A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

448 Pages·2010·3.61 MB·English

by  Adam Rutherford

I was tutored and schooled by Professor Steve Jones, at University College
London and beyond. On the first day of his undergraduate genetics course in
1994, he offered to compensate any of us impoverished students the profit if we
bought a copy of his masterpiece The Language of the Genes. I claimed that 55
pence. Over the years he has influenced me intellectually perhaps more than
anyone else, and in many ways, this book is, with his permission, a continuation
of that classic. In 2012, when I was invited to give a prestigious lecture for the
British Humanist Association, Steve introduced me. He joked, I hope, that he
had a strong sense that I was waiting for him to die so I could truly inherit his
living. Because he’s still not dead, and for the 55 pence, I dedicate this book to
STEVE JONES
CONTENTS
Foreword by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Author’s note
Introduction
Part One: How We Came to Be
1. Horny and mobile
2. The first European union
3. These American lands
4. When we were kings
Part Two: Who We Are Now
5. The end of race
6. The most wondrous map ever produced by humankind
7. Fate
8. A short introduction to the future of humankind
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Glossary
References and further reading
Text and image credits
Index
About the Author
FOREWORD
BY SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE
It is humbling to introduce the North American edition of Adam Rutherford’s
monumental A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. Ambitious, wide-
ranging, and deeply researched, Rutherford’s book sets out to describe the
history of the human species—from our origins as a slight, sly, naked, apelike
creature somewhere in Africa to our gradual spread across the globe and our
dominion over the planet. In academic circles, it is becoming fashionable to use
the word anthropocene to describe the current epoch, when humans have begun
to have significant effect on the earth and the environment. We have, in short,
reshaped the world that we live in, but Rutherford turns our attention to a
somewhat different, if equally essential, question: How did the world—biology,
environment, culture—shape us?
The key idea that Rutherford unveils in this riveting volume is that human
genomics—the study of our DNA—is radically altering our understanding of our
own past. Traditionally, we have investigated questions of human origin by
studying biological and cultural artifacts—skeletons, tools, architectural remains,
books, stories, language, rituals. But the genome, Rutherford argues, is also an
artifact: It stores powerful information about heritage, enabling scientists to
reconstruct human origin based on that information alone. Did the first settlers in
North America arrive across the Bering Strait several thousand years ago?
Where and when did Homo sapiens coexist and interbreed with Neanderthals?
How old are we as a species, and how, exactly, do we define where we were
“born”? The study of human DNA is unveiling astonishingly novel insights into
such questions, Rutherford writes. Indeed, one of the most surprising features of
the genetic investigation of human history (as opposed to more traditional means
of approaching the question) is the number of myths and fallacies that human
genomics has already overturned, and how much of what seemed known and
well established is, in fact, unknown and steeped in ambiguity.
In this edition, Rutherford tackles a few thorny concerns that are particularly
relevant to our side of the world. Our attempt to reconstruct the early history of
human settlement in North America has been dramatically reshaped by modern
genomics. By studying genes, we might be able to understand the migration
patterns of humans across this continent, decipher the lineal relationships
between tribes, and even track the first genetic intersections between Native
Americans and European settlers. But this knowledge has not been easy to come
by, Rutherford argues. We know much less about American history than we
could know because of the unique manner in which the United States developed.
The profound failures in the relationships between Native Americans and
European settlers—failures driven, in large part, by the toxic legacy of
colonialism—have made it impossible, at times, to answer some of the
fundamental questions about the origins of humans in the Americas. It is a
strange shame that our cultural history has made it monumentally difficult to
unearth our biological and anthropological history.
Rutherford is hopeful that this shadow of suspicion and distrust will finally
ease, enabling scientists to be able to train the ever-expanding—and ever-more-
acute—lenses of genome technologies on the history of the Americas. The
capacity to sequence, analyze, and store vast troves of genetic information has
made it possible, in principle, to answer deep questions about American history.
The reconstruction of ancestry—previously a parlor game that could only be
played by the ultrarich—is being popularized and commercialized: With a cheek
swab, a drop of saliva, and a few hundred dollars (as the infomercials on TV and
the web exhort us), we can now easily obtain information about our individual
heritage. But the reconstruction of our national past is unlikely to be easy, he
writes. To make inroads into this uncharted continent of genomics, we must first
tackle the legacy of European colonialism with caution, openness, and fortitude.
This kind of wisdom—rarely to be found in academic textbooks of genetics—
catapults Rutherford’s book beyond the realm of popular science writing into the
domains of philosophy, history of science, and cultural studies.
The study of DNA—the molecule that stores information about heritage—is
a rather modern idea. (Indeed, we did not know that DNA was the carrier of
genetic information until the 1950s. The elegant double-helix structure of the
most beautiful molecule in biology was solved just sixty-four years ago, and the
genetic code was only deciphered in the early ’60s.) But the desire to understand
heritage, Rutherford reminds us, is an ancient desire—and twisted into that
desire are our concerns about identity and relationships, and our sense of self. As
Rutherford concludes, we cannot investigate “heritage” simply by studying
DNA; we also need to understand the social and political history of heritage. In
this endlessly intriguing book, we are thus not just presented with the mini-
history of the human genome, but also with a sweeping history of our attempt to
grapple with the human genome.
SM
June 2017
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE is the author of The Gene and the Pulitzer Prize–
winning The Emperor of All Maladies.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Science demands collaboration. There are no lone geniuses, never evil geniuses,
and very rarely any heretical geniuses. Almost all science is done by very normal
people working in teams or in cahoots with others in similar or dissimilar fields,
and they build knowledge on the shoulders of historical and contemporary
giants, as Isaac Newton once suggested, parroting the words of the eleventh-
century philosopher Bernard of Chartres, who was referencing the Greek myth
of the temporarily blinded hunter Orion, who saw further by sitting a dwarf on
his shoulders.
The science in this book is perhaps more collaborative than most, as it
involves the introduction of a new discipline, genomics, into older ones, namely
history, archaeology, paleoanthropology, medicine, and psychology. Author lists
of genetics papers can now run into the dozens, hundreds, and occasionally
thousands. Long gone are the days when Victorian gentlemen could idle away
their inheritances in hot pursuit of the fabric of nature.
Many people have helped me with the writing of this book, and I have used
numerous research papers, which are listed at the back. For the most part,
though, I have not included specific references in the text, nor individual
researchers, simply to add to the flow of the stories herein. A large number of
the studies involve Mark Thomas at University College London, and I am very
grateful for his guidance and friendship over the years. The particular field of
ancient DNA is led by a few labs currently, though it is spreading at a feverish
pace as the techniques become better and easier to deploy, and as more and more
data is accrued. Several of these tales are drawn from the work of Svante Pääbo,
Turi King and the Richard III project, Joe Pickrell, David Reich, Josh Akey,
Joachim Burger, Graham Coop, Johannes Krause, and a few others, who have all
helped me directly or indirectly. The work is theirs; any errors are mine. There is
a glossary of some of the technical or less than friendly terms that geneticists
use.
Introduction
“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches . . . Light will be thrown
on the origin of man and his history.”
“Chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion” in On the Origin of Species by Charles
Darwin, 1859
This is a story about you. It concerns the tale of who you are and how you came
to be. It is your individual story, because the journey of life that alights at your
existence is unique, as it is for every person who has ever drawn breath. And it’s
also our collective story, because as an ambassador for the whole of our species,
you are both typical and exceptional. Despite our differences, all humans are
remarkably close relatives, and our family tree is pollarded, and tortuous, and
not in the slightest bit like a tree. But we are the fruit thereof.
Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though
this number depends on when exactly you start counting. All of them—of us—
are close cousins, because our species has a single African origin. We don’t
quite have the language to describe what that really means. It doesn’t, for
example, mean a single couple, a hypothetical Adam and Eve. We think of
families and pedigrees and genealogies and ancestry, and we try to think of the
deep past in the same way. Who were my ancestors? You might have a simple,
traditional family structure or, one like mine, handsomely untidy, its tendrils
jumbled like old wires in a drawer. But no matter which, everyone’s past
becomes muddled sooner or later.
We all have two parents, and they had two parents, and all of them had two
parents, and so on. Keep going like this all the way back to the last time England
was invaded, and you’ll see that doubling each generation results in more people
than have ever lived, by many billions. The truth is that our pedigrees fold in on
themselves, the branches loop back and become nets, and all of us who have
ever lived have done so enmeshed in a web of ancestry. We only have to go back
a few dozen centuries to see that most of the 7 billion of us alive today are