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Where did the first humans originate? How and when did humans get onto North America, the tip of South America, and Australia? Was there a single human ancestress whose mitochondria survive within us today? Because history cannot be repeated, we may never have answers to these far-reaching questions. Yet, population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza proposed that the evolutionary past of humankind can be reconstructed by analyzing current genetic data. Now, in The Great Human Diasporas, coauthored with his son, Cavalli-Sforza presents in a single volume for the non-specialist the fruits of over forty years of research. After providing a thorough grounding in evolutionary theory, Cavalli-Sforza takes readers back to the heady times of 1961-62 when he and a few colleagues were able to bring together genetic data on blood groups for fifteen populations spread out on five continents. By computing the genetic distance between pairs of populations, these scientists were able to develop an evolutionary tree that looks surprisingly like the ones reconstructed today, even with fifteen times more information. Using this crude tree, scientists could trace the approximate routes modern humans took in colonizing the earth 100,000 years ago and discover when populations split off from each other to form new groups. In the course of his work, Cavalli-Sforza joined forces with archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and molecular biologists. He shows how both archaeological and genetic data were used to track human migrations during the spread of agriculture; he probes such topics as the existence of a single ancestral language and the relationship between biological and linguistic evolution;and he brings us up to date with his current work as chief sponsor of the human genome diversity project, an ambitious attempt to analyze the most significant individual variations in human genomes.
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I am not a hunter by nature. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
I am not a hunter by nature. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An extraordinarily clear account of the many interrelated issues in science and archaeology that contribute to our current understanding of human development. After reading any number of books touching on the same material, it was refreshing to read such lucid and literate explanations of so many complex issues. Most of all I was impressed by the way that personal opinion was clearly stated and not disguised as fact. A tour-de-force!
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a well known and respected geneticist, has teamed up with his son, Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, to write a superb, well-informed, literate, and easy to read book on genetics, race, and evolution. Using the elder Cavalli-Sforza's own research and that of others, the team weaves a story, starting with research on the pygmies, that entertains as well as informs. I am a scientist, but not a geneticist; what I particularly liked about this book is that it spoke in non-jargon language, yet did not shy away from the sophistication and complexity involved in the subject matter. I also liked and applauded the way the authors forthrightly and honestly dealt with subjects of controversy, such as the concept of race, racism, race and IQ, and so forth. Their destruction of the arguments of Jensen, Shockley and Herrnstein that the differences in IQ between Blacks and whites is genetic is beautiful and complete. This is a wonderful book for the layperson as well as the expert who wishes to read outside his or her field.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Here is a theory that springs to mind from reading this sometimes overly simple primer but enjoyable explanation of the fantastic lifework of a humane (if sometimes rather kneejerky liberal) genius, a statistical anthropologist (most anthropologists only think they are scientists, Cavalli-Sforza really is): The map of the "Megalithic culture" in the book, based on their megalithic remains, has a striking similarity to the map of the genetic characteristics of people associated with the Basques, except for there being no Basque strain on Sardinia. And a map of the Celts in Western Europe is highly similar. And if memory serves, so is a map of the dispersion of the Vikings in Western Europe (the latter two, even had an impact on Sicily, as I recall, based on a wave of Celts/Phoenicians). What would cause the familiar pattern? 1. This is a natural pattern by people who settle the Western European lands by arriving at them by sea. 2. They are forced onto border areas by indigenous people or by new groups immigrating by land. 3. Both 1. and 2. The Basques may have found refuge in the Pyranees and been there so long that it accounts for their genetic radiation from that stronghold, but note that otherwise they tend to be a coastal people hugging the Western shores and islands. The lack of representation on Sardinia (although there is some representation on Corsica it appears) could be due to the Basques being so ancient and to island peoples in the Mediterranean being more easily replaced or diluted racially by invaders than on the mainland (even though islanders may be more completely isolated for longer periods of time than mainlanders).
This is a fine book, and the translation from Italian seems to have generally worked very well-- except for the translator not being up to the legerdemain required to explain English pronounciations of cognate words from the languages and language groups, and the occasional use of "and" when "but" was in order. The book fails to make any mention of the climatic effects on geography that would influence these diasporas-- the glaciers and tundra to the North as they waxed and waned, the less distance by water the New Guinainas/Australians had to travel to become New Guinians/Australians due to lower water level and tectonic lift, the nicely watered pastoral fertility of the Shahara for most of early man's existence, etc. The book also does not use qualifiers when it should. I know it is the Strunkian style, but here it is incorrect and I believe may reflect a too simple mind-set of Caralli-Sforza's. There are a lot of mistakes along the lines of using "the first" when the truth is "the earliest we have found so far". And the evolutionary development of modern humans is surely a bushy tree filled with dead ends instead of the orderly simple tree anthropologists routinely present to us as proven fact. I blame the publisher and the editor, in this day of superb computer support, for not seeing to it that the all important maps were better detailed and in color.
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Fascinating
I just wanted to confirm the various reviews on this book.
I finished this book in a couple of days so it was keeping me interested. Read more
I finished this book in a couple of days so it was keeping me interested. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Eric le rouge
out of Africa
This book is co-authored by a geneticist and a film maker, a father and son. It is written from the point of view of the geneticists and talks about how human beings walked out of... Read more
Published on 3 Sep 2000
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