Product Description
Around 60,000 years ago, a man—genetically identical to us—lived in Africa. Every person alive today is descended from him. How did this real-life Adam wind up as the father of us all? What happened to the descendants of other men who lived at the same time? And why, if modern humans share a single prehistoric ancestor, do we come in so many sizes, shapes, and races?Examining the hidden secrets of human evolution in our genetic code, Spencer Wells reveals how developments in the revolutionary science of population genetics have made it possible to create a family tree for the whole of humanity. Replete with marvelous anecdotes and remarkable information, from the truth about the real Adam and Eve to the way differing racial types emerged, The Journey of Man is an enthralling, epic tour through the history and development of early humankind.

Amazon.com Review
Spencer Wells traces human evolution back to our very first ancestor in The Journey of Man. Along the way, he sums up the explosive effect of new techniques in genetics on the field of evolutionary biology and all available evidence from the fossil record. Wells's seemingly sexist title is purposeful: he argues that the Y chromosome gives us a unique opportunity to follow our migratory heritage back to a sort of Adam, just as earlier work in mitochondrial DNA allowed the identification of Eve, mother of all Homo sapiens. While his descriptions of the advances made by such luminary scientists as Richard Lewontin and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza can be dry, Wells comes through with sparkling metaphors when it counts, as when he compares genetic drift to a bouillabaisse recipe handed down through a village's generations. Though finding our primal male is an exciting prospect, the real revolution Wells describes is racial. Or rather, nonracial, as he reiterates the scientific truth that our notions of what makes us different from each other are purely cultural, not based in biology. The case for an "out of Africa" scenario of human migration is solid in this book, though Wells makes it clear when he is hypothesizing anything controversial. Readers interested in a fairly technical, but not overwhelming, summary of the remarkable conclusions of 21st-century human evolutionary biology will find The Journey of Man a perfect primer. --Therese Littleton

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 64 reviews)

Would like more substance by D. Gamon

3 Stars
October 07, 2009
There is no in-depth explanation of mitochondrial DNA dating, Y-chromosome dating, etc., in the book. I understand that the fact that mtDNA doesn't undergo replication/reshuffling is supposed to aid the usefulness of mtDNA as a dependable evolutionary clock, as is the supposed fact that the mtDNA doesn't interact with the environment, meaning that there isn't any kind of selection of certain coded traits over others, so overall there are these arguments that the rate of change/accumulation of mutations is steady and predictable, etc., so we can triangulate back from existing variation in a gene pool to a common ancestor at a point in time we can infer based on the degree of present diversity. But as far as this business of a common ancestor goes, how would this be any different from the notion that all males alive in a world that happened to have an exclusively patrilinear naming system happened to be able to trace all their names back to a single male living 50,000 (or whenever) years ago? So all males alive right now just happened to be named "Smith," tracing their ancestry in unbroken lines all the way back to some "Smith" living 50,000 years ago -- while all the Joneses, Denningtons, Coopers, Gamonators and Katzenellenbogens just happened to experience breaks in their male lines and thus died out, name-wise? Unless I'm thinking of this wrong, if "Eve" had a daughter and a son Barney, and Barney married Betty, and they had kids, and so on, we would have to assume that all those offspring of Barney and Betty died out sometime between then and now. Otherwise there would be mtDNA in our gene pool that wouldn't triangulate back to Eve. Not to mention all the offspring of Eve's friends Wilma, Rutabaga, Parsnip, Tutu, and Kumquat. Am I thinking of it wrong? It seems preposterous. Anyway, this is not Wells, it is the methodology, or the problem of conceptualizing the findings that the methodology brings us to. But a propos of Wells. One thing that I do NOT like is his way of, in passing, alluding to someone's notion or hypothesis or tossing out a thought about this or that and then moving briskly on as if the notion had been somehow validated or indeed had any validity. Example: "The populations involved [in populations in Africa showing 'ancient lineages' by virtue of genetic diversity] encompass the African Rift Valley, extending into south-western Africa, where people known as the San -- formerly known as the Bushmen -- have a very strong signal of the diversity that characterized the earliest human populations. They also speak one of the strangest languages on the planet, notable for its use of clicks... The languages of the family are incredibly complicated. English, for example, has thirty-one distinguishable sounds... while the San !Xu language... has 141. While it is uncertain exactly which forces govern the acquisition of linguistic diversity, this figure is certainly suggestive of an ancient pedigree -- in exactly the same way that genetic diversity accumulates to a greater extent over longer time periods." But this is patent nonsense, on multiple levels. First, no linguist would propose that a large phoneme inventory, or the possesion of click phonemes, is suggestive of an "ancient pedigree." If you're writing fantasy novels, that stuff might wash, but it won't in an ostensible presentation of scientific findings. Second, Wells is confusing diversity with complexity. While if you have a given language and you let time pass, other things being equal the greater the amount of time that passes the greater the diversity among the daughter languages, nobody would propose that the longer you wait the more "complex" the language would become, any more than someone would imagine that a biological organism would become more "complex" if you wait a while. So this is just muddle-headedness, or worse, because it really reminds me of the Fox News trick of saying, in passing, that "some people say" something or other that is really not something some people say, it is really the opinion of the commentator being passed on as something "some people say." And it has no foundation. So here, when he says "While it is uncertain exactly which forces govern the acquisition of linguistic diversity...," it comes off as dishonest, because clearly he knows nothing about the topic, and he is disingenuously positioning his own muddle-headedness in terms of "uncertainty" in the field (a field he knows nothing about, and obviously failed to talk to anyone from, if you accept my syntax) and using that to support his evidence on completely different grounds for the "ancient pedigree" of the San. Overall I find the linguistic references gratuitous and poorly thought out, and they undermine the credibility of the author. Beyond that, I have no real way of judging the genetic studies.

The Journey of Man: A genetic odyssey by Nancy C. Constantin

3 Stars
July 09, 2009
The book's condition was described by the vendor as "very good". However, several chapters had underlining in pencil. Condition would probably be described as "good". No big deal! I'm sure the book will read fine. Nancy

Fascinating topic by bluecloud (NJ, USA)

4 Stars
April 24, 2009
I would recommend the book especially for those who want to delve deeper into the topic after watching the PBS documentary with the same name. It is a well written book. When going over the topics of DNA, Y chromosome, gene mutation, etc, if the author had doodled a couple very basic sketches - without turning it into a biology book - it would have helped lay people like me tremendously. Also, the author makes several assumptions (climate, life styles, etc) when explaining the migration paths of our ancestors. I am not an expert in the field, but I have a feeling that these should be taken by a grain of salt. All in all, this is a story of cutting edge technology leading to fascinating findings about our ancestors.

Genetics of the Out of Africa odyssey by John C. Landon (New York City)

5 Stars
March 21, 2009
Superb little book on the genetics of human evolution, and in the process a new perspective on the 'Out of Africa' question. The suddenness of this new science, with its revolutionary perspective on man, his origins and history, is compelling and it makes even books of a decade ago seem out of date. This book itself may need updates, but the basic snapshot of the human genetic odyssey is breathtaking in its scope.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey by P. D. Zohrab

3 Stars
January 19, 2009
This is a very interesting and well-written book, and I recommend it to anyone who is new to the field of genetics for genealogy. However, it does fall between two stools, to some extent, in that it tries to explain complex statistical concepts to a general audience using everyday analogies which I, at least, did not find helpful. Since I have a background in linguistics, I found his section on language weak. It was irritating to hear yet another academic trot out the old myth that language is unique to humans, when recent experiments with gorillas and chimpanzees show that they have extensive language capacities, and we just do not know enough about their own communication systems to say that they do not use language in everyday life. Similarly, it was irritating to hear him use the word "indigenous" so loosely, when it should be blindingly apparent to someone in his field that it can only be used when the evidence is available to show that a particular group is in fact the first human population in a given area. Give the political correctness evident in his use of the word "indigenous", we may suspect that his stress on genetic drift, as opposed to natural selection, in human genetics has to do with an ideological preconception which may or may not mask the reality of human genetic development.

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