Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

by Nicholas J. Wade and Nicholas Wade

Book Overview

"Meaty, well-written." --Kirkus Reviews

"Timely and informative." --The New York Times Book Review

"By far the best book I have ever read on humanity's deep history." --E. O. Wilson, biologist and author of The Ants and On Human Nature

Nicholas Wade's articles are a major reason why the science section has become the most popular, nationwide, in the New York Times. In his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014303832X
• ISBN13: 9780143038320
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Tracking our roots.

Nicholas Wade thoroughly exercises his source material. As science writer for the NY Times he has access to many of the latest research reports on a wide variety of related fields including anthropology, archeology, languages, and genetics. In "Before the Dawn," Wade collected the latest findings from these fields and others and assembles them into a readable compiled description of the origins of modern humans. According to theories reported in this book our ancestors developed the mental ability for fully articulated speech only about 50,000 years ago or so. In a few thousand years thereafter our speaking ancestors had split into three genetic lineages and some small number of only one lineage left southern Africa to venture along the southern coast of Asia. Migration was slowly accomplished by growth of a tribe until it split and the new division moved a little farther along. Within a few thousand years or so humans from original genetic all the way to Australia. From southern Asia our ancestors also moved north and west. Fascinating DNA studies of people from all around the world show how various people migrated and when. One aspect of human evolution that Wade devotes considerable attention to is the taming of our species. Primitive hunter gatherer tribes are constantly at war with their neighbors and generally value men who are successful warriors. When our ancestors moved into Europe and Asia these areas were already occupied by other species of early humanoids such as Neanderthals. Over a period of years and countless skirmishes, raids, and battles, our ancestors hunted them all down and exterminated them; there is no discernable Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. Constant tribal warfare eliminates about 30% of each generation of men so it is a very powerful evolutionary force. By comparison, even the wars of the 20th century killed a far smaller percentage of our whole population. In order to leave our age old hunter gatherer, tribal warfare, model of life and become villagers, farmers, and even soldiers, our ancestors had to evolve into less aggressive and more trusting people. Wade reports sociological speculation that one early function of tribal religions was to allow more trust among a wider group than immediate kin. Wider trust increases the size of the "us" group and helps all of the group to succeed in tribal warfare. Trust and peaceful coexistence wider than kin was a necessary change before our ancestors could settle in villages. One chapter deals with the study of linguistics. Linguistics studies how common early languages split into divergent related languages and attempts to track how they are related. In theory all the small number of humans who originally left Africa about 50,000 years ago spoke the same language. When they became isolated in geographically separated areas their languages changed over time. In theory the history of language migration should be consistent with archeological and genetic

Human genome enlivens study of human evolution, but ....

This remarkable book covers so much ground in such lucid fashion that skeptical readers may wonder if Wade has an Achilles Heel as a commentator on human evolution. Academic specialists will envy the ease with which Wade offers to reorganize paleoanthropological accounts of the "out of Africa" exodus of behaviorally modern humans in the light of information from the human genome, and then shows how similar quantitative methods may extend our understanding of the phylogeny of the world's languages to a much deeper past than hitherto considered possible. I do not agree with other reviewers that the material on the genetics of "race" is scandalous or even controversial in the way suggested. That information has been accumulating in studies of the medical (pharmacological) significance of variations in the genome, and rejecting its possible utility in saving human lives because of unrelated arguments about the social construction of "race*" is methodologically naive. The book's major shortcoming is its failure fully to explore the implications of its findings concerning the continued action, during and after the global diaspora and the invention of agriculture, of natural selection on widely dispersed populations, responding to quite different ecological challenges, with quite different linguistic and cultural innovations. This renders suspect the view that the mental modules postulated by evolutionary psychologists evolved in one specifiable "environment of evolutionary adaptation." In fact, the hypothesis that natural selection continues to act on human behavioral capacities ("organs") up to the present suggests that culture itself has become a factor in determining such selection pressures. While biologists and many of the rest of us will find the chapter on languages and linguistics heavy going, it is remarkable to find such a chapter in a book of this sort. Wade does Herculean labor in detailing the differences of opinion among linguists concerning the classification and developmental chronology of the world's languages. In contrast, he gives no attention at all to equally significant disputes among evolutionary psychologists, behavioral ecologists, cultural evolutionists, and social psychological studies of human gender differences. As a consequence, the book's acceptance of the dominance of the genetic perspective on human evolution in the past 50 K years is totally uncritical. Just one example: we are told, again, that men and women differ markedly in the weight they assign to such factors as age, wealth, anatomical symmetry and waist-hip ratios. What does this tell us but that men who mate with fecund women and women who mate with resourceful and faithful men will have more offspring? David Buss' studies of mating strategies in "37 world cultures" themselves show that both men and women agree in assigning much greater weight and priority to psychological compatability and behavioral collaboration in the choice of sexu

The Dawn of New Knowledge: Fascinating, But Bound to Be Controversial

"Before the Dawn" is a very well written survey of what genetics can teach us about the origin and evolution of the human species. Starting with the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees 5 million years ago, Wade explores the latest theories about the development of the "hominid" line and explains why homo sapiens evolved differently from our cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Most of the books about human origins tend to focus on paleoanthropology and related disciplines. "Before the Dawn" does a great job of synthesizing the discoveries of paleoanthropolgists with the findings of geneticists--in some cases, examination of human DNA has confirmed what paleoanthropolgists have long believed, in others it has raised new and sometimes disturbing questions. Without becoming overly technical, Wade explains how scientists use the study of DNA to determine when signficant events occurred in human evolution--for example, when humans began to use fully modern language (about 50,000 years ago), the size of the ancestral population of modern humans (as small as 150 people), or when the ancestral population left the African continent (also around 50,000 years ago). Some of Wade's observations may surprise and trouble many people. Creationists will not be pleased with the book's basic view that Darwin's theory of natural selection is absolutely correct and that it applies to people as well as animals. Others will be troubled by the ideas that our DNA contains evidence that our ancestors practiced cannibalism; that homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthal and Homo ergaster populations in genocidal warfare that spanned millenia; that hunting and gathering societies are much more warlike than modern, settled ones; that our DNA suggests that humans became more sociable and less violent roughly 15,000 years ago, finally enabling human societies to settle down and begin farming; that human evolution did not stop 10,000 or 50,000 years ago as some have argued, but that it continues down to the present day and will continue into the future (either naturally or artificially); that in rare cases, unusual selection pressures have produced populations that, on average, are either more intelligent or more physcially capable in certain respects than others. Wade handles each of these delicate propositions with care, but some will be disturbed by the implications of what he is saying. (Perhaps that's why E.O. Wilson, in the blurb on the back of the book, praised Wade's "courage and balance.") "Before the Dawn" is a superb survey of what scientists know (or think they know) about human origins in 2006. But this is a report from the cutting edge of genetics and paleoanthropology, so stay tuned for further developments. In the meantime, Wade's book is an excellent introduction to a new dawn of knowledge.

fascinating, meticulous and wide in scope

I liked this book a lot. The material is complicated, but familiar at the same time. When I thought about it, I found that I had a number of ingrained notions about ancient human life. I had a picture in my mind of a relatively peaceful caveman, the same one from grade school textbooks and the natural history museum- I had never really thought about ancient human history, or what humanity's predecessors might have been like. This book examines those points in depth- how our ancestors might have walked, made tools, begun to speak, and spread across the world. A main point of this book is that scientists' growing understanding of the information encoded in DNA, along with integrating information from other disciplines, can provide a window into human history we have never had before. The breadth of disciplines that apply to this topic are amazing, encompassing history, biology, primatology, archaeology, linguistics, paleontology, sociology, behavioral science, and many others- it was enjoyable to learn about different fields of normally esoteric knowledge from someone who can explain it all clearly and interestingly. And delicately- for example, the chapter on race is an artful discussion of the new questions we can ask about race and evolution with DNA, describing with precision what sort of meaningful things can and cannot be said about race from a biological standpoint, versus a sociological one. This book is reminiscent in some respects to Guns, Germs, and Steel, another book looking at humans from a more biology-focused perspective (in fact, Mr. Wade addresses a couple of claims made in it), and people who liked that book would almost certainly enjoy this one. This book is similarly broad in scope, yet surprisingly concise, which I suppose might be expected from a journalist. Anyway, it is a well-written, fun and interesting book, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in science in general and human history and biology in particular-