has revealed again and again, the danger in trusting one's instincts or of being led astray by one's biases--of being too convinced that one knows the truth..." He readily admits his mistakes and is equally willing to expose his personal biases.

If you read the negative reviews and think this book is not for you I believe you do yourself a great disservice. Is this book perfect? Of course not. Is it informative, well grounded in science and worthy of your time? Yes.

I have read, enjoyed and recomend all the following
Svante Pääbo 'Neanderthal Man'
Jean Manco 'Blood of the Celts' and 'Ancestral Journeys'
Marija Gimbutas 'The Language of the Goodess'
David W. Anthony 'The Horse, the Wheel and Language'

I was really looking forward to learning about the genetic heritage of mankind, but was sorely disappointed by my purchase of this unreadable book. Billed as something of interest to the popular science reader, in this case - me, as well as the sophisticate, I found myself lost from the get-go. The reader is presupposed to have a solid knowledge of the various "tribes" of man, understand former theories of man's migrations, and care about how to rapidly sequence archaic DNA. The explanations are partly there, but they are obfuscated by sentences 25 - 100 words long or longer, in large block paragraphs that make it a chore to work through.

Terms of art are introduced without definition, though sometimes one will be able to partly deduce their meaning further on in the book. One is confronted with the Upper Paleolithic era, the San group, and numerous other terms that are not part of my vocabulary, and little help is offered to those of us not in the field.

Making it worse, I bought the book for my Kindle. The few charts and tables included in the book for explanation come through in microscopic size and I had to use a magnifying glass to read them.

I gave up and did not even get 25% of the way into the book. Maybe if you are in this field, it is terrific -- for me, it was maybe one of the only times I felt bamboozled by the description on the the store site.

Caveat emptor!

According to the top definition on Urban Dictionary, “hippie punching” is a "practice common among establishment centrists of ritualistically denigrating progressives in order to win over imaginary swing voters and David Brooks."  This is the sense in which I think it's appropriate to say that Dr. Reich spends a lot of time Nazi punching, likely for the benefit of interlocutors responding to what have been and what will be commentary on this book at places like the New York Times or the Atlantic where any mention of genetically-founded racial differences might be "literally Hitler".  

I wish Reich had kept it to the science without getting into the politics, because there is so much more that could be said about the rich array of experimental, statistical, and algorithmic ideas discussed in the first four or five chapters. [1] The political stuff could be omitted altogether and the book would still deserve five-stars, because it demonstrates the overwhelming power of the scientific method – both as a vague concept as well as the scrappy creativity that fuels some of the experimental breakthroughs described – to answer a question viscerally relevant to most thinking people (“who are we, and how did we get here?”)

Some of the political meandering would have made sense if Reich was slightly to the right of where he seems to be, or making claims about which even reasonable people disagree – the extent of genetic contribution to psychometric differences between “population groups”, for example. But the overwhelming amount of his work is not even vaguely controversial for people who read about and care about science – which is apparently to exclude anthropologists and other hacks who apparently get all worked up when they learn that you can get pretty close to the top factors of a singular value decomposition of differentiation across the human genome with something called your eyes. The point is that the people who are interested in how ancient DNA reveals the provenance of modern humans neither need to be told that discrete clusterings of the human population are materially informative, nor that Arthur de Gobineau’s classification of these clusters is probably anachronistic.

The book has already been discussed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and by Ezra Klein who manages to contrive the good professor into a dispute that involves Charles Murray and Sam Harris regarding some intellectual non sequitur about race and intelligence — and this I gather as someone who studiously avoids reading things written by people who style themselves “journalists”. Unsurprisingly, none of these people discuss the scientific experiments and fantastic, in the etymological sense of the word, discoveries made by Reich and his lab except insofar as his quotes can be lifted without context to peddle some irrelevant thing or the other to readers who are more interested in reading about whether or not race is real than they are about the techniques through which we can go dramatically beyond the limits of radiometric dating for that organic matter which can reproduce itself sexually – and then how this technique can be used to answer centuries-old debates about the sources of common civilization between Indians and Europeans (!).

The precision and effortless authority that characterize the former part of the book is all but nonexistent in the chapters on race. I suspect that’s because as far as mainstream publishers go, speaking in exact language about topics of race is verboten, usually trading precision for an unfalsifiable subjunctive in which words like “structural” and “institutional” prefix a perpetual counterpoint to any suggestion that not all populations are exactly the same across all traits of importance. In this latter section, Reich’s premise is something along the lines of (a) people should be prepared for the fact that we will likely soon discover a genetic source of racial differences for behavioral and cognitive traits, (b) we have no idea what this will look like, and the people suggesting that the outcome will be in the stereotypical direction are peddling bad science, (c) we know already that, even though we don’t know anything about genetics, race and intelligence, that whatever we will come to know will only lead to modest differences so that the differences within groups will be much more important than those across groups. I don’t mean to caricature what I believe is an honest attempt at describing his views on this topic – but I am nonetheless very, very confused as to how I should interpret his comments.

When the genetic source of these cognitive differences is eventually discovered – and Reich seems to think they will for the simple reason that how could anyone possibly expect otherwise given disparate demographic histories that diverged literal eons ago – am I to understand that Reich would be just as surprised to learn that mutations associated with what we call intelligence occur more frequently in sub-Saharan Africans than in Ashkenazi Jews? This is the most perplexing thing about the whole book: many reasonable (otherwise?) people believe that differences in demonstrated cognitive talent between populations is the residue of sociological and political forces with no genetic provenance. *As far as I know*, however, Professor Reich is the only person to believe that conditional on Ashkenazi Jews and sub-Saharan Africans not being of equal intelligence, that it is just as likely that it will be the Africans smarter than the Jews than the other way around! [2]

It gets even more confusing. Reich goes on to discuss the former New York Times writer Nicholas Wade, stopping just short of outright labeling Wade a racist. We are told that Wade says Ashkenazi Jews are smarter and also given some data that sound pretty convincing to me in that regard, before abruptly hurling to something else Wade says about Tay-Sachs disease that isn’t entirely accurate. This error in measure at hand we are back to another part of the book where Wade is now making some vaguely unadvisable statement regarding the the work ethic of sub-Saharan Africans. It seems a reader is meant to be convinced that Wade is wrong about Jews and Africans because of an unrelated point regarding Tay Sachs. The next part is filled with some sentimentality but pretty much nowhere do I see the sort of crisp, neat, and clever explanation about why the central and important part of Wade’s conclusion, forget the irrelevant flourish, are incorrect that would have been par for the course in previous chapters. Then we get to James Watson, who probably first made the New York Times for discovering DNA and last made the New York Times for selling his Nobel prize to pay his mortgage (or something) because he claimed African people were less intelligent than Europeans. Reich shares a colorful story…

“It was ironic, then, that Watson was forced to retire as head of Cold Spring Harbor after being quoted in an interview with the British Sunday Times newspaper as having said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa,” adding that “[all] our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”44 (No genetic evidence for this claim exists.) When I saw Watson at Cold Spring Harbor, he leaned over and whispered to me and to the geneticist Beth Shapiro, who was sitting next to me, something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He then said that Jews and Indian Brahmins were both high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars.”

Again, I would have loved to hear more about why the process Watson suggested is so unreasonable, but the entire argument is dismissed for the lack of “genetic evidence” (which is unrelated to the veracity of the evidence Watson was clearly referencing; though a rejection of the psychometrics itself would have taken the book into completely foreign territory we thankfully avoided: but why even the footnote?)

But all this was just about one chapter. It's a wonderful book. Maybe it can be revised in a future edition.

[1] There’s a neat irony to the politics in that the only place he seems to be entirely at ease with sharing his thoughts have to do with his experience sparring with two Indian colleagues who were very worked up about contemporaneous evidence conclusively ending a narrative that ancient India was a source civilization for the Indo-European people which is the sort of thing that is believed by the same people who believe that the Vedas knew about quantum mechanics, and their contemporaries sent a spaceship to Mars (maybe it was an airplane and the Moon). Someone who has read the whole book might smirk at the idea that, in a decade, Professors Lalji Singh and Kumarasamy Thangaraj travel to Harvard, this time with conclusive evidence using new methods from the Reich lab demonstrating, say, an exciting finding that between South Indian Brahmins and Punjabi Kapoors, the latter are much more likely to have mutations associated with attractiveness, strength, and height whereas the former is more likely to have mutations associated with intelligence, conscientiousness, and working memory. Drs Singh and Thangaraj cannot figure out why their blunt abstract is so controversial. (Of course, as this is happening, both Kapoor and Kannada keyboard warriors are thrilled with the results, trading insults with each other in the comments of some poor American blogger who didn’t realize that writing about the possibly-genetic provenance brahmin intelligence or fair skinned punjabis is a clarion call for armies of apparent experts in the Vedas taking a break from chanting on what looks like a T9 keyboard).

[2] Indeed this is suggested when he remarks that “unfortunately, today there is a new breed of writers and scholars who argue not only that there are average genetic differences, but that they can guess what they are based on traditional racial stereotypes” in Chapter 11, given that one can indeed profitably “guess using stereotypes” unless they find both outcomes just about equally likely.

First of all, I loved this book. It challenged me a great deal. I have and will continue to highly recommend it. A few things you need to know first:

1) This book assumes you have a very detailed knowledge of science, how science works, and the motivations of scientists. If you haven't had a science class since high school, this will be very confusing to you because scientists are weird and are motivated by weird things. Don't let that alone discourage you, just know that you might not understand the motivations of the writer, which brings me to the next point:

2) The writer is a scientist first and only. The writer clearly believes that Data is king, and to heck with your feelings about what it means to you personally. A lot of people will be challenged by this because this book WILL make statements of fact that you are going to be uncomfortable with. But, again, I recommend reading this book as a scientist would. Data is king. When reading, ask yourself does the writer present his argument in a way that is best supported by the data -THEN ask yourself how this makes you feel and how it challenges your personal beliefs. You will see reviewers on both sides deride this book because they are challenged by it. That is good.

After accepting those two points, then read the book. And pay attention, it isn't a page turner. It's heavy science. Highly recommend it.

Well, I didn’t see this one coming. Apparently, the current politically correct themes of this or that being a cultural construct is pure malarkey. The gender business is obvious to anybody who has raised both boys and girls. Just try getting your 3 year old daughter to play with a fire truck or a GI Joe combat set.

Well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It seems that genetics has enormous influence on what we are and what we choose to do with ourselves here in this life. The key, and not really emphasized by the author, is that we can evolve genetic traits much faster than most people think we can. Mutations race through the population and other changes likewise can adapt us faster for whatever challenges we face than previously thought. Actually, in the long past, nature was a predictor of characteristics. Only in the recent past has this been purged from PC thought with the blank slate replacing it.

As the author points out, this is a field which is moving so fast that he admits his book will be obsolete before it’s read. Well, obsolete in the sense that more will have been discovered but that doesn’t make the book’s contents wrong or not worth a read.

It takes a bit of effort to get through. Sure, it’s a non-technical book but there’s a good deal of rather dry material setting the structure up so the last quarter or so of the book’s claims rest on a solid foundation. The author also doesn’t explain some of the terms from anthropology he tosses about. I read this on a Kindle which made looking up unfamiliar terms easy but a paper book would have had me doing one after another Internet searches.

I can list one after another thing I learned here, but why? If you’re interested in how we came to be, this is a book for you. It will upset many such as those who buy into the ancient superstitions which are national myths but facts are facts. Here they are. All you need to is read all about it.

An incredible insight for me, which says a lot because I am not a scientist nor do I read scientific journals. I really picked this for my fifteen year old who is into science, I thought this book would help generate his interest into scientific study even more. What I did not expect is that I would enjoy reading this book. It is fascinating. It is confusing in spots because this book is not written for the lay person, but I enjoyed the challenge.

I do not know much about DNA or its contributions to our lives, our existence but after reading this book, I do have a better idea of what it is, what it does and what it tells. I know that there will be more discoveries over the years to come, but this is a fascinating start. I have always been fascinated by history and cultural studies, and while this is a scientific report on our genes, it does combine my two great loves in life.

It is not a fast read, but it is a fascinating read. It is dense, filled with a lot of terminology that I have to look up to understand better. In spite of that, I still enjoyed reading this book. I hope it is just the first of many that will come out as we discover more of where we came from.

Hi Richard,

I read two chapters last night and right away I spotted a few red flags.  I’ll withhold the summary until I’m done but a few things jumped out.
• The author is not immune to the self-agrandizement, backstabbing of competitors, and casual misinformation which is the life blood of human origins science, especially in its patronization of lay readers.
• He misrepresents the state of the science prior to his arrival. Half of the discoveries he brandishes were made before he showed up, albeit not through applied genomics.
• He attributes racial animus to his predecessors. I’m widely read in the science and have never seen any evidence of it.
• He cleverly disguises the distance into the past that his science, genomics, is able to unravel mysteries. He discusses techniques for extracting DNA for genome sequencing back to 400,000 years, which is not possible. Later he shortens that to 160,000 years, which is also not possible. Nowhere does he admit (at least in the first two chapters) that his discoveries are limited to DNA extracted from samples aged less than 15 thousand years, and are not dependably accurate over 10 thousand.
• What he does is not insignificant. He just happened to be sitting in a DNA lab when the cost of DNA sequencing came down due to computerized analysis. That enabled him to accumulate thousands of samples and effectively add a confirmation, using genomics, to a theory already developed using paleoanthropology, about the early dispersion of modern Homo sapiens from his origins in East Africa.
• He is very casual about the limits of genomic analytics of population distributions due both to sample contaminants and to intermarriage among divergent populations. Yes, he mentions these limits but doesn’t explain how he can see through the statistical static.
• My guess is that, if paleoanthropology hadn’t already painted white stripes down the middle of the roads early humans took out of Africa, he’d have had more difficulty teasing out those routes using DNA.
• My main quibble is his misuse of the adjective “ancient.” The lay reader may consider 10,000 year old DNA to be ancient but by then humans had speech; Neanderthal had been extinct for 30 thousand years, Lascaux and Altamira had been painted; the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier had enabled humans to cross the Bering Straight, and their gracile arrowheads were being discarded in New Mexico. This Upper Paleolithic era is modern to anyone familiar with human origins, not ancient. 

To be continued. 

R.

Dear Ralph:

That is an excellent review, and from the first 50 pages  that I have read, I concur in your less than flattering analysis of the author.  Don't feel obliged to keep reading, but i would be interested in any further analysis you may make.

Sincerely,

Richard

PS . Your review should be sent to the store.

R,

No, I’m definitely reading it through. It’s a fascinating story. My view is that paleoanthropology tells a better human migration story up to 15 thousand years ago, and genomics provides higher resolution detail within the last 15k years. I’m expecting to learn stuff. Genomics is a relatively new science for me, as it is for everyone. Hell, Crick and Watson published their discovery of DNA when I was in high school. 

This is a fascinating read about how our ancestors developed from a split in our evolutionary tree from chimpanzees in a valley in Africa. The main premise is that we can now trace genetic information to deduce how those early human tribes migrated and developed across the planet. I admire the audacity of the premise but am reminded of the ideas of David Belinski, an atheistic skeptic of Darwinism, where he points out the anecdotal aspect of nearly all of Darwinism. The inferences drawn by this author reminds me of similar errors. Connecting lines between genetic markers that occur over thousands of years seems like a compelling exercise–when in reality it contains the possibility of thousands of errors and the total refutation of its own premise.

The book was also marred by the incessant political correctness that is so prevalent today. When authors write as if they are trying their hardest to please they peers (all of whom apparently are politically liberal) I feel that said authors credibility diminishes. Go ahead and think something outside the Overton Window. I dare you. When a thinker can articulate a controversial thought it seems more likely such a person is more likely to overturn the supposed verities that certainly will one day be proved false.

Am I the only one who finds Darwinism archaic? Like it is a Newtonian ideal in a quantum mechanical world? This book will provide the reader with many thought-provoking ideas. But the overall premise of the author's thesis solidly resides within theories whose shelf life seems soon to lapse.

Fantastic summary of the state of the art information regarding research on ancient human DNA, human migration and populations. Well written by an expert in the field for both the layman and others in the field. Really enjoyed reading this.

This book is not for the casual reader. While there are morsels of subject matter of general interest to the layman they are buried in layers of technical data that can only be appreciated by genetic researchers.

If there is any doubt about the political agenda informing this work, go to page 153 of the text.What is the ancestry of Indus civilization people? Dr Reich makes it clear: Heads you lose. Tails you lose. The three different possibilities he proposes leave no room for Indigenous creativity of the unmixed South Asian. Instead we are told that it was either the unmixed Iranian farmers, who somehow spoke a Dravidian language, that created this great civilization, or, the ANI,
who of course were largely Indo-European speakers, according to him. Another option given by him is that a mix of people related to Iranian (Indo-European) farmers, and South Asian hunter gatherers were involved. With the stroke of a pen and a vial of veiled Indo-European supremacist mythology, the Indigenous South Asians were written out of Indus history. In similar vein, the unmixed South Asian hunter gatherers had to wait for a bunch of external migrants to show them how to farm. In his words, "farming was not invented in India." p. 127. It took the Near Eastern magical crops of wheat and barley and some genetic mixing to do so, he implies. But really, can anyone invent farming? Is it not the culmination of local demographic, ecological and climatic situations that may or may not include adaptations. But recall that Dr.Reich also claimed that the South Asians adopted agriculture from the so-called Near East sometime after 9000 years (p. 127) and that the genetic mixture allegedly detected in the population was possibly as a result of " the movement of farmers of Near Eastern origin into South Asia." p. 138. Really? Where is the proof? By the way, is there such a thing as a farming gene? If so tell us more. Explain why open minded historians point to the indigenous growth of agriculture around the river valleys of the world. I tend to believe them. On a different note, the claim that ancient Greek religion and Hinduism were related in terms of 'unmistaken similarities' was unconvincing but let me defer to experts in comparative religion on that one.

If you love ancient history this book is great. If you love science, especially genetics, this book is great. It’s the perfect marrying of history and science and how both pertain to humanity at present. Very technical but carefully explained. I would 110% recommend this book.

Biology has a big problem. Its basic theory has grown hoary and ancient, and cannot keep up with the rapid pace of modern discovery. Yet few want to abandon it by the wayside and move on. Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" was published in 1859, an age when our understanding of "who we are and how we got here" was very different than today. Yet his ghost still reigns in our books and spooks our thinking.

We have moved on from Sigmund Freud and his theory of the "I", the "It", and the "Above-I" in each of us. (The usual translation of "Ego", "Id", and "Superego" obscures how simple Sigmund Freud's theory was.) We have moved on from Karl Marx and his theory that means of production shapes our economy, that class struggle is what shapes human history, and that communism will supplant capitalism. We need now to move on from Charles Darwin and his theory that natural selection slowly but surely shaped us and every other living thing through eons of a glacial pace of steady, subtle, random changes.

David Reich's brilliant new book shows us, yet again, how Charles Darwin -- even with the rehabilitation of neo-Darwinism -- slows down our thinking. David Reich shows us how our thinking about human history has been wrong, while at the same time clinging to the basic "natural selection" theory that underlay and gave birth to that thinking.

David Reich suggests otherwise. He points out the error of thinking that reductionist thinking is going to solve the great mysteries of who we are and how we came to be. We don't know what the answers are going to be yet, but we do know that the answers are not going to be simple. Yet he always seems to back away from any hint of heresy and retreat to orthodox thought.

Some examples. On page 21, David Reich notes that new studies "will make it possible to explore whether the shift to behavioral modernity among our ancestors was driven by natural selection". He implies that that is unlikely, given the mystery of a great change in human behavior that seems to have happened rather suddenly and simultaneously about 50,000 years ago. "Nature does not make jumps", Darwin thundered. But here, it seems, it did.

On page 81, David Reich writes, "while a tree is a good analogy for the relationships among species -- because species rarely interbreed and so like real tree limbs are not expected to grow back together after they branch -- it is a dangerous analogy for human populations". But more and more it seems like Charles Darwin's tree of life does not work for species either. If a tree, it is a Tangled Tree, more like the trellis David Reich suggests for human development.

On page 225, David Reich declares "dead" "the model of an evolutionary tree in which today's populations have remained unchanged and separate since branching from a central trunk". The data from ancient DNA "will disprove many commonly held assumptions", and force us to grapple with complexity instead of laze in Darwinian reductionism.

On pages 254 and 255, David Reich notes how the desire to avoid racism is leading people to ignore where genetic facts lead. There are, he notes, "contradictions between the politically correct messages academics often give about the indistinguishability of traits across populations and their papers showing that this is not the way the science is heading". "The indefensibility of the orthodoxy is obvious at almost every turn." (Admittedly this is not a case of clinging to Darwinism, but it shows the same trend.)

On page 256, David Reich says, "it is already known that traits shaped by many mutations (as is probably the case for behavior and cognition) are at least as important targets of natural selection as traits like skin color that are driven by a small number of mutations." But that ignores the basic tenet of neo-Darwinism, which is that natural selection acts on random mutations, and traits shaped by many mutations will not be realistic targets for natural selection because multiple random mutations occurring simultaneously will be too rare.

On page 281, David Reich argues that "the power of ancient DNA" "provides a previously unavailable tool that we can use to understand the fundamental principles of how natural selection proceeds". He talks on page 280 about how we might use DNA analysis to look at the "pace and nature of human adaptation". But is it really that simple? Could something else be happening? It seems, as the song says, that though "there's something happening here", "what it is ain't exactly clear".

New discoveries often need new thinking. But we resist thinking newly. Max Planck said that, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Or as others have more pithily put it, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Do we have to wait until we are all dead before we (or rather, our descendants) can move on from our bowing obeisance to the orthodoxy of natural selection as the creator of all things and Charles Darwin as its prophet? I hope not. But David Reich's book dims that hope when it should brighten it.

Hideously poorly-explained first chapter frustrates this reader into returning the book immediately.

This person clearly has a very good sense of what they are talking about. They also have a very poor ability to communicate their understanding into something an unfamiliar mind can readily understand. Repeated uses of deeply confusing, deeply synonymic words — as opposed to words with an inarguably clear meaning and intention — in crucial explanatory sentences render *several* presumably-foundational premises completely ambiguous.

I cannot tell you how much I want to have been able to read this book. I'm *fascinated.* I got loud and shouty and threw the book.

I really wanted to get onboard, but it shook me off.

This is a relatively new area of learning for me, no pun intended. As such some of the book was interesting and understandable by me, a higher educated woman of broad knowledge. Other parts were of a more editorial, persuasive nature that had an agenda that was not what I was looking for. It seemed the author is trying to cover too many aspects of the subject in one volume, for different audiences. I took the parts that were helpful and passed on the rest. I expect most readers will ultimately do likewise.

This is truly an amazing and wonderful book except for one thing. It is very sad and more than just a little scary that the author has to bow to Liberal PC from the MSM and Liberal Academia in the chapter about race. I don’t know if the author really meant to write what he did in this chapter or he had to out of fear ( look what has happened to Charles Murray and others). We actually have to wait to hear what genomic studies say about comparing cognitive and behavioral traits between Jews and Sub Saharan Africans !? REALLY !!! I could go on in more detail but there are other reviews on this site that do a very good job at reviewing the flaws in the chapter about race. (See A. Murthy).

This book is written in academic language whose purpose seems to obfuscate rather than illuminate. It has important discoveries to communicate, but communicates them in in such tangled, obtuse, and in endless sentences full of comma splices, that I finally gave up reading this about 54% of the way through. Reich needs a remedial course in writing expository prose. It is possible to be exact, clear and correct without academic obfuscation! HINT: obfuscation is not the sign of intelligence, quite the contrary! I am confident you can do better if you're smart enough to have figured all this out!

Disclaimer: If the book skipped Part III, I probably would have given it 4 or 5 stars.

The book is very well written and strikes a nice balance between providing entertaining facts about ancient migrations, being a manifesto on a new area of science, the Ancient DNA movement, and explaining its basic mechanics. However, my personal opinion is that the book drifted away as it entered the very controversial discussion of population-specific genetics, which will never be entertaining or enlightening.

As I read the book, or even when I sent saliva samples to an internet-based ancestry-finding service, it never occurred to me that DNA analysis of ancestry could have practical repercussions. In fact, knowing that the Yamnaya culture replaced Europe previous inhabitants or that maybe a distinct migration from Asia is represented in Brazil's indigenous people is not life-changing, but assigning certain traits to specific population can be.

In the final chapters of the book, which are rather short for the complexity of the subject at hand, the author goes beyond the recreational value of knowing such facts and takes a view against the prevailing wisdom that variations among individuals are more important that variations among populations. The evidence against this assertion is thin (e.g. gold medals in athletics given to people of african ancestry or Nobel prizes given to european jews), but the author simply assumes it is out there and that we must be ready to deal with it, and his proposed stance is altogether frail, for the scientific evidence is not out there, and it will never be.

Any genetic difference that may exist is mediated by the social environment in its effects. In fact, social influences can go a long way in explaining differences that may be wrongly attributed to genetics. However, since social influences cannot be as objectively pinpointed as genes we ultimately find ourselves in the conundrum economists describe as "correlation is not causation".

Unless we can control for the social environment, that is put people of different genetics in the same exact environment throughout their life, whatever difference on populations is found on the DNA is better treated as noise or garbage if not for strict medical purposes. Even the beliefs groups have about themselves can affect how they behave, and that is why I think the author's stance is deeply flawed.

Any scientific credence given to racial stereotypes would inevitably entrench them more, and stating this as a serious scientific agenda, however cautious the words used, does just that. Besides, it is a dead end for scientific purposes, for we do not know to separate culture from genetics at the population level and cannot do controlled experiments to disentangle them. That the author lends his credibility to such a debate is sad and contaminates an otherwise good book.

I read this book with great interest and was fascinated by the many scientific discoveries possible with DNA research reported in it. Mr. Reich truly is a great scientist. The reason why I give it only two stars is that Mr. Reich also elected to call Nicholas Wade a racist on page 264. Unfortunately we live in a world where to many people hurl this epithet very freely at someone they disagree with. This has to stop, Mr. Reich!!

Here is a book that captures the breath-taking changes in genomics and the effect on our understanding of the human past, by a pioneer in the subject. "Who We Are And How We Got Here" provides an explanation of the rapidly evolving technology in layman's terms. Author David Reich then walks the reader through the new theories on how modern human populations came to inhabit various portions of the world. The changes are stunning, with the promise of more to come.

For this former anthropology student, the discussion of the populating of Europe and the Americas was particularly fascinating. That process was far more complex than could be taught a generation ago. Genomics is providing levels of detail that simply weren't available to earlier researchers. The author sketches the roles played by various populations of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, and their sometimes surprising contributions to the current populations of those regions. The maps and charts are particularly helpful in illustrating the discussion, which can get a little dense.

In later chapters, the author "goes there" and warns that future study may reveal differences in human populations that go beyond physical appearance. He is properly nervous about the impact of that information and how it might be misused, but determined to embrace the progress in science. Highly recommended to the general reader.

This is a truly amazing book! To fully appreciate the incredible job Prof. Reich does, you do need some science background. As an academic and practicing endocrinologist, my exposure to genetics was long ago, and, I fear, a bit superficial. After a brief introduction, Reich explains in a clear and logical way, how modern genetic analytics are done. I had no idea that on the average, each human generation has one chromosomal crossover per chromosome (!). The size of inherited segments is a good measure of how long ago a particular chromosome (or fragment thereof) entered a given population gene pool. (He explains it much more clearly). Using the 3 population and the 4 population tests, he can summarize migrations and shifts of ancient populations. Aside from a dozen pages of obligatory "politically correct" stuff, the book is uniformly excellent. The only warning is you do need a bit of scientific literacy to fully appreciate this book - otherwise, it might make your brain hurt.

I found this book a page-turner, absolutely amazing. Archaeologists, linguists, pre-historians of all stripes have struggled to discover our human pre-history. They won't be out of their jobs but they will have to incorporate what whole-genome genetics has discovered in just the last few years.

"Popular" science books have to drawn a line between a too-simple approach and a realistic view of the science. This book tends to the latter and I praise the author for it. Parts are slow-going for a dilettante like me and most rewarding. (And I especially like how the author mentions scientists by name whose work he explains.)

This is a 10-star book.

A gripping overwiew of the exploding knowlege of humanitys past, its endless migrations, mixing. Also a report from the moving frontiers of knowlege. Nobody who has not read this book can clame to know or utter anything on this field.

In my studies of evolution, I have noticed that many male "science" authors quail at the prospect of offending certain protected groups. For example, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer in A Natural History of Rape. The rated book is no exception. Take the Reich's finding that strong males had many wives and left hundreds of thousands of descendents. Why does he apologize? Perhaps because beginning at least with E. O. Wilson, male scientists have been publically humiliated, howled down, assaulted, and even had their lives threatened. Yet Reich's finding is the heart of human evolution. The male desire for a variety of women, which began with the evolution of sperm and egg sex, strengthened the human "race." It can be shown statistically that (see, ge.g., Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works) that it paid our ancestral males in terms of reproductive success to war for women. In the Bible (Numbers and Deuteronomy) you find Moses ordering his men that should any city resist, they should kill all the inhabitants but the virgins, whom they were to take to marry. So much for the ideology that dismisses the value of virginity. The defense or acquisition of women has always been the primary motivation for war. In hunter/forager groups, the best hunters and warriors have the most wives. The male brain has not changed. What has changed is ideology and the boobytraps ideology sets to derail human nature. To be sure, Reich's findings grate against PC ideologies, but are we to allow the prejudiced ideology of the moment to triumph over science? As I read him, Reich apparently would do so. Or does he really believe in the Lockean "blank slate" that underpins the current ideology? Or perhaps even Jacques Derrida's idea that all the world is text to be interpreted willy-nilly by every Pam, Nan, and Sally. Or perhaps the latest Orwellian doublespeak: the mind is set in the womb but remains malleable. Sigh! Hope springs eterne. All these roads lead to a Rome where truth is relative and the mind is up for grabs. I prefer the accomodation approach that every society once used. If boys are aggressive, and their aggression (as experiments have shown) increases with the presence of a nubile female, give them their own arena of achievement as Margaret Mead allowed. Sports, science, the workplace--all are just synonyms for "rutting arena." So an alpha male like Wilt Chamberlain can attract perhaps 20,000 women to his bed over his lifetime, as Wilt claimed in his memoirs. I know of no king who had a harem anywhere near as large. King Solomon is reputed to have had only a mere 700 in his harem, plus 300 mistresses. It may gall some ideologues but human nature is what it is. This gall you? As Anne Moir wrote (Brain Sex), get a syringe and shoot up women pregnant with an XY fetus with a load of estrogen or some androgen opposer chemical.