A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

"Average" according to Alejandro Gaviria. This book is a readable introduction to both the exciting findings and exaggerated claims of modern genetics. The author describes, first, a growing (and somewhat chaotic) area of research that uses genetic analysis to uncover the relentless and complex occupation of planet Earth by a band of brainy and horny Africans, starting 100.000 years ago. He also describes how our genomes reveal the sexual contacts of our ancestors with other hominids (Neanderthals and Denisovans in particular), and how culture, tec. This is a superb book & a great example of science communication at its best Alison This is a superb book & a great example of science communication at its best. The book is intended for a general audience but, as someone who's been teaching human evolution and introductory genetics for a long time now, I found there were still new things to learn from it (especially the historical contexts from the last 500 years or so). Rutherford slips in quite a lot of genetics (which is, after all, the unifying theme of his narrative) but in a way that wouldn't put off a reader with no background in t. "and a good book for beginners to the subject" according to Amazon Customer. An informative book for anyone interested in genetics and family history, what they mean in the context of genealogical research, how diseases are passed along family lines, and a good book for beginners to the subject, science in easy to understand language. Funny, irreverent, at times but you would never call it dull. A good read, and well worth the money.

But those stories have always been locked away—until now, with the invention of genomics, a tool that lets scientists decode our DNA. In every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. And so he rewrites all of human history—from 100,000 years ago to the present, and on topics as wide-ranging as Neanderthals and murder, redheads and race, dead kings and plague, evolution and epigenetics—using genetics to shatter deeply held beliefs about our heritage, and to replace them with new answers to some of the biggest questions of all: Who we are, and how we came to be. As acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford shows, before genomics, we never really knew much about ourselves at all. The implications for ou

And on the way, he reveals what DNA can—and can’t—tell us about ourselves, our history and our deep evolutionary heritage. Demonstrating these divergent concepts is not easy. I love the many meanders that Rutherford takes along the way, whether it’s the horrendously inbred family tree of the Hapsburgs resulting in the sad case of Charles II, or the unique genetic laboratory provided by the small and relatively isolated population of Iceland. If you know little about the human story, you will be spellbound. Rutherford, a trained geneticist, is an enthusiastic guide. It’s that good.”—Brian Cox “Rutherford takes off on an extraordinary adventure, following the wandering trail of DNA across the globe and back in time. In his exploration of ‘the stories in our genes’ that word stories