Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David ReichMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was an excellent glimpse into a field I don’t know much about: sometimes I’ll see an article in some media about Neanderthal DNA or something, but I don’t have enough context to really get what’s going on. This book was an enjoyable way to get all that context; would recommend.
I didn’t really realize this before reading it, but it sounds like ancient DNA is a pretty exciting and fast-growing field; it’s just in the last decade that we’ve made enough technological advances to do whole-genome sequencing on ancient human remains, and we’ve gotten a way better understanding of human history from doing this. Tbh it made me kind of jealous: it feels like this is one of those moments where there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit and you don’t actually have to be that smart or lucky to significantly improve our understanding of early human history.
So yeah, read this to learn about:
- interbreeding with archaic humans
- agriculturalists and steppe pastoralists in Europe
- the Indus Valley civilization and its fall
- Indian caste division and endogamy
- the tribes in the Amazon who are related to Australian aborigines
- sex-asymmetric mixing between populations
etc. It’s cool.
I guess this also made me feel like I had a better overall picture of human population history, which is something like: there’s a family tree that splits and branches off, as you’d imagine. Sometimes those branches end up as hunter-gatherers on random islands and do their own thing for thousands of years. But a lot of the time the branches continue to intermingle, one of them develops some new technology or something and conquers another, then they interbreed and produce a new population, and so on.
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