Reflections of Our Past
How Human History Is Revealed in Our Genes
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- 41,99 €
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- 41,99 €
Publisher Description
The rise of the multi-billion dollar ancestry testing industry points to one immutable truth about us as human beings: we want to know where we come from and who our ancestors were. John H. Relethford and Deborah A. Bolnick explore this topic and many more in this second edition of Reflections of Our Past.
Where did modern humans come from and how important are the biological differences among us? Are we descended from Neandertals? How should we understand the connections between genetic ancestry, race, and identity? Were Native Americans the first to inhabit the Americas? Can we see evidence of the Viking invasions of Ireland a millennium ago even in the Irish of today? Through engaging examination of issues such as these, and using non-technical language, Reflections of Our Past shows how anthropologists use genetic information to suggest answers to fundamental questions about human history. By looking at genetic variation in the world today and in the past, we can reconstruct the recent and remote events and processes that have created the variation we see, providing a fascinating reflection of our genetic past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gem of a book, Relethford, an anthropologist at SUNY Oneonta, examines how members of his field use genetic information to shed light on human origins and prehistory, and he questions some orthodox views along the way. Through intuitive examples and friendly analogies, Relethford shows the lay reader why our closest living relatives are the African apes and how one's method of genetic classification depends on the questions one is trying to answer. Examining how our genetic variations inform us about our origins, he tentatively challenges current views by proposing that not all of our ancestors originated in Africa 150,000 years ago--some came from other continents. Then there is the question of what happened to the ill-fated Neanderthals: Relethford shows that differences between Neanderthal and present human DNA are not as great as we might think, and concludes that perhaps Neanderthals were bred out of existence by mixing with a numerically superior gene pool. The remainder of the book shows how genetic data from living human populations can be used to reconstruct the past. The author touches on the Kennewick Man controversy (the skeleton found in Washington state was dated at 9,600 years old yet appeared European), concluding that he was probably not Caucasian but in fact a precursor to Native Americans. There are also chapters on the origins of the Polynesians, the genetic history of Ireland and ever-interesting case studies of genetic admixture such as the Jewish diaspora and the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings affair.
