I bought and finally read Nicholas Wade’s – “Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors” after catching references to it around the blogosphere (e.g. TDAXP)
I loved it.
This book makes an interesting pass at writing down the “pre-history” of humans mostly based upon on genetics and human DNA analysis.
Wade notes the following as the themes driving the book:
- There is a clear continuity between the ape world of 5 million years ago and the human world that emerged from it.
- A principle force in the shaping of human evolution has been the nature of human society.
- The human physical form was attained first, followed by continued evaluation of human behavior.
- Most of human prehistory occurred in, and was shaped by the last ice age.
- The adaptaions for three principal social institutions – warfare, religion, and trade – had evolved by 50,000 years ago.
- The ancestral people had a major limitation to overcome: they were too aggressive to live in settled communities.
- Human evolution did not halt in the distant past but has continued to the present day.
- People probably once spoke a single language from which all contemporary languages are derived.
- The human genome contains excellent records of the recent past, providing a parallel history to the written record.
Everybody should read this book. I am passing my copy onto my family
Glad you liked it! A great summary!