This is a 21st Century Learning Initiative sort of book, a masterly synthesis which, like the work of the Initiative, brings together research from a broad range of disciplines to examine one of the fundamental big questions “Where do I come from?”

E O Wilson says that Wade has “pulled together the explosion of discoveries in diverse fields of biology and the social sciences on the origin of our species”. Wade uses the work of modern geneticists in the last few years to build on the solid foundation laid by paleo-anthropologists, archaeologists, anthropologists and many other specialists, to create a new and far more detailed picture of human evolution, human nature and history. He writes “There exists no video of how apes slowly morphed into people, but a sequence of salient events can for the most part be reconstructed. There is no map that records the dispersal of the new humans from their ancestral homeland, but researchers can now follow the path they took out of Africa into the world outside.”

In this book we are taken on a journey, perhaps the most exciting journey of all, beginning with our ancestors 5 million years ago when all we have to guide us are battered skulls and stone tools. We leave Africa, face the fearsome Neanderthals to embark upon a journey to find a new home 50,000 years ago. Some travel east and others north and west. All we have learned from early research in archaeology and anthropology, much of it fragmented and contradictory, is challenged and illuminated by the work on the human genome whose full sequence of DNA units was first known only in 2003. This is cutting edge thinking bringing studies and disciplines together. Data from the human genome, genes with some advantage, and genealogies which allow ancestors to be traced through the Y or mitochondrial chromosomes, enable the geneticists to throw new light onto the continuity from the ape world of 5 million years ago to the emerging human world .

No fossils may exist from 5 million years ago but we can learn much from studies of the chimps and bonobos. We can see the footprints of Australopithecus 4.4 million years ago in Tanzania, follow the archaic Homo Erectus as they head from Africa to go east into Asia and the Neanderthals as they moved into the Near East and Europe. Then 50,000 years ago our own ancestors burst out of their African homeland and began a colonisation which would lead at last to the human society we know today. “By daring so much they gained the whole world” writes Wade. As they spread and settled each population developed cultural characteristics, language, religion, lifestyle, and distinct genetic characteristics too, as each responded to climate, ecology and social arrangements.

And what a range of insights Wade brings to the journey on which he takes the reader. “It seems that our human ancestors had decided to dress up for the occasion” he writes of the leaving of Africa! We can work out when clothes were invented from the DNA of lice for a second family, body lice, evolved from head lice when humans began to wear clothes. How do we know? The body lice had claws to grasp onto fabric. We know they began to speak at about the same time too. We learn the significance of the Ice Age, understand how nomadic family groups became settled communities He sheds new light upon the loves and lives of Gengis Khan and Thomas Jefferson. He re-examines the history of the Icelanders and the Jews. We see the human adaptation to cultural practises like cattle herding and cannibalism. Britain’s history is presented from the genome’s perspective.

An Englishmen who has lived and worked in the United States since the 1970s Nicholas Wade is a science reporter who uses the breadth of his understanding from diverse fields to apply new knowledge to long disputed topics, even the genetic basis of human nature “The biological framework of human origins and nature is beginning to emerge with surprising clarity. With the information now streaming forth from the sequence of the human genome, a new understanding has dawned. In the long search to understand ourselves: our obscure origins, our strange and contradictory nature, and the fragmentation of the once united human family into different races and warring cultures speaking thousands of different languages, we can begin at last to comprehend the long darkness before the dawn. “

Accompanying us on our travels with our ancestors is Charles Darwin, whose extraordinary insight first hinted at the story of how the human line split from the apes in his “On the origin of Species” published in 1859 and “The Descent of Man” in 1871. Darwin gave us the outline and now with Wade we can “begin to trace the finest workings of the grand process”. Quotations from the works of Darwin begin each chapter of the story. ”Had he not been subjected during primeval times to natural selection, assuredly he (man) would never have attained his present rank” he wrote. And ”We must however acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his mobile qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system – with all these exalted powers – man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origins.”

We would want to add “in his behaviour”, to “in his bodily form” and Wade shows us how new light is being cast on human behaviour. From our apelike forebears we follow not only the story of human form but human behaviour too. Was it to gain reproductive advantage or to defend their territory that certain genes evolved? What was the significance of the male – female bond which emerged 1.7 million years ago? And what difference to our social and cultural lives did the evolution of language from 50,000 years ago bring? When we could share precise thoughts, social interaction at a deeper level became possible. Organised warfare, reciprocity and altruism, exchange and trade and our ability to immerse our independence in the religion of our community have developed and shaped society. All were there in the hunter-gatherer societies of the Upper Palaeolithic but only 15,000 years ago with the first settlements, as aggression diminished, social life formed the complex institutions.

What drives us? We see the contradictory impulses of aggression and conciliation. Warfare is a way of life which is universal, a norm in pre-static societies. 30% of adult chimps die of wounds, a Mohave war party expected to loose 30% of its warriors, at Gettysberg the Confederates lost 30% of their numbers. E. O.Wilson writes of “the human pre-disposition for socially approved aggression”. A nuclear family allowed all males to procreate and aggression diminished. Parallel to that is an ability to cooperate with more than family members which led to a cohesive society. Fairness and reciprocity with their associated trust and guilt, led to trade and allowed cities and large urban societies to develop. Defence against freeloaders, who would take advantage of trust, led to religion, Wade believes. Religion is communal, it bonds, it excludes those who cannot be trusted. It too has a wired-in basis. E. O. Wilson believes we have a predisposition to accept truths with a deeper meaning. Language is used to deceive and in religious ritual - so religion and language co-evolved.

Wade identifies four glues that hold human society together - reciprocity, language, religion and pair bonding in a family unit. Taken with warfare that is remarkable close to the four “Drives” identified by Lawrence and Nohria in their book “Driven - How human nature shapes our choices” published by Jossey-Bass in 2002: to defend, to bond, to acquire and to learn.

Coincidences in archaeological evidence and genetic calculation as humans developed a “fixed abode” are fascinating. Three quarters of Europe’s population today comes from 40 identifiable lineages the oldest of which can be dated to about 50,000 years ago, just when the exodus from Africa of our ancestors happened. The oldest archaeological site in Europe is dated at 45,000 years ago and is in Bulgaria. Linguistic evidence too, often fits the new developing patterns.

Changes in the social order follow sedentism. Defence, agriculture, and intellectual skills of calculation, abstract thought, symbolic notation and writing. With these there seems to have been a set of evolutionary adaptations - thinner skulls and genetic change, disease resistance and lactose tolerance for example. The gene that produces sickle-cell-anaemia developed as a protection against malaria. The ability to digest milk had disappeared in animals and early humans in adulthood but persists throughout life in northern cattle breeding Europeans and in some groups in Africa too. So, alongside the core of humanity from its common source, are continuing changes in specific groups.

“Human nature”, Wade suggests, “is a set of adaptive behaviours which have evolved in the human genome we see today”. E. O. Wilson writes “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.” All the findings are not and will not be comfortable for us but, like the question of intelligence and the Ashkenazi Jews or Jefferson’s secret family, the past should not be suppressed. That would be “a retreat into darkness” says Wade. We know human evolution was shaped by the environment in which the species struggles to survive, and society is an important environmental feature – so to some extent man has shaped his own evolution and continues to do so, for the picture is not complete.

Questions remain. Was change gradual or in bursts? What will we learn when a language gene can be clearly identified and we can trace back to a common language? This is not a story with an end. Wade follows continuing human evolution, new genetic findings casting light on today’s races, on our developing resistance to disease and new cognitive powers. The studies inter-related here are fascinating in themselves. But they are more than that. They also illuminate the past and promise increasing insight in the future as the shadows are lit one by one and we fill in more and more of the fascinating story of “Who am I?” Here is a story every human needs to know, surely an essential part of a new Curriculum for Humankind.

Janet M.Lawley, March 29th 2007

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21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org