John Mundy

Why do Dogs Bark?, Feb 16 2009

Nicholas Wade has written a really interesting book. He is a journalist for the New York Times who has assimilated the most recent research into the prehistory of our species. He brings to life the excitement that specialists in this field must feel by explaining how the science of genetics has led to deep new insights into our human journey out of Africa some 50,000 years ago.

Apparently, we non-Africans descend from a single group of perhaps no more than 150 hunter-gatherers who left Africa across the southern end of the Red Sea and over the next several thousand years spread across the rest of the globe. Wade describes these ancestors of ours, who were most probably clothed… Read more