It is humbling to introduce the North American edition of Adam Rutherford’s monumental A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. Ambitious, wide-ranging, and deeply researched, Rutherford’s book sets out to describe the history of the human species—from our origins as a slight, sly, naked, apelike creature somewhere in Africa to our gradual spread across the globe and our dominion over the planet. In academic circles, it is becoming fashionable to use the word anthropocene to describe the current epoch, when humans have begun to have significant effect on the earth and the environment. We have, in short, reshaped the world that we live in, but Rutherford turns our attention to a somewhat different, if equally essential, question: How did the world—biology, environment, culture—shape us?
The key idea that Rutherford unveils in this riveting volume is that human genomics—the study of our DNA—is radically altering our understanding of our own past. Traditionally, we have investigated questions of human origin by studying biological and cultural artifacts—skeletons, tools, architectural remains, books, stories, language, rituals. But the genome, Rutherford argues, is also an artifact: It stores powerful information about heritage, enabling scientists to reconstruct human origin based on that information alone. Did the first settlers in North America arrive across the Bering Strait several thousand years ago? Where and when did Homo sapiens coexist and interbreed with Neanderthals? How old are we as a species, and how, exactly, do we define where we were “born”? The study of human DNA is unveiling astonishingly novel insights into such questions, Rutherford writes. Indeed, one of the most surprising features of the genetic investigation of human history (as opposed to more traditional means of approaching the question) is the number of myths and fallacies that human genomics has already overturned, and how much of what seemed known and well established is, in fact, unknown and steeped in ambiguity.
In this edition, Rutherford tackles a few thorny concerns that are particularly relevant to our side of the world. Our attempt to reconstruct the early history of human settlement in North America has been dramatically reshaped by modern genomics. By studying genes, we might be able to understand the migration patterns of humans across this continent, decipher the lineal relationships between tribes, and even track the first genetic intersections between Native Americans and European settlers. But this knowledge has not been easy to come by, Rutherford argues. We know much less about American history than we could know because of the unique manner in which the United States developed. The profound failures in the relationships between Native Americans and European settlers—failures driven, in large part, by the toxic legacy of colonialism—have made it impossible, at times, to answer some of the fundamental questions about the origins of humans in the Americas. It is a strange shame that our cultural history has made it monumentally difficult to unearth our biological and anthropological history.
Rutherford is hopeful that this shadow of suspicion and distrust will finally ease, enabling scientists to be able to train the ever-expanding—and ever-more-acute—lenses of genome technologies on the history of the Americas. The capacity to sequence, analyze, and store vast troves of genetic information has made it possible, in principle, to answer deep questions about American history. The reconstruction of ancestry—previously a parlor game that could only be played by the ultrarich—is being popularized and commercialized: With a cheek swab, a drop of saliva, and a few hundred dollars (as the infomercials on TV and the web exhort us), we can now easily obtain information about our individual heritage. But the reconstruction of our national past is unlikely to be easy, he writes. To make inroads into this uncharted continent of genomics, we must first tackle the legacy of European colonialism with caution, openness, and fortitude. This kind of wisdom—rarely to be found in academic textbooks of genetics—catapults Rutherford’s book beyond the realm of popular science writing into the domains of philosophy, history of science, and cultural studies.
The study of DNA—the molecule that stores information about heritage—is a rather modern idea. (Indeed, we did not know that DNA was the carrier of genetic information until the 1950s. The elegant double-helix structure of the most beautiful molecule in biology was solved just sixty-four years ago, and the genetic code was only deciphered in the early ’60s.) But the desire to understand heritage, Rutherford reminds us, is an ancient desire—and twisted into that desire are our concerns about identity and relationships, and our sense of self. As Rutherford concludes, we cannot investigate “heritage” simply by studying DNA; we also need to understand the social and political history of heritage. In this endlessly intriguing book, we are thus not just presented with the mini-history of the human genome, but also with a sweeping history of our attempt to grapple with the human genome.
SM
June 2017
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE is the author of The Gene and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies.