The scenario proposed in this chapter, of populations beachcombing their way to Australia, is similar to one advanced by Jonathan Kingdon in Self-made Man and His Undoing (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993).
5 Leaps and Bounds
The term Great Leap Forward was first applied to the study of human prehistory by Jared Diamond in The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (Vintage, London, 1991) – a fascinating summary of human prehistory. Good sources on the origin of language include Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind (Phoenix, London, 1996), Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (William Morrow, New York, 1994) and Parker and McKinney’s Origins of Intelligence (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1999). William Calvin’s A Brain For All Seasons (University of Chicago Press, 2002) discusses the impact of climate change on human brain evolution. Thomas Keenan’s An Introduction to Child Development (Sage, London, 2002) is a good general overview of this very complicated subject.
Henry Harpending and colleagues’ work on the inference of human population expansions from mitochondrial DNA data is presented in a paper in Human Biology (66:761–75, 1994). Much of the information on climate change in Africa and the fossil record in the Middle East was taken from Richard Klein and Stringer and McKie’s books (see above), as well as that of John Gowlett (Ascent to Civilization, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1984).
6 The Main Line
The ordering of the Y-chromosome markers discussed in this chapter, and their implications for human migration, appear in Underhill et al.’s 2000 Nature Genetics and Annals of Human Genetics papers (see above). The spread of Y-chromosome lineages along the Eurasian steppe belt is discussed in the Wells et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. A good overview of the central Asian fossil record is Dani and Masson’s History of the Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume 1 (UNESCO, Paris, 1992). Lewis Binford’s work on the importance of scavenging in the early human diet has been presented in many publications, one good example being in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (4: 292–327, 1985). Cavalli-Sforza’s work on Chinese populations is discussed in The History and Geography of Human Genes (see above).
7 Blood from a Stone
James Riordan’s The Sun Maiden and the Crescent Moon: Siberian Folk Tales (Interlink Books, New York, 1989) is a great introduction to the stories of Siberia’s native peoples. A good overview of Upper Palaeolithic cave art is Paul Bahn’s Journey Through the Ice Age (Seven Dials, London, 1997) – beautifully illustrated with Jean Vertut’s photography.
The first Neanderthal sequence was published by Matthias Krings and his colleagues in Cell (90: 19–30, 1997) – truly a landmark paper in the study of human origins. The dating of M173, the major western-European Y-chromosome lineage, is given by Semino et al. in Science (290: 1155–9, 2000). Ezra Zubrow’s modelling of Neanderthal demographic patterns is in Stringer and Mellars (eds.), The Human Revolution (Edinburgh University Press, 1989, pp. 212–31). Kristen Hawkes’s theory of grandmothering and its effect on human populations is discussed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (95: 1336–9, 1998).
Levin and Potapov’s The Peoples of Siberia (University of Chicago Press, 1964) is an amazing overview of Siberian anthropology – now sadly out of print. Thomas Jefferson’s only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia (W. W. Norton, New York, 1972), is primarily a collection of facts and figures about the state – although the sections on anthropology are worth reading. Richard Klein reviews much of the material on American archaeology in The Human Career (see above). James Chatters’s Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001) describes this exciting archaeological find.
The work by Wallace and Torroni on Native American mitochondrial DNA and multiple waves of migration was reviewed by them in Human Biology (64: 271–79, 1992), and by Emoke Szathmary in American Journal of Human Genetics (53: 793–9, 1993). Underhill et al.’s paper on the Y-chromosome marker M3 appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (93: 196–200, 1996). Santos et al. and Karafet et al. published their papers on 92R7 and Native American origins in American Journal of Human Genetics (64: 619–28 and 64: 817–31, respectively). Joseph Greenberg’s work on Native American languages is reviewed in Merritt Ruhlen’s A Guide to the World’s Languages, Volume 1, Classification (Stanford University Press, 1987).
8 The Importance of Culture
The epigraph for this chapter is modified from a creation story in Arthur Cotterell’s Encyclopedia of World Mythology (Paragon, Bath, 1999).
A summarized version of Cook’s Resolution journal can be found in The Journals of Captain Cook (Penguin, London, 1999).
Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s book Digging up Jericho (Ernest Benn, London, 1957) is her account of the discovery of the origins of the Near Eastern Neolithic. Brian Fagan’s account of Neolithic origins is given in his People of the Earth, cited above. Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues’ work on the Wave of Advance is summarized in Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe (Princeton University Press, 1984), and in Cavalli-Sforza’s books cited above. Martin Richards et al.’s work on the mtDNA evidence for a Neolithic expansion was published in American Journal of Human Genetics (59: 185–203, 1995), and Semino et al.’s work on the Y-chromosome evidence was presented in their paper in Science cited above. David Goldstein and colleagues’ work on the spread of Y-chromosome lineages in south-east Asia can be found in American Journal of Human Genetics (68: 432–43, 2001). The discussion of negative aspects of the Neolithic transition is taken from several sources, including Fagan (see above), William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (Doubleday, New York, 1976) and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Merritt Ruhlen’s A Guide to the World’s Languages (cited above) and The Origin of Language (John Wiley, New York, 1994) and Charles Barber’s The English Language (Cambridge University Press, 1993), give general accounts of linguistic classification and the history of linguistics. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language edited by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 1997) is an excellent reference. Cavalli-Sforza’s work on genetics and language is reviewed in The History and Geography of Human Genes cited above, and the relationship between cultural and biological evolution is examined in greater detail in Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman’s Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (Princeton University Press, 1981). The search for the Indo-European Homeland is reviewed in Colin Renfrew’s Archaeology and Language (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and in Jim Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans (Thames and Hudson, London, 1989) – both wonderfully engaging books.
Mark Seielstad and colleagues’ work on patrilocality and Y-chromosome variation was published in Nature Genetics (20: 278–80, 1998), as was the work of Stoneking and colleagues on the matrilocal tribes of northern Thailand (Nature Genetics 29: 20–1, 2001).
9 The Final Big Bang
Nationalism and the rise of monolingualism is briefly summarized in Timothy Baycroft’s Nationalism in Europe, 1789–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). The extinction of the world’s languages is discussed in David Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s book Vanishing Voices (Oxford University Press, 2000). The US census data is available on a US government website (http://www.census.gov/). The statistics on race identity were taken from an article on the census by Steven Holmes in the New York Times (3 June 2001).
Spencer Wells was born in 1969 and grew up in Texas. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1994, focusing on population genetics and evolution. He subsequently moved to Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow with Luca Cavalli-Sforza. While there he began his research on the genetics of human populations in Central Asia, which he continued after moving to Oxford University in 1999. After heading the population genetics research group at Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, he served briefly as research director at an A
merican biotechnology company. Since 2001 he has been a freelance scientist, writer, and filmmaker. His films have aired on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the National Geographic Channel.
Dr. Wells is author or co-author of over thirty scientific publications, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, NATO, and the National Geographic Society. He divides his time between the U.S.A. and France, where he lives with his wife and two children.
The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey Page 24