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Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past Hardcover – March 27, 2018

by David Reich (Author)

2,844 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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A groundbreaking book about how ancient DNA has profoundly changed our understanding of human history.

Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry.

In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich allows readers to discover how the human genome provides not only all the information a human embryo needs to develop but also the hidden story of our species. Reich delves into how the genomic revolution is transforming our understanding of modern humans and how DNA studies reveal deep inequalities among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals. Provocatively, Reich’s book suggests that there might very well be biological differences among human populations but that these differences are unlikely to conform to common stereotypes.

Drawing upon revolutionary findings and unparalleled scientific studies, Who We Are and How We Got Here is a captivating glimpse into humankind—where we came from and what that says about our lives today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Few subjects fascinate us as much as human origins. . . . If you want to understand our origins over the course of the last 100,000 years, this book will be the best up-to-date account for you.”
—Jared Diamond, The New York Times Book Review

"The work in [Reich's] lab has reshaped our understanding of human prehistory. . . . He and his colleagues have shed light on the peopling of the planet and the spread of agriculture, among other momentous events."
—Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

"Reich documents an extraordinary moment in the history of science. . . . A potential political bombshell."
—The Wall Street Journal

"In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, David Reich . . . introduces us to the 21st-century Rosetta Stone: ancient DNA, which will do more for our understanding of prehistory than radiocarbon dating did… Who We Are and How We Got Here is less than 300 pages of text, but it is packed with startling facts and novel revelations that overturn the conventional expectations of both science and common sense.”
—The National Review

“An excerpt from David Reich's new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, recently touched off a media and cultural firestorm in the United States. Appearing as an op-ed in The New York Times, ‘How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of “Race”’, it had Reich stating that he is ‘worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.’ This was not unlike tossing a grenade into the public square. But perched at Harvard, as one of his generation's most eminent human population geneticists, Reich will move forward unscathed. The reason is simple: Who We Are . . . is mostly not a controversial book, but a wondrous one. It sheds light on the nascent field of ancient DNA, paleogenetics, which is exposing the human past by tracing population histories. Give a paleogeneticist a single genome, and they will unfurl the history of whole peoples.”
—India Today

"Ancient DNA is rewriting human (and Neanderthal) history. The genomes of the long dead are turning up all sorts of unexpected and controversial findings. Who We Are and How We Got Here, charts the myriad ways the study of ancient DNA is lobbing bombs into the halls of established wisdom."
—The Atlantic

"A thrilling account of mapping humans through time and place. . . . Genomics and statistics have drawn back the curtain on the sort of sex and power struggles you’d expect in Game of Thrones. . . . We do need a non-loaded way to talk about genetic diversity and similarities in populations. This book goes some way to starting that conversation."
—Nature

“In this comprehensive and provocative book, David Reich exhumes and examines fundamental questions about our origin and future using powerful evidence from human genetics. What does ‘race’ mean in 2018? How alike and how unlike are we? What does identity mean? Reich’s book is sobering and clear-eyed, and, in equal parts, thrilling and thought provoking. There were times that I had to stand up and clear my thoughts to continue reading this astonishing and important book.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies

“Reich’s book reads like notes from the frontline of the 'Ancient DNA Revolution' with all the spellbinding drama and intrigue that come with such a huge transformation in our understanding of human history."
—Anne Wojcicki, CEO and Co-Founder of 23andMe

“In just five years, the study of ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of world prehistory. The geneticist David Reich, one of the pioneers in this field, here gives the brilliantly lucid first account of the resulting new view of human origins and of the later dispersals that went on to shape the modern world.”
—Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archeology Emeritus, University of Cambridge

“Reich’s magisterial book gives a riveting account of human prehistory and history through the new lens provided by ancient DNA data. The story of human populations, as he shows, is ever one of widespread and repeated mixing, debunking the fiction of ‘pure’ populations.”
—Molly Przeworski, Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University

“This breathtaking book dramatically revises our understanding of the deep history of our species in our African homeland and beyond. Beautifully written, it reads like a detective novel and demonstrates a hard truth that often makes many of us uncomfortable: not only are all human beings mixed, but our intuitive understanding of the evolution of the population structure of the world around us is not to be trusted.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr., University Professor, Harvard University, and Executive Producer of Finding Your Roots

“This absorbing book will blow you away with its rich and astounding account of where we came from and why that matters. Reich tells the surprising story of how humans got to every corner of the planet, which was revealed only after he and other scientists unlocked the secrets of ancient DNA. The courageous, compassionate, and highly personal climax will transform how you think about the meaning of ancestry and race.”
—Daniel E. Lieberman, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, and author of The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Powerful writing and extraordinary insights animate this endlessly fascinating account, by a world scientific leader, of who we modern humans are and how our ancestors arrived in the diverse corners of the world. I could not put the book down.”
—Robert Weinberg, Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"David Reich uses the power of modern genome analysis to show the fascinating complexity of human migration and history. By letting the data lead him, he treads a narrow path between racists and xenophobes on one side and left-wing ideologues on the other. Although many of his conclusions will be controversial, he starts a necessary conversation about what modern genome analysis can tell us about the variability of human populations."
—Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society, London

[Praise from the UK]:

"Remarkable. . . . Spectacular. . . . In making constant new discoveries about humanity, Reich and his Harvard team are now plunging into uncharted academic waters. . . . Reich’s influence in this field has been immense and the output of his department monumental. . . . Thrilling in its clarity and its scope."
—The Guardian

"David Reich of Harvard Medical School is one of the leading lights in the field of ancient DNA. His team's work has cast a new perspective on human history, reconstructing the epic migrations and genetic exchanges that shaped the people of different regions worldwide."
—BBC

"This is a compendious book . . . its importance cannot be overstated and neither can some of its best stories."
—Sunday Times

"Who We Are and How We Got Here provides a marvellous synthesis of the field."
—Financial Times

About the Author

DAVID REICH, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, is one of the world’s leading pioneers in analyzing ancient human DNA. In a 2015 article in Nature, he was named one of ten people who matter in all of the sciences for his contribution to transforming ancient DNA data "from niche pursuit to industrial process." Awards he has received include the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Dan David Prize in the Archaeological and Natural Sciences for his computational discovery of intermixing between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part I

The Deep History of Our Species

1

How the Genome Explains Who We Are

The Master Chronicle of Human Variation

To understand why genetics is able to shed light on the human past, it is necessary to understand how the genome—defined as the full set of genetic code each of us inherits from our parents—records information. James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins showed in 1953 that the genome is written out in twin chains of about three billion chemical building blocks (six billion in all) that can be thought of as the letters of an alphabet: A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine).1 What we call a “gene” consists of tiny fragments of these chains, typically around one thousand letters long, which are used as templates to assemble the proteins that do most of the work in cells. In between the genes is noncoding DNA, sometimes referred to as “junk” DNA. The order of the letters can be read by machines that perform chemical reactions on fragments of DNA, releasing flashes of light as the reactions pass along the length of the DNA sequence. The reactions emit a different color for each of the letters A, C, G, and T, so that the sequence of letters can be scanned into a computer by a camera.

Although the great majority of scientists are focused on the biological information that is contained within the genes, there are also occasional differences between DNA sequences. These differences are due to random errors in copying of genomes (known as mutations) that occurred at some point in the past. It is these differences, occurring about one every thousand letters or so in both genes and in “junk,” that geneticists study to learn about the past. Over the approximately three billion letters, there are typically around three million differences between unrelated genomes. The higher the density of differences separating two genomes on any segment, the longer it has been since the segments shared a common ancestor as the mutations accumulate at a more or less constant rate over time. So the density of differences provides a biological stopwatch, a record of how long it has been since key events occurred in the past.

The first startling application of genetics to the study of the past involved mitochondrial DNA. This is a tiny portion of the genome—only approximately 1/200,000th of it—which is passed down along the maternal line from mother to daughter to granddaughter. In 1987, Allan Wilson and his colleagues sequenced a few hundred letters of mitochondrial DNA from diverse people around the world. By comparing the mutations that were different among these sequences, he and his colleagues were able to reconstruct a family tree of maternal relationships. What they found is that the deepest branch of the tree—the branch that left the main trunk earliest—is found today only in people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, suggesting that the ancestors of modern humans lived in Africa. In contrast, all non-Africans today descend from a later branch of the tree.2 This finding became an important part of the triumphant synthesis of archaeological and genetic and skeletal evidence that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s for the theory that modern humans descend from ancestors who lived in the last hundred thousand years or so in Africa. Based on the rate at which mutations are known to accumulate, Wilson and his colleagues estimated that the most recent African ancestor of all the branches, “Mitochondrial Eve,” lived sometime after 200,000 years ago.3 The best current estimate is around 160,000 years ago, although it is important to realize that like most genetic dates, this one is imprecise because of uncertainty about the true rate at which human mutations occur.4

The finding of such a recent common ancestor was exciting because it refuted the “multiregional hypothesis,” according to which present-day humans living in many parts of Africa and Eurasia descend substantially from an early dispersal (at least 1.8 million years ago) of Homo erectus, a species that made crude stone tools and had brains about two-thirds the size of ours. The multiregional hypothesis implied that descendants of Homo erectus evolved in parallel across Africa and Eurasia to give rise to the populations who live in the same places today. The multiregional hypothesis would therefore predict that there would be mitochondrial DNA sequences among present-day people that are separated by more than a million years, the age of the dispersal of Homo erectus and its descendants. However, the genetic data was impossible to reconcile with this prediction. The fact that all people today share a common mitochondrial DNA ancestor about ten times more recently showed that humans today largely descend from a much later expansion from Africa.

Anthropological evidence pointed to a likely scenario for what occurred. The earliest human skeletons with “anatomically modern” features—defined as falling within the range of variation of all humans today with regard to having a globular brain case and other traits—date up to around three hundred thousand years ago and are all from Africa.5 Outside of Africa and the Near East, though, there is no convincing evidence of anatomically modern humans older than a hundred thousand years ago and very limited evidence more than fifty thousand years ago.6 Archaeological evidence of stone tool types also points to a great change after fifty thousand years ago, a period known to archaeologists of West Eurasia as the Upper Paleolithic, and to archaeologists of Africa as the Later Stone Age. After this time, the manufacture of stone tools became far more efficient, and there were changes in style every few thousand years, compared to the glacial earlier pace of change. Humans in this period also began to leave behind far more artifacts that revealed their aesthetic and spiritual lives: beads made of ostrich eggshells, polished stone bracelets, body paint made from red iron oxide, and the world’s first representational art. The world’s earliest known figurine is a roughly forty-thousand-year-old “lion-man” carved from a woolly mammoth tusk, found in Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany.7 The approximately thirty-thousand-year-old drawings of pre–ice age beasts, found on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France, even today are recognizable as transcendent art.

The dramatic acceleration of change in the archaeological record after around fifty thousand years ago was also reflected by evidence of population change. The Neanderthals, who had evolved in Europe by around four hundred thousand years ago and are considered “archaic” in the sense that their body shape did not fall within present-day variation, went extinct in their last holdout of western Europe between about forty-one thousand and thirty-nine thousand years ago, within a few thousand years of the arrival of modern humans.8 Population turnovers also occurred elsewhere in Eurasia, as well as in southern Africa, where there is evidence of abandonment of sites and the sudden appearance of Later Stone Age cultures.9

The natural explanation for all these changes was the spread of an anatomically modern human population whose ancestors included “Mitochondrial Eve,” who practiced a sophisticated new culture, and who largely replaced the people who lived in each place before.

The Siren Call of the Genetic Switch

The finding that genetics could help to distinguish between competing hypotheses of human origins led in the 1980s and 1990s to exuberance about the power of the discipline to provide simple explanations. Some even wondered if genetics might be able to do more than provide a supporting line of evidence for the spread of modern humans from Africa and the Near East after around fifty thousand years ago. Perhaps genes could also be the cause of that spread, offering an explanation as simple and beautiful as the four-letter code written in DNA for the quickening pace of change in the archaeological record.

The anthropologist best known for embracing the idea that a genetic change might explain how we came to be behaviorally distinct from our predecessors was Richard Klein. He put forward the idea that the Later Stone Age revolution of Africa and the Upper Paleolithic revolution of western Eurasia, when recognizably modern human behavior burst into full flower after about fifty thousand years ago, were driven by the rise in frequency of a single mutation of a gene affecting the biology of the brain, which permitted the manufacture of innovative tools and the development of complex behavior.

According to Klein’s theory, the rise in frequency of this mutation primed humans for some enabling trait, such as the ability to use conceptual language. Klein thought that prior to the occurrence of this mutation, humans were incapable of modern behaviors. Supporting his notion are examples among other species of a small number of genetic changes that have effected major adaptations, such as the five changes that are sufficient to turn the tiny ears of the Mexican wild grass teosinte into the huge cobs of corn that we buy in the supermarket today.10

Klein’s hypothesis came under intense criticism almost as soon as he suggested it, most notably from the archaeologists Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks, who showed that almost every trait that Klein considered to be a hallmark of distinctly modern human behavior was evident in the African and Near Eastern archaeological records tens of thousands of years before the Upper Paleolithic and Later Stone Age transitions.11 But even if no single behavior was new, Klein had put his finger on something important. The intensification of evidence for modern human behavior after fifty thousand years ago is undeniable, and raises the question of whether biological change contributed to it.

One geneticist who came of age at this time of exuberance about the power of genetics to provide simple explanations for great mysteries was Svante Pääbo, who arrived in Allan Wilson’s laboratory just after the “Mitochondrial Eve” discovery, and who would go on to invent much of the toolkit of the ancient DNA revolution and to sequence the Neanderthal genome. In 2002, Pääbo and his colleagues discovered two mutations in the gene FOXP2 that seemed to be candidates for propelling the great changes that occurred after around fifty thousand years ago. The previous year, medical geneticists had identified FOXP2 as a gene that, when mutated, produces an extraordinary syndrome whose sufferers have normal-range cognitive capabilities, but cannot use complex language, including most grammar.12 Pääbo and his colleagues showed that the protein produced by the FOXP2 gene has remained almost identical during the more than hundred million years of evolution separating chimpanzees and mice. However, two changes to the protein occurred on just the human lineage since it branched out of the common ancestral population of humans and chimpanzees, suggesting that the gene had evolved much more rapidly on the human lineage.13 Later work by Pääbo and his colleagues found that engineered mice with the human versions of FOXP2 are identical to regular mice in most respects, but squeak differently, consistent with the idea that these changes affect the formation of sounds.14 These two mutations at FOXP2 cannot have contributed to the changes after fifty thousand years ago, since Neanderthals shared them,15 but Pääbo and his colleagues later identified a third mutation that is found in almost all present-day humans and that affects when and in what cells FOXP2 gets turned into protein. This change is absent in Neanderthals, and thus is a candidate for contributing to the evolution of modern humans after their separation from Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years ago.16

Regardless of how important FOXP2 itself is in modern human biology, Pääbo cites the search for the genetic basis for modern human behavior as a justification for sequencing the genomes of archaic humans.17 Between 2010 and 2013, when he led a series of studies that published whole-genome sequences from archaic humans like Neanderthals, Pääbo’s papers highlighted an evolving list of about one hundred thousand places in the genome where nearly all present-day humans carry genetic changes that are absent in Neanderthals.18 There are surely biologically important changes hiding in the list, but we are still only at the very beginning of the process of determining what they are, reflecting a more general problem that we are like kindergartners in our ability to read the genome. While we have learned to decode the individual words—as we know how the sequence of DNA letters gets turned into proteins—we still can’t parse the sentences.

The sad truth is that it is possible to count on the fingers of two hands the examples like FOXP2 of mutations that increased in frequency in modern humans under the pressure of natural selection and whose functions we partly understand. In each of these cases, the insights only came from years of hand-to-hand combat with life’s secrets by graduate students or postdoctoral scientists making engineered mice or fish, suggesting that it will take an evolutionary Manhattan Project to understand the function of each mutation that we have and that Neanderthals do not. This Manhattan Project of human evolutionary biology is one to which we as a species should commit ourselves. But even when it is carried out, I expect that the findings will be so complicated—with so many individual genetic changes contributing to what makes humans distinctive—that few people will find the answer comprehensible. While the scientific question is profoundly important, I expect that no intellectually elegant and emotionally satisfying molecular explanation for behavioral modernity will ever be found.

But even if studying just a few locations in the genome will not provide a satisfying explanation for how modern human behavior evolved, the great surprise of the genome revolution is the explanations it is starting to provide from another perspective—that of history. By comprehending the entire genome—by going beyond the tiny slice of the past sampled by our mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome and embracing the story of our past told by the multiplicity of our ancestors that is written in the record of our whole genome—we have already begun to sketch out a new picture of how we got to be the way we are. This explanation based on migrations and population mixture is the subject of this book.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 27, 2018
Edition ‏ : ‎ Illustrated
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 110187032X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101870327
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #278,917 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in Genetics (Books)
- #10 in General Anthropology

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Customers say

Customers find the book fascinating and informative, particularly praising its great discussion of cutting-edge ancient DNA research and rigorous statistical techniques. The book is up to date and worth the price, with one customer describing it as a "priceless intellectual gift to mankind." While some customers find it well-explained and easy to follow, others consider it technical and challenging to read.

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Interest Gene content Accuracy Value for money Population mix Up to date Readable Accessibility

163 customers mention "Interest"163 positive0 negative

Customers find the book very interesting and informative, with one customer noting it provides a report from the moving frontiers of knowledge.

"...However, it is worth the effort because it contains fascinating information about our past...." Read more

"...It is essential reading if one wants to know the history of the human being whose nature, as Reich unknowingly demonstrates, does not change." Read more

"Also well worth reading: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution [..." Read more

"...with the second being the most substantial/ The author starts with some quick biology and discusses the genome and the way in which it can be..." Read more

117 customers mention "Gene content"107 positive10 negative

Customers appreciate the genetic content of the book, which provides a deeper understanding of DNA anthropologic research and fascinating topics in human evolution. One customer notes it serves as a good introductory book for evolution and genetics enthusiasts.

"...Reich begins the book by providing a readable, succinct primer on biology and DNA, which is essential to someone like me bereft of training in..." Read more

"...I think this work of his is producing one of the great achievements of Mankind...." Read more

"...The author is a professor of genetics at Harvard, and over the last decade has been working with applied mathematician Nick Patterson to analyze..." Read more

"...read, but a very stimulating one, both for the specific applications of ancient DNA technology and for an overview of the capabilities of the..." Read more

17 customers mention "Accuracy"17 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's accuracy, praising its rigorous statistical techniques and excellent breakdown of the subject matter.

"...This is a solid, quick read for anyone interested in ancient history, genetics, and ancestry." Read more

"...The book, grounded in entirely new data and rigorous statistical techniques, gives us a brand new understanding of who we, as humans, are and where..." Read more

"...as the author laid the foundation of his research, but the struggle was well worth it! His conclusions are the heart of this book!..." Read more

"...knowledge beyond thousands of years of human history with an unimaginable precision and richness of data...." Read more

8 customers mention "Value for money"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book worth its price, with one describing it as a priceless intellectual gift to mankind.

"...only to urge the hesitant amateur to give it a try........the book is not expensive and, yes, as usual in this type of Amazon book downloaded to one..." Read more

"...techniques for deciphering whole genomes rapidly and (relatively) inexpensively together with statistical methods for extracting meaning out of huge..." Read more

"...This final section of the book is alone worth the price of the entire book. This is a "must read" book." Read more

"This book is well written. The seller is very good. I was looking for a book covering the latest in DNA...." Read more

7 customers mention "Population mix"7 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's exploration of population mix, with one customer highlighting the mixture of highly differentiated groups, while another notes the reproductive mixing of various groups.

"...of humanity across the globe, how humans interacted and DNA mixed between different groups. Excellent book, fascinating reading." Read more

"...Clear demonstration of multiple migrations and population replacements and mixing...." Read more

"...THEIR ancestors, which reveals the relationships and reproductive mixing of various groups...." Read more

"...fascinating research from the last ten years on how population mixtures formed humanity...." Read more

7 customers mention "Up to date"7 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate that the book is very up to date.

"This is an important book; it is a timely book; it is an extremely thought-provoking book...." Read more

"...Lots of new and good information on Ancient DNA research. It is a very interesting book and I learned a lot...." Read more

"...of the main scientist in the field, is very readable and, today, very current...." Read more

"This book is simply amazing. It gives you an updated review of an extremely exciting scientific field that is rapidly developing at the moment...." Read more

113 customers mention "Readable"74 positive39 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the readability of the book, with some praising the author's excellent knowledge and writing skills, while others find it not an easy read for the nonspecialist and note that the illustrations are very hard to read.

"...perhaps didn’t anticipate. Reich begins the book by providing a readable, succinct primer on biology and DNA, which is essential to someone..." Read more

"...has tried to make the book accessible to non-experts, but it is not an easy read...." Read more

"...This part of the book is readable but somewhat irrelevant to the major core which is to better understand human migration and mixing of the past..." Read more

"...valley which was already mostly abandoned. Overall, a very well-researched and excellent body of knowledge." Read more

14 customers mention "Accessibility"9 positive5 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's accessibility, with some finding it easy to follow while others describe it as unusually challenging.

"...Reich has tried to make the book accessible to non-experts, but it is not an easy read...." Read more

"...However, it is hard to follow sometimes because the author tends to jump around the topic and infiltrate it with his personal life, belief, and..." Read more

"...The book is written with a minimum of jargon and is accessible to the scientific laymen...." Read more

"...exceptionally well-written, it is authoritative and yet clear and easy to follow...." Read more

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David Lindsay
This is a must read for anyone interested in our past
Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2020
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Reich is a geneticist at Harvard’s Medical School. Recent advances in DNA sequencing have made it possible to extract sequences from humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Those ancient human remains can help explain who we are and where we came from. DNA can reveal something of human population migrations over time. It also tells us that Europeans are a mixture of ancient peoples. Reich has tried to make the book accessible to non-experts, but it is not an easy read. However, it is worth the effort because it contains fascinating information about our past.

Modern people are often unrelated to the people who lived in the same area in the past. The ancestors of the modern British arrived 4,400 years ago and replaced the people who built Stonehenge. The Bell Beaker people (named after their pots) traveled to Britain and replaced 90% of the indigenous population. Similar migrations and population mixtures characterize human prehistory on all continents. Ancient DNA teaches us that the population in any one place has often changed many times since the great human post-ice age expansion. Once invaders moved into an area, they have tended to kill off the men and breed with the local women. The mixing of peoples has been commonplace and Europeans are essentially mongrels.

Homer described societies in which warlords gained prestige and wealth through plunder and rape. It is similar to what we now know of the Yamnaya (the Beaker people represented the far western wave of Yamnaya migrations). Of theirs and other such male-dominant migrations, Reich comments: “Males from populations with more power tend to pair with females from populations with less.”

Modern humans emerged out of Africa 50,000 years ago. Our species is alone today, but we used to share the planet with other human species, like Neanderthals and Denisovans. We interbred with Neanderthals about 50,000 years ago. As a result, Europeans are about 2% Neanderthal. Within a few thousand years, the Neanderthals were extinct. Given our track record, our ancestors probably had something to do with it.

Farming was invented in the Near East 11-12,000 years ago. Ten thousand years ago Europeans were a mixture of four main groups: Iranian farmers, Levant farmers, western hunter-gatherers, and eastern hunter-gatherers. The four population groups mixed together in different proportions in different countries. Europe was later transformed by two great migrations. The first was 8500 years ago and involved near eastern farmers. Farmers arrived from Anatolia (modern Turkey) and mixed with the local populations, this is the largest source of ancestry in Europeans today. A second, later migration came from the Eurasian Steppe. The Steppe includes the grass plains bordering the Black and Caspian seas. “People [from the Steppes] took advantage of two powerful inventions: the wheel and the domestication of the horse,” said Reich. “They were able to exploit the grasslands of the Steppes in a way that hadn’t been done before."

In 1786, Sir William Jones a Briton living in Calcutta discovered that Sanskrit and ancient Greek were related languages. Indo-European languages are all very similar. Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit have common words for wheels, horses, and carts. This led to the recognition of the vast Indo-European language family – which includes the Germanic, Celtic, Italic, near eastern (Iranian), and north Indian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, etc). Until recently there was no consensus on how this might have occurred. Reich has now shown that the Indo-European languages and the largest single component of the genetic makeup of Europe and North India today stem from the Steppe migrations around 4,500 ago. Most people of European descent have close genetic and linguistic ties with near eastern and north Indian peoples.

The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans, and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of Darwinian evolution to work. Reich found himself criticized after publishing an Op-Ed in the New York Times in 2018, based on this book. He claimed that ancient DNA reveals “hard evidence of substantial differences across populations." Reich claimed that because of political correctness scientists are unwilling to do research on genetic variation between human populations, despite the fact that genetic variations do exist. “It is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races,’” he wrote.

The recent Coronavirus pandemic has illustrated that susceptibility to particular diseases may differ among different populations. There have been calls for the higher mortality rates among African-Americans to be investigated. We know that genetic factors help explain why multiple sclerosis is more common in European-Americans than in African-Americans, and why the reverse is true for end-stage kidney disease. We also know that genetics probably explains why northern Europeans are taller on average than southern Europeans. Reich argues that if scientists in the West don’t investigate these differences the Chinese will. However, many people in the West remember the horrors of Nazi Germany and the way eugenics was used to justify the regime's atrocities. Academics are probably wary about emphasizing racial differences because of the way science was misused in the past.

Some readers from countries that take their origin myths seriously may find Reich’s conclusions unpalatable. Reich’s Indian collaborators did not like hearing that their own DNA samples attested to massive past migrations into the Indian subcontinent. The Japanese may not like that they share 80 percent of their DNA with Koreans. This is a fascinating book that changes the way we should think about our past.

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FloridaMan
Full of discoveries
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2023
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
It is humans, according to the Sophists, that make things good or bad. And, granting certain exceptions, this is largely true. David Reich’s book “Who We Are and How We Got Here” proves this ancient observation yet again with regard to the power of DNA technology. He also demonstrates that human nature is immutable, though in a way he perhaps didn’t anticipate.
Reich begins the book by providing a readable, succinct primer on biology and DNA, which is essential to someone like me bereft of training in those fields. He quickly moves into the meat of the book and discusses what DNA technology can and can’t tell us about how humans become human and the past movements of peoples. It turns out that it can tell us quite a lot while still leaving large, possibly unanswerable questions before us.
One debate that DNA has settled is the question of whether Neanderthals and homo sapiens interbred. That answer is a flat “yes.” Non-African humans contain up to two percent Neanderthal DNA and East Asians contain even a bit more. DNA also confirmed the existence of the Denisovans, a hominin that split off the lineage that also produced Neanderthals and humans. Finally, the use of DNA put to rest the theory that modern humans evolved into one common species in several locations throughout the world. In fact, modern humans evolved first in Africa and spread thence, eventually outcompeting other hominid beings and dominating the planet.
The book is dense with facts that I prefer to leave them to the reader to discover rather than hastily relate them in a review. The story of how Europeans became European, the origins of modern Indians, and how the Americas were populated is all here. In addition, the reader will learn how and why certain diseases get transmitted through certain populations at higher rates than others.
My one gripe with the author is he can’t resist scoring political points and virtue signaling at the expense of a great man and in the process tarnishes his own honor. Reich starts off well. He is preoccupied throughout his book that some will take the power of DNA research and pervert it towards a malign end. After all, this is precisely with the Nazis did, using pseudoscience to justify race war. In contrast, Reich uses DNA evidence to puncture some of the still extant race myths and pleas for the responsible use of the technology.
But then he turns to James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA’s structure, and a whispered discussion they once had at a conference in 2010. Apparently- allegedly- Mr. Watson made a few benighted observations about Indians and East Asians. If true, the comments were certainly distasteful; but they were whispered to Reich, clearly something not intended for wide broadcast. They were said in confidence by a man who was 82 years old at the time. By retailing them in a book Reich looks to be scoring cheap points against a titan of his field and reveals himself to be at once a grandstander and a jealous upstart. It’s simply poor form and completely unnecessary to proving his larger point.
Overall, this is a decently-written book with valuable information. It is essential reading if one wants to know the history of the human being whose nature, as Reich unknowingly demonstrates, does not change.

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淡路
Good
Reviewed in Japan on March 24, 2021
Format: KindleVerified Purchase

Good, but not easy to read.
Introductory but clumsy.

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Esam M. Al Eissa
Hard Reading
Reviewed in Saudi Arabia on April 8, 2023
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
The material is very enjoyable, but the writing is hard to grasp. Although English is not my mother tongue, I have read hundreds of books without issues, specifically if the author is American. But this book was a hard read for me. The sentences are long, and I had to repeatedly reread sentences. I wonder if native English speakers had difficulty reading this book as I did.

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Eric Burgess
Currently the best book on Ancient DNA, a fascinating read.
Reviewed in Canada on November 18, 2019
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
This fascinating book carries forward from previous works on ancient DNA and puts to rest competing theories on the genetic makeup and history of Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The author does a good job of discussing ethical issues and cultural sensitivities. The big contribution this books brings to its audience is explaining the ghost populations of the past and how these populations explain some of the strange results we see in ancient DNA. For those interested in Ancient DNA and genetic anthropology this book is a real page turner.

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Eff
What We (Think We) Know about Where We Come From
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2018
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David Reich is one of the leading population geneticists alive, and this book is about how DNA evidence helps us understand the relationships between population groups. When and which people migrated into Europe? Where do the the people of Papua New Guinea come from? Genetic differences between peoples help us answer such questions... and many more.

This book contains good explanations of which techniques are used to analyze population genetics. Why these methods work and what their limitations are is discussed. Of course, the most important topic is the findings of these methods. DNA analysis has in many cases confirmed things we already knew from other types of evidence; archeology and fossil evidence and such. However, in many cases, the science of DNA analysis has forced us to reinterpret what we thought we knew. This is the power of genetics; it can be analyzed to get us one step closer to understanding what humans are.

Genetics has a controversial history, obviously. Yet, I still find his need for 'justifying' doing research in genetics a pity. As people of science, we should know what's true whether we like the truth or not. He agrees, but unfortunately in his desire to appear non-racist he throws good scientists under the bus. Some are bad and his harsh criticism is justified, sure, but some of the people criticized simply had totally reasonable scientific questions. This is my only substantial criticism of the book.

The science and technology of DNA analysis is progressing at an amazing rate. It will help us answer all kinds of questions. It will be used in medicine, to understand psychological differences between humans, and much, much more. As the science progresses, many things we think we know will be questioned.

Despite my one criticism, the book in general is amazing. This is simply *the* book to read if you're interested in human origins, human differences and similarities, or simply if you're interested in where you come from. This book gives the current best scientific understanding of Who We Are and Where We Come From.

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BB
I'd give this six stars if I could - a masterful summary of the current research
Reviewed in Australia on January 5, 2021
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David Reich is one of the leading practitioners in the new field of analysing ancient human DNA. This field is turning much of what we thought we knew about human prehistory on its head. This book updates what we know now, and makes me want to throw out some of my older books on the topic, such as Bryan Sykes' "Seven Daughters of Eve" and anything by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, as outdated.

I'm particularly grateful to Professor Reich not only for a fascinating, clearly written exposition of the latest findings. He should also be commended for the sensitive and thoughtful discussion of some of the ethical dilemmas in this field. These include the appropriate handling of remains that might be associated with indigenous peoples, and interpreting the science and what it means for concepts of "race". I also appreciated the straightforward acknowledgement that there ARE biological differences between the two sexes, but that these differences have no bearing on equality under the law or how individuals should be treated in terms of their own specific abilities. (In other words, yes, men are overwhelmingly taller and stronger than women, and while this might have implications for collective activity like sports or who gets housed in which jail, it doesn't and shouldn't determine who should do what job, who can have what hobby, who should get the vote or how people should be treated in social interactions. Nor should we assume the sex of ancient remains from the items buried with those remains.)

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Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past Hardcover – March 27, 2018

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5.0 out of 5 stars This is a must read for anyone interested in our past

4.0 out of 5 stars Full of discoveries

Top reviews from other countries

4.0 out of 5 stars Good

3.0 out of 5 stars Hard Reading

5.0 out of 5 stars Currently the best book on Ancient DNA, a fascinating read.

5.0 out of 5 stars What We (Think We) Know about Where We Come From

5.0 out of 5 stars I'd give this six stars if I could - a masterful summary of the current research

This is a must read for anyone interested in our past

Full of discoveries

Good

Hard Reading

Currently the best book on Ancient DNA, a fascinating read.

What We (Think We) Know about Where We Come From

I'd give this six stars if I could - a masterful summary of the current research