Product Description

In a journey across four continents, acclaimed science writer Steve Olson traces the origins of modern humans and the migrations of our ancestors throughout the world over the past 150,000 years. Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Mapping Human History is a groundbreaking synthesis of science and history. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the latest genetic research, linguistic evidence, and archaeological findings, Olson reveals the surprising unity among modern humans and "demonstrates just how naive some of our ideas about our human ancestry have been" (Discover).Olson offers a genealogy of all humanity, explaining, for instance, why everyone can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius as forebears. Olson also provides startling new perspectives on the invention of agriculture, the peopling of the Americas, the origins of language, the history of the Jews, and more. An engaging and lucid account, Mapping Human History will forever change how we think about ourselves and our relations with others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142906 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618352104
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Library Journal

Thanks to recent discoveries in genetics, explains science journalist Olson, we're learning about human history before any history was written down.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
"An instructive overview of human history." -- Review

Review

Customer Reviews

Should be a 20-page paper instead
As mentioned by many reviewers, this book has a lot of preaching about the invalidity of the concept of races.

What interests me to the book was the title "Mapping Human History". 10% of this book content is in this area, and if those content are condensed into a short paper, it'd make really good reading.

The whole book is a quick read. The key "mapping" can be summarized as follows:
1. "Out of Africa" hypothesis (sole source of modern homo sapiens is from Africa) is affirmed by genetic research.
2. First wave out of Africa (~65,000 years ago) is by sea along Arabian peninsula to Indian Ocean which has two streams afterwards, one earlier stream down Oceania and a later stream up East Asia.
3. "Mongoloid" characteristics are formed relatively late (~20,000 years ago? I don't recall anymore)
4. Second wave is through Sinai peninsula by land ~45,000 years ago and completely displaced Neaderthals in Middle East & Europe by around ~30,000 years ago
5. First wave and second wave met in (north) Central Asia from different directions
6. Primarily the East Asia stream entered the Americas ~15,000 years ago (but could be earlier), though some genes from the ME/Europe stream have also entered (because of 5.)
7. All these really happenned before the invention of agriculture (and culture). Agriculture (and potentially other key technologies such as use of iron) privileges the groups who are the first to under-go population explosion. A lot of racial mixing especially on the fringes afterwards. This is where Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" picked up.

If you're just interested in the mapping, you don't need to buy the book-- save it for something else.

Unfulfilled Promise
Mr Olson's book starts out extremely well, but sags after a few chapters. The initial segments on mitonchondrial DNA and our genetics is probably the most readable and understandable treatment that I have seen. About halfway through the book, however, Olson stops trying to trace human migration and development. His emphasis becomes avoiding rascism. At this point, the history and science dwindles away and the emphasis becomes how intermixed our gene pools are. It was almost as if his underlying motivation was a desire to use science to prove a political position. It became rather pedantic at this point. I was very disappointed after the strong start that the book made.

Not bad quick overview, but too much political sermonizing
Using ever improving molecular techniques, population geneticists study the history of extended families that are inbred to some degree. In other words, they trace the genealogies of racial groups. It's an inherently fascinating subject, and science journalist Steve Olson introduces it adequately in his new book, Mapping Human History. Written in the breezy style of a National Geographic travel-log, Olson's book is a quick read, but a little too superficial to be intellectually satisfying. Still, it's not a bad overview of an important subject.

It would be better, though, without the recurrent political sermonizing. Unfortunately for population geneticists, their subject matter-race-is vastly unfashionable. So, the dean of the field, Stanford's great L.L. Cavalli-Sforza long ago developed the transparent subterfuge of defining the word "race" in the most ludicrous straw-man terms possible-as the classification of the human race into absolutely separate, never-overlapping, mutually exclusive categories. (Never specified is exactly who today believes such a thing: the Grand Kleagle's retarded brother, perhaps?) This straw-man definition allows him to deny that he's studying race, since by his definition "race" is impossible. Still, it allows Cavalli-Sforza to get back to work without being crucified for political incorrectness, so we shouldn't hold it against him.

Unfortunately, Olson never seems to grasp that this is just pro forma boilerplate. In his book, Olson stops every few pages to tell you that there are no races that have been absolutely isolated genetically since the beginning of time because-you will be shocked, shocked to learn this-humans have been known to outbreed. (The reality of course is that for any human racial group, the inbreeding glass is both part empty and part full.) This makes Mapping Human History rather like a geology book that repeatedly admonishes the reader that the Earth is not flat.

Another curious feature that Olson's book shares with many other contemporary writings about population genetics is the author's apparent longing for the abolition of his own subject matter via universal random interbreeding. Although animal and plant biodiversity is routinely celebrated as a supreme good, the conclusions of books on human biodiversity tend to treat it as a temporary evil that will soon be gone, and good riddance to it. It's as if that geology textbook ended with an ode to the blessed day when the Earth will plunge into the Sun, thus happily eliminating the need for a science of geology.

In his final chapter, "The End of Race," Olson cites Hawaii as exemplifying the future of the human race. Still, not even Hawaii has achieved racial nirvana. Despite interracial marriage blurring the ethnic boundaries, the Native Hawaiians are now campaigning hard to have themselves declared a sovereign nation like American Indian tribes.

On a vaster scale, Brazil exhibits the same tendency for class to correlate with color, and for the people at the bottom of the pile to agitate, not unreasonably, for race-based privileges for themselves. Currently, the government of Brazil is introducing racial quotas in response to black demands.

Further, the mixing of races often leads to new races rather than to no races, such as the Angles and Saxons became the Anglo-Saxons.

This notion that the entire world will soon consist of one beige race is both highly popular and highly dubious. I see little statistical evidence to suggest that there will be significantly greater racial admixture in either Asia or Africa anytime in the 21st Century ... and that's where most humans will live.

For example, the UN's best guess is that China will have 1,462 million people in 2050. The Chinese government shows no intention of ever admitting many immigrants, so the racial admixture level in China will not change perceptibly. The UN also projects that in 2050, India will have a population of 1,572 million. Almost all of these people will be racially descended from current Indians. Why? Well, who would want to move to India? It's a country that's more than full now, even before it adds another half billion Indians.

Other populous countries that-trust me-won't be attracting huge numbers of immigrants from other continents include Pakistan (344 million in 2050), Indonesia (311 million), Nigeria (279 million), Bangladesh (265 million), the Congo (204 million), and Yemen and Uganda (102 million each). In other words, the absolute numbers of racially distinct East Asians, blacks, and non-European Caucasians will be larger in 2050 than today.

Most of the growth in racial mixing will be restricted to regions where intermarriage has been a long tradition (primarily Latin America and some remote islands) or are immigrant magnets (presumably North America, Australia, and Western Europe).

In essence, what is so enthusiastically anticipated is the admixture of people of European descent. Evidently, there is something uniquely, even superhumanly potent and evil about European DNA that means it must be diluted. Strikingly, the greatest enthusiasts for this view tend to be highly European themselves. (Olson, for example, is blonde.) This reflects that weird combination of racial self-loathing and racial egotism found in so many white intellectuals.

Finally, I doubt that the beigeification of Europeans will proceed all that quickly. I don't think it's at all inevitable that Eastern Europe will open its borders to non-Europeans. Prudent statesmen in the ex-Communist countries will be wary of reproducing Western Europe's travails with hostile immigrant minorities, although the European Union will no doubt try to bully them into it.

So, the odds are that-on a global scale-the current races will remain at the end of this century almost as distinct as they are today. Then, beyond 2100, DNA engineering and, perhaps, interstellar colonization will likely radically increase genetic differences among humans.

So, while a better book than this one could certainly be written about race, you can feel confident that if you do invest the modest amount of time required to read Olson's effort, you don't have to worry that its subject matter will suddenly evaporate.