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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... sequence took a long time . In the mid - 1970s , however , Walter Gilbert and Fred Sanger independently developed methods for rapidly obtaining DNA sequences , for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1977. The ability to sequence DNA ...
... sequence of nucleotides in a DNA molecule . This is because biochemical tech- niques can generate DNA fragments of a particular length based on their sequence . After the fragments are generated , they can be separated by passing them ...
... sequence . What he saw when he pieced it together was extraordinary . Krings relates the first glimpse of the 40,000 - year - old DNA : I basically knew the sequence by heart . . . and I was certainly able to spot a substitution [ DNA ...