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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... spoken in the Americas - over 600 by some estimates – have long been a contentious issue for linguists . Are they related to each other , or is their diversity simply too great to be subsumed into a few language ' families ' ? Amer ...
... spoken in the Caucasus , while others find similarities to Burushaski , a language isolate spoken in a remote part of Pakistan . Similarly , there were other now - extinct languages spoken throughout the Mediterranean world , in south ...
... spoken by 90 per cent of the people in the world despite the fact that linguists recognize over 6,000 distinct tongues . Clearly , most are spoken by only a few people . The future of most of these languages is uncertain at best ...