Mapping Human History
Unravelling the Mystery of Adam and Eve
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- R$ 82,90
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- R$ 82,90
Descrição da editora
150,000 years of human existence have passed, and yet what do we really know about our history before the advent of writing? Some of the most momentous events - including our origins, our migrations across the globe, and our acquisition of language - were lost in the darkness of 'prehistory'. But at last geneticists and other scientists are piecing together a history - the true story of Adam and Eve. Mapping Human History is nothing less than a 'history of prehistory'. Steve Olson travelled through four continents to discover the development of humans and our expansion throughout the planet. He describes, for example, new thinking about how centres of agriculture sprang up among disparate foraging societies at roughly the same time. He tells why most of us can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius among our forebears. He pinpoints why the ways in which the story of the Jewish people jibes with, and diverges from, biblical accounts. And using very recent genetic findings, he explodes the myth that human races are a biological reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Genetic research is now about to end our long misadventure with the idea of race," science writer Olson (Shaping the Future) states in this engaging reevaluation of humanity's collective self-image. Olson digests the recent findings of geneticists, linguists and archeologists. Despite people's outward physical differences, he assures readers, mitochondrial DNA does not lie: every one of the six billion people on the planet today is descended from a single "Eve" who lived in Eastern Africa around 150,000 years ago. The causes of physical diversity which he calls "the single most important question in all of human biology" are natural selection and "genetic happenstance." The notion of biologically based racial differences in habits, temperament or lifestyle, Olson argues, is pure bunk. He traces the history of human civilization in five regions of the world Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Europe and the Americas, plus a final chapter on Hawaii to explain how physical differences originated and to provide evidence of our essential sameness. Noteworthy are his fine chapters on encounters between Neanderthals and our early modern forebears; the way agriculture spawned ethnicity, kinship and nationalism in the Middle East; and the basic similarities among the more than 5,000 languages spoken on the planet. Though Olson spreads himself a little thin tackling the origins of race and the origins of language in a single concise volume, this is an engaging and fast-paced look at a subject that has profound implications for our everyday lives.
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