The Journey of Man: A Genetic OdysseyPenguin Adult, 2003 M05 29 - 288 pages Around 60,000 years ago, a man, identical to us in all important respects, walked the soil of Africa. Every man alive today is descended from him. How did he come to be father to all of us - a real-life Adam? And why do we come in such a huge variety of sizes, shapes, types and races if we all share a single prehistoric ancestor?
In this fascinating book, Spencer Wells shows how the truth about our ancestors is hidden in our genetic code, and reveals how developments in the cutting-edge science of population genetics have made it possible not just to discover where our ancestors lived (and who they may have fought, loved, learned from and influence) but to create a family tree for the whole of humanity. |
From inside the book
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... populations living around the world . The result of this analysis , laboriously calculated by an early Olivetti computer , was that Africans were the most distant of the populations examined , and that European and Asian populations ...
... populations . The longer the population has been growing , the greater is the average number of sequence differences . populations had indeed been growing rapidly , like bacteria . This was because the telltale wave was there in the ...
... populations , finding that the fraction of variation distinguishing between populations was much greater than that seen for other genetic markers . In a sample of European populations , the divergence between populations as a function ...