Even Reich has had to backtrack on some of his published findings as more data have accumulated. New discoveries are constantly being made, refining or negating previous theories.
Reich is at pains to stress that this book is not a definitive overview. The pace of discovery has accelerated tremendously since. Today, non-Africans have some 2% Neanderthal in their DNA. We *can* isolate DNA from archaeological samples and we *can* use this to reconstruct how human populations are related.Īncient DNA pioneer Svante Pääbo showed that Neanderthals, one of our evolutionary cousins, and humans mated with each other before Neanderthals went extinct (see his book Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes). Even so, you will come away from this with at least the broad picture. I struggled a bit to get a clear understanding of the finer details. Reich details how this technique works and what you can do with the data.
With effort, care, the right techniques, and extreme measures to prevent contamination with human DNA from for example the researchers themselves, it is possible to isolate, amplify and puzzle together the genome of humans that died many millennia ago. What little DNA you can retrieve is typically fragmented and mixed with DNA of microbes that feasted on the corpse when it died. Reich does not really go into this, but DNA is notoriously unstable and quickly degrades after an organism dies. Why did we have to wait so long for the ancient DNA revolution? This is perhaps the only part where I feel the book misses a beat. “ Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past”, written by David Reich, published by Oxford University Press in March 2018 (hardback, 335 pages)
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