Customer Reviews

Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins

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It is a fortunate fact of history that wrongful prejudice can scare bear the light of truthful inquiry. Olson provides this truthful inquiry in his search for the origins and migrations of the human race from the African continent of 150,000 years ago to today. For those who have or would claim a "superior race" they find quick and strong rebuke in the fact of a common racial human origin. Today, there are some seven billion people on the planet. Two thousand years ago, that figure was around 200 million. One hundred thousand years ago, that figure was around 10,000. Ten thousand humans lived in Africa 100,000 years ago. We are therefore all litterally extended brothers and sisters. This book is the story of our race told through the unbiased perspective of our mitochondrial DNA. For those straining to recall high school science, our mitochondria are power plants of our cells. In evolutionary prehistory, they merged with regular cells before humans even existed. Because of the nature in how they are passed on, their DNA can be uniquely examined with an eye toward reviewing our maternal history. In this way, the story of our mothers becomes the story of us, taking us all back to same stooped endangered group of humans living in prehistoric Africa. This book is an excellent book to be read in conjunction with other historical studies, anthropological studies or studies on human development. Olson's accessible writing style makes his points easy to grasp and his obvious enthusiasm contagiously makes you want to read on and better understand.

FOUND THIS BOOK THE BEST ON THE SUBJECT THAT I HAVE EVER READ! HIGHLY READABLE (NON-TECHNICAL) FOR US "LAYMAN" - WOULD NOT PART WITH MY EDITION AS I WILL BE RE-READING IT FOR SOME TIME TO COME! IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN THIS SUBJECT I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS THOUGHTFUL, INFORMATIVE, AND OBJECTIVE HISTORY OF THE ORIGINS AND DISTRIBUTION OF "MODERN MANKIND".

Steve Olson's Mapping Human History is an excellent introduction to historical genetics, and indeed it has been called by the New Scientist as "the most balanced, accessible and up-to-date survey of the field currently available." It is written by a renowned science journalist, not a scientist, who quotes and discusses the leaders in the field in a quite readable and entertaining fashion. The book has apparently offended some people by discounting ancestry (and racist offshoots) in light of the overwhelming evidence against the concept. However its scientific credentials are impeccable.

Although many words have been written attempting to show the unity of the human species, Steve Olson makes yet another attempt. He feels the need is there to be met. Instead of basing his effort on philosophical or moral grounds, he turns to our genetic record to make his point. It's a valid quest using unimpeachable methods and Olson presents it well. Some of the material, such as Wilson and Cann's "mitochondrial Eve" may be a bit shopworn, but it's an essential element of Olson's scenario. He builds his structure carefully and solidly, so a bit of used material isn't out of place. After all, he's not attempting any new, revolutionary concept in this book. He merely wishes to displace old, traditional ideas with a new reality.

Given the entrenched thinking about "race" in human cultures, calling Olson's task daunting is grievous understatement. The human diaspora from Africa he traces reaches across 150 millennia. Unlike most other species, humanity developed at an astonishing rate. Tracing genetic changes with humans migrating across the planet, not always in one direction is staggeringly difficult. Olson struggles, usually successfully, to reconcile the paleoanthropological finds with genetics research. He demonstrates the likely origins of the Chinese, Europeans, Australian and Western Hemispheric Aborigines. One subset of our species, the Jews, receives some special attention.

Olson recognises that much of the information he addresses is "highly contentious", but he bravely sets out to reconcile the views of many researchers. He examines in some detail, for example, hotly disputed notions about linguistic evolution. Given that the human population at the beginnings of language was already "on the road", his own description of language origins seems a bit thin. It would be unfair to fault him for this section, however, particularly since his aim isn't to prove or disprove any of the theories, but to use linguistic evolution as a metaphor. A full analysis of the topics in historical linguistics would double the size of the book. Readers interested in the topic should start with Olson's bibliography and keep reading.

Does Olson succeed in his quest? With the advances made in genetic analysis over the past generation, the origin of our species in Africa is now beyond dispute. Whether there's been enough time for local populations to form genetically distinct sub-species of Homo sapiens, Olson deftly refutes. There's been far too much intermingling and interbreeding to establish the kinds of races birds have done. That cultural ties keep groups with some identifiable physical traits such as the epicanthic folds of some Asian peoples doesn't justify labelling them with racial identities. A broadening of marriage traditions would quickly blend out the trait, as it already has in some areas.

Olson has performed a monumental task in defining our species. He covers the globe over an immense time span. He traces, as best he can with current evidence, the various tracks our ancestors took in occupying the planet. There's little doubt he's built a solid case for our identity as a single, if widespread, species. He helps his theme with some useful maps and other diagrams. Clearly our common ancestor denies the notion of "separate races".

On the other hand, why did he feel the need to make this effort. Clearly, "race", whether or not biologically valid, is a strong element in human thinking. Why this should be doesn't appear to be something we can identify through genetic analysis. The cause is ultimately, as Olson tentatively concedes, cultural. Bring up your children to hate someone identifiable, and they likely will do so. In Hawaii, likely the planet's most ethnically blended society, intermarriage, mixed schools and churches and full job opportunity, still has not shed divisions among its people. Olson would like his book to help overcome those divisions. It isn't likely to happen unless every human alive reads this book. And accepts his conclusions. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This book is a fascinating overview of the work of the many scientists engaged in a truly scientific treatment of heritage (which would complement both our origins both mythical and religious). It's their hope that one day in the future there will be an accurate map of human history which will trace the migration of modern humans from northeast Africa to the Middle East and their subsequent diffusion throughout the world.

But this book also contains several concise arguments against the concept of human "races," a construct that does not hold up to scientific scrutiny at all (but which has been used for the past three hundred years to justify the worst crimes against humanity). The main points are that 1) while there are averages to the features of ethnic groups, these do not hold when taking individuals individually, that is, the variations between individuals of a given "race" are greater than average variations between the races themselves; 2) the vast majority of humans have "mixed" ancestry beyond about four generations; 3) every human being alive today is descended from the groups which left Africa some 65,000 years ago. Racism should really be called "contingencism", that is, when one discriminates against a group of persons based upon the wholly accidental adaptations of their ancestors to local geographical/climatic conditions.

Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel opened the eyes of a lot of us to questions about human origins. There is the widely-known work of Rebecca L Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan C Wilson using Mitochondrial DNA to show how all living humans are descended from a single, small band of homo sapiens who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. There is the tale of the Lemda, an South African group whose Jewish origins were proven with the discovery of a special DNA sequence on the Y chromosome found only in men descended from the Biblical Aaron, the so-called cohenism gene.

I had hoped that this book would follow Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Thomas Sowell as an overview of what is currently known about our origins, from a DNA-based genetic perspective. Steve Olson is a science journalist, not an academic, so it's too much to ask that he compete with Steven Pinker in original or bold thinking, but his writing style holds up well by those standards. He divides his story into easy-to-understand discussions of people on each continent:

Africa, where we all began 200,000 years ago.

The Middle East, the geographical bottleneck through which every group passed on its way to the rest of the world. Jews are especially interesting, because they kept much of their identity intact while mixing with the rest of the world.

Asia and Australia are lumped together because, surprisingly, the aborigines are one of the oldest groups out of Africa, probably riding around the Indian ocean on their way south.

Europe is where the Neandertals lived until as recently as 30,000 years ago. Although they used stone tools and fire, they were not true humans, and the question of whether they mixed with homo sapiens was answered conclusively in the negative through recent tests on DNA recovered from old bones.
Finally, North America offers a glimpse at the clovis cultures and the growing evidence of pre-clovis people. Olson grew up in Washington State and digresses to talk about Kinnewick man, the 13,500 year-old Caucasian skull discovered there in 1996. Here we also learn about the "Mongoloid spot", a patch of bluish skin found near the base of the spine in some children of Asian descent-also seen among native Americans (but never Europeans or Africans), more evidence of their Asian history.

Unfortunately Steve Olson is a big believer in the Blank Slate hypothesis, that it's dangerous to think about biological evidence that races are different, so his book veers toward political correctness at all costs.

Generally this is a readable book, though you will be disappointed if you come hoping that its status as a National Book Award finalist means it can compete with the likes of Guns Germs and Steele. It can't.

Not only is this book superbly well written, so that mere graduates with humanities degrees like me can understand it, but it also shows that racism is biologically wrong, which is wonderfully ironic since it is biology that racists in the past have used to argue that their pernicious and evil doctrines are scientifically correct (such as Hitler).

I consider myself to be well educated but I'm by no means a scientist. Some science books scare me...you know the ones I'm talking about. Within five pages of the first chapter I feel like I should have taken a course before starting the book. Let me reassure all you other non-scientists--this is not that kind of science book. In fact, as a lay person I'd have to say this is one of the best non-fiction books I've read this year.

Olson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through time and place to follow our human ancestors (and their genes) out of Africa and into the big, bad world. The number one thing I took away from this book is that skin color, facial characteristics, language, and culture don't really matter in the bigger picture. The unavoidable truth is that we're all related and we all come from the same starting point. Of course, this is nothing new to folks who have been following scientific research in the past 20-30 years...but Olson really brings the point home by taking us right into the heart of genetic research as it's happening today.

I enjoyed the way Olson focused on a variety of groups--Jews, Africans, Native Americans, Polynesians--to show just how ephemeral cultural and racial distinctions really are. This is a great book for history buffs and armchair anthropologists alike.

For starters. How do Australian Aborigines whose ancestors have lived nowhere but in Austrailia for the last 6,000 years possibly descend from Abraham, the Jewish founding father, who was supposed to have lived just 4,000 years ago in the Middle East? Yet Olson, in his book, ridiculuosly claims all human beings descend from that Abe if he in fact really existed. Fatter than fat chance of all humans being that particular Jewish patriarch's descendants even if he once did exist. Other silly ideas abound in this book. Pass on it!

Steve Olson's Mapping Human History is a wonderful account of the journeys of modern man. The author explains all of the science involved in a very understandable and readable way so that all readers can follow this fascinating story. The narrative concerns the migration of man out of Africa and then all around the globe. Language and archeology play a part but this book focuses on the genetic clues to piece together this history which everyone alive today shares. Along the way, he debunks theories of race and any idea of biology as destiny. The author shows that we, modern humans, are all genetically related wherever we have recently hailed from. He does not shy away from the various controversies that swirl around these ideas but tackles them with great skill, particularly in the chapters focusing on the Americas. This is a very informative and entertaining book.