Uncovering Our History: Exploring Ancient DNA and the Revolutionary Science of the Human Past

Ed Parker Jr: I learned a lot and looked up several items while reading. I recommend the book, but it is maybe too difficult for someone until they have earned 8th grade and are interested in science.

United States on Oct 07, 2023

N: The science of ancient DNA is fascinating and recent, and the author is an expert in the subject. Unfortunately, the book is not well written. I don't demean the author; he may not have had the time to write in a clearer way. I only wish he would take a science writer as a co-author, and issue a second edition. If he does that, I'll be only too happy to buy the book and read it again.

India on Jul 11, 2023

David Lindsay: 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...

United States on May 10, 2020

Serghiou Const: The book proved to be a difficult read for me. This emanated from the intrinsic complexity of comparing ancient and modern genomes of populations continuously migrating and interbreeding. The populations in a place today are never the direct descendants of the people that lived in the same place in the past but the result of continuous migrations and interbreeding as complex in the past as in the present. At times I felt lost. Moreover, I felt that the narrative was addressed to a more specialist audience than the general reader and this was corroborated by specialist statistics used such as the four population test which must be known only to specialists studying ancient genomes.

The book presents novel findings but it is also a work in progress in that it is anticipated that in the coming decade more ancient genomes will be sequenced but also more sophisticated statistic techniques will be developed and employed.

The determination of ancient genomes became possible because since the sequencing of the human genome project in 2006, the methods became thousands of times more efficient and thousands of times less expensive. Whole genomes provide much more information...

United Kingdom on Oct 04, 2018

Eff: 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...

United Kingdom on Sep 06, 2018

Laura Knight-Jadczyk: This book is definitely 5 star for a lot of reasons. First, it is clearly written for even non-specialists; it is loaded with the latest information (at least to the time of writing); some of the revelations of genome research settle long-standing mysteries of human culture and language; and it makes clear that human evolution and history is way more complicated than had been thought.

It is the last item - the complicated nature of evolution - that leads me to make my only criticism of what is an excellent book: the author never mentions the work of Sarich and Wolpoff, nor the outstanding book by Wolpoff and Caspari "Race and Human Evolution", even though the end result of Reich's book is pretty much what Wolpoff and Caspari wrote back in 1997. Not only that, Reich even describes the relationship between different early human types as a "trellis", (p.81) which exact diagram Wolpoff has in his book! So, while I am here, I'm also making a plug for Wolpoff because he said a LOT that David Reich is saying in this book, with a lot less genetic evidence to hand, and said it over 20 years ago; Wolpoff's book is a tour de force!

Back to the present: I especially like the...

France on Apr 27, 2018

Crawford Kilian: (First published in The Tyee, April 19, 2018)

This book is fascinating, surprising and disquieting, in roughly equal portions. The fascination arises from a remarkable new science making discoveries almost daily. The surprises are in discoveries that overturn what seemed like settled knowledge about humanity’s evolution and spread.

And the disquiet stems from the implications. If history is written by the winners, the history in our DNA is darker and bloodier than anything imagined in Game of Thrones.

David Reich is a specialist in ancient DNA and the head of the Reich Lab at Harvard. He and his colleagues can read whole genomes in a single bone, faster and more cheaply than anyone would have thought possible in the 1990s.

The genetics of ancient-DNA analysis are complex, and Reich doesn’t dumb down the technical aspects. Sometimes his explanations baffle more than enlighten. But he shows that it’s a wise population that knows its ancestors: we of European descent, for example, are a recent mixture of four different peoples as unlike one another as modern Europeans are from modern East Asians.

Other surprises are coming thick and fast....

Canada on Apr 23, 2018

R. Young: Also well worth reading:

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book)
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

The study of ancient human DNA, David Reich tells us, can reveal “findings that almost no one expected.” p. 276.

That remark comes near the end of his remarkable book, but he demonstrates the truth of it again and again from the very beginning. Certainly I could not have anticipated the results he and those working with him have achieved.

I lazily follow this field simply for the pleasure of learning what I can about humanity and I had never imagined that so much could be learned about our species from deep time. I am an agnostic, but I am not uncomfortable saying, “God grant that this brilliant man continue with this work.” I think this work of his is producing one of the great achievements of Mankind. It is work that, like unraveling the mysteries of the universe, needs no practical justification, and Reich knows it well....

United States on Apr 08, 2018