A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
About this book
In every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away—until now, with the invention of genomics, a tool that lets scientists decode our DNA. The implications for our identity are enormous. As acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford shows, before genomics, we never really knew much about ourselves at all. And so he rewrites all of human history—from 100,000 years ago to the present, and on topics as wide-ranging as Neanderthals and murder, redheads and race, dead kings and plague, evolution and epigenetics—using genetics to shatter deeply held beliefs about our heritage, and to replace them with new answers to some of the biggest questions of all: Who we are, and how we came to be.