This effervescent book contains the latest thinking on the African origins of Homo sapiens and asks what our genes can really command usIn trying to categorise a fresh arrival in the film Mean Girls one character asks: “whether you’re from Africa,how come you’re white? The mean girl cannot have been paying attention in class, because, and as Adam Rutherford reminds us so elegantly in his latest book,we are all African – originally. The only homo sapiens on the planet 100000 years ago were in Africa.
The mean girl can be forgiven her ignorance, since the way many of us (lay people and professionals alike) have been taught approximately our origins is flawed. The neat family trees and branch lines charting the regular progress of evolution, or those ubiquitous illustrations of the ascent of humans,in which we evolve step by step from bent-over apes to straight-backed homo sapiens, are not just simplistic, and they are a profound misshaping of the truth.
Rutherford argues that rather than halting the advance of gene science,we all need to have our genomes sequencedContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com