Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

Really fun science book, warts and all. The author is up front at the beginning he's a lead scientist active in the area and is going to focus mostly on the research he and his colleagues are doing. The book is not a full overview of archaeology or genomics or the History of Humankind.

What it is, is a fantastic detailed look into the cutting edge of genomics research into the history of humanity. And he wrote it at a time where new techniques are just becoming available so there's a whole lot of juicy detail in it. Very well explained, in detail. Sometimes a little too much detail, or perhaps not enough. I was left being impressed that some of the statistical methods they were using worked at all, but no real idea how they worked. That's OK, glad to take the author's word for it.

The broad story he comes away with is that humans have mixed a whole lot more often than you'd think. For instance, the current folks living in Europe are genetically a result of a migration that only happened 5-6000 years ago. There are previous populations of homo sapiens, and also Neanderthal, that were only recently overwhelmed by migrants. That same broad story seems true all over the world with many more groups and migrations than previously believed. It's a fascinating story and I can't wait to read it again in, oh, twenty years when the new science has become commonplace and reached a consensus.

I also appreciated the author's sensitivity to some of the social implications of this kind of genetics work, including the whole last section of the book. He owns up carefully to the bad history of anthropology leading to, say, Nazi ideas of purity. But he's not fully willing to bow to political orthodoxy either; he walks a very fine line in emphasizing that there are real genetic differences in current human populations, just that they don't mean what the racists claim they do.

Anyway, read this if you want a fascinating view of the cutting edge of genomics and anthropology. Or wait a few years for this stuff to become more widespread and someone writes a new History of Humanity that becomes the standard view. At least until the next scientific advance rewrites it again with new evidence.