Adam Rutherford, "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived"

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Adam Rutherford, "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived:

The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes" (2016)

 

 

본문이 370쪽쯤 되는 이 책은 곁가지들이 너무 무성하다. 예를 들어, 그 자체로는 흥미롭기도 하지만, 주의를 흩뜨리는 이런 얘기:  "Audrey Hepburn was fifteen at the time and endured the Hongerwinter like so many others, making flour for bread and biscuits out of dried tulip bulbs"(p. 331). 한 250쪽 이내로 줄이면 좋았을 것 같다.

 

"[W]e made assumptions about patterns of migration [by humans] that were much more linear and spread like ripples, rather than the picture that has emerged in the last coupl of years"(p. 75)라면서 이 책도 2013년 이후의 획기적인 -- 고고인류학 교재를 고쳐 써야 할 -- ancient DNA 연구 결과를 중점적으로 이야기하고 있어서, 그에 대해 그 연구의 기여자가 쓴 David Reich, Who We Are And How We Got Here(2018)를 읽은 지 얼마 안 돼서 우연히 또 이 책을 만난 게 다소 놀랍기도 했다.

 

national book critics circle 서평

 

 

본문에서 (David Reich와 겹치는 내용은 피하고, 두 가지에 관해서만):

 

There are four living genera of hominidae, aka the great apes: Pan (chimps and bonobos), Pongo (orangutans), Gorilla (gorillas), and Homo (us). The first three have twenty-four pairs of chromosomes, whereas we have twenty-three. But all great apes, including us, share effectively all the same genes in our genomes. The discrepancy is found in our chromosome 2 -- the second largest single chunk of DNA we carry. It's such a whopper because it is an end-to-end fusion of two chromosomes found in chimps, orangs, and gorillas. (p. 59)

 

Anyway, he [Pope John Paul II] tried to reconcile the idea of our divine special creation with the irrefutable evidence of our evolution from earlier apes bu suggesting that there was an "ontological discontinuity" --- if we were looking for a moment where the metaphorical breath of God metaphorically entered us, then it could be when those two chromosomes fused. (p. 59)

 

By asking how recently the people of Europe would have a common ancester, he [Joseph Change, a statistician from Yale] constructed a mathematical model that incorporated the number of ancesters an individual is presumed to have had ..., and given the current population size, the point at which all those possible lines of ascent up the family trees would cross. The answer was merely 600 years ago. (p. 161)

 

In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that DNA says exactly the same thing as Chang's mathematical ancestry. (p. 163)

 

It pleases me that every one of us shares us an ancester who, in the words of Joseph Chang, sowed rice on the banks of the Yangtze or who labored to build the pyramids. (p. 363)