Ill never look at history or anthropology the same way again.

books:

	• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending Basic Books, 2009 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great book

I would recommend the book to anyone interested in anthropology. This book is very well written. The writing is very clear in what is being conveyed as new ideas versus what are already established theories/facts. The book is also easy to read and understand, even without any pre-existing knowledge of the subject matter.

More Required Reading

Another book I think everyone should read because it both expands our understanding and peaks our curiosity about human genetics. The premise of "The 10,000 Year Explosion" is the rate of human evolution is accelerating. With modern techniques for dissecting the human genome science is now able to better approximate the dates of the major changes in human evolution. While factors such as migration, mutation, etc were discussed (as in other books) the authors believe that the significant changes in evolution have occurred much more recently than previously believed.

Unlike more technical books on this subject, "The 10,000 Year Explosion" is compact and easy to read (and understand) despite the span of time it covers. What I liked best is that this book made me think about what I was taught in school and made me want to read more on the subject. Any book that makes me want to read more is a book worth reading. Highly, highly recommended.

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Ill never look at history or anthropology the same way again.

The authors have done an incredible job of covering what might otherwise be a difficult subject matter. To paraphrase Einstein: they made it as simple as possible, but no simpler. The writing style is always engaging and at times surprisingly funny! The book is a very quick read, but you will find yourself digesting the ideas it contains long after you finish reading.

As to the main points of the book, some are startling when you first read them, but as the authors effortlessly back them up you realize that nothing they are saying is in any way controversial. They aren't peddling some far fetched theory; they are merely stating the known facts organized in a way which at times pierces current PC orthodoxy.

If you feel passionately that all children must be taught that people come from monkeys but otherwise are entirely uninterested in evolution, this isn't the book for you. Otherwise pick up a copy of this fascinating and easy to read book ASAP and you won't be disappointed.

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Get in Touch With Your Inner Neanderthal

This book makes the astounding claim that our evolution has sped up 100 times faster in the past 10,000 years than the previous six million years. Even people 4,000 years ago were genetically and culturally different from us.

How do we know this? One way is from looking at both human and chimpanzee DNA. We know we split off from chimps about 6 million years ago, so we can compare the genetic differences and thus the long-term rate of genetic change. The rate of change the past few thousand years is 100 times greater than the long-term rate over the past few million years. If we'd always evolved at such a fast rate, the difference between chimp and human DNA would be much greater than it is.

If evolution this fast seems impossible, then consider how different dogs are from wolves. It took less than 15,000 years to go from wolf to a Chihuahua. There's no other mammal on earth with more varied forms and sizes than dogs. Dogs also vary widely in behavior. For example, some can learn much quicker than others. Border collies just need 5 repetitions of a new command to learn it and follow the command correctly 95% of the time, but a basset hound will need 80 to 100 repetitions and only obey correctly 25% of the time.

And it isn't just a dogs appearance, dogs are much better at understanding our commands and gestures than wolves are.

Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev created a domestic fox in just 40 years by selecting the most tame foxes in each generation.

As far as humans go, it's pretty obvious evolution has taken place the past 50,000 years - just look at all the varieties of skin, eye, and hair color. Such skin-deep appearances were all we could see until recently, but with genetic testing we can see more than superficial differences - we also vary in bones, liver and brain function, disease resistance, etc from each other quite a bit. All of us can speak and have evolved better hearing as well to understand complex language and perhaps to better eavesdrop.

For a long time scientists have been baffled about why humans made a very sudden shift about 50,000 years ago - suddenly advanced, complex art, culture, tools, and weapons came on the scene. For several decades now scientists have been trying to understand what happened.

This is different from the overall "prime mover" - of why we are the way we are. Recent evidence supports the thermal hypothesis, other proposals include Man the Hunter, tool making, speech, social intelligence, taming fire, a constantly changing climate, etc and most likely of all, a synergy of these and many factors not listed as Peter Corning explains so well in "Nature's Magic".

Once our amazing culture evolved, we were no longer bound by natural selection - we didn't need to evolve fur when we moved into colder climates, because we could make warm clothes, and we didn't need to evolve strong muscles to hunt large animals - we could build better weapons.

And once we had better weapons, such as the long distance spear throwing atlatl, humans didn't have to be muscular heavy hulks risking their lives every time they hunted. We became smaller, needed less food, and perhaps that's why we out-competed Neanderthals.

But how could we have evolved so rapidly 50,000 years ago? Here's the bombshell theory - we interbred with Neanderthals!

This book came out before the recent discovery we have one to four percent Neanderthal DNA. But none of the articles about this discussed the implications - that this is why we underwent such an explosive cultural change roughly 50,000 years ago and became fully modern humans.

The authors explain that a common misconception is that people think that Neanderthals were closer to apes than people, but that is not at all true. They also had large brains, speech, and cooperated highly with each other when they hunted together.

We had too small a population to have enough mutations to evolve quickly, the only way it makes sense for this sudden change to have happened is for us to have acquired useful genes from Neanderthals. All it would have take is for a few dozen half human - half-Neanderthal babies over thousands of years for us to gain their best genetic strengths.

What would be interesting to know is whether it was mainly male humans and female Neanderthals or the reverse. Such analyses were done on the ancestry of Mexicans, and their maternal ancestry is mainly Amerindian, but their paternal ancestry is Spanish.

Ultimately, the most important result of our recent evolution was our ability to innovate. Every new innovation led to new selective pressures, which caused us to evolve in new ways. The most important innovation, and the one that caused the most evolution the past 10,000 years, was the invention of agriculture.

Once we had agriculture, the human population grew enormously, which meant a much larger pool of potentially beneficial mutations happening - 100 times more than in the Pleistocene.

Agriculture also created diets early farmers weren't adapted to. They ate way more carbohydrates and less protein, didn't get all the vitamins they needed, and lived much shorter and unhealthier lives.

But mutations arose that changed that. Here's just one example (that you may know): About 8,000 years ago the ability to drink milk as an adult arose in Europe, and now about 95% of people in Denmark and Sweden have no problems with digesting dairy products, and 80% of the rest of Europeans, on average. A different mutation that did the same thing arose in East Africa, and now 90% of the Tutsi are lactose tolerant. Densely populated areas evolved disease resistance, the ability to drink alcohol, and many other non-skin-deep abilities that we can now "see" with genetic studies.

At times in the Old World, when war wasn't the main source of deaths, famine and malnutrition limited populations that reached carrying capacity. The poorest were so short on food that they didn't reproduce themselves, while the elite had more than the two children required to replace themselves and had twice the number of surviving offspring as the poor. The least successful rich children became the new farmers, with the result that after a thousand years or so, everyone was descended from the wealthy classes.

Once the ruling elites existed, they didn't have a hard time controlling farmers, who couldn't leave their land in protest, or they'd die, which stuck them with paying whatever taxes, being conscripted into wars and in general endure whatever the elites dished out.

The authors suggest that in the end, people were ultimately domesticated by elite rulers, who weeded out aggressive fighting peasants, just as farmers weed out their most aggressive animals. The elites selected for a population that submitted to authority. Attention deficit disorder doesn't exist in China - the elites completely bred that behavior out of the population. I found the whole idea fascinating and scary, the full discussion is on pages 110-113. Maybe that explains why Americans have allowed the greatest disparity in wealth between rich and poor in our nation's history to exist, haven't marched with torches and pitchforks on Wall Street, and so on.

A chapter of the book is devoted to why Ashkenazi Jews are so much brighter than other populations. Although they comprise less than one in 600 people, they've won one in four of all Nobel science and too many other achievements to list here. Basically the hypothesis is that because they were forced to hold difficult white collar jobs for centuries in finance and related areas, and couldn't marry outside their group, evolution selected for intelligence. Unfortunately, this selection comes with genetic disorders of Tay Sachs and other diseases.

Well of course the problem with book reviews is that they're too short and have no peer-reviewed scientific references, unlike the book, nor can the logic and details be explained, so if you think any or all of the above is crazy, read the book. And if you're at all interested in the mystery of how we evolved, this fills in a few of the puzzle pieces that I haven't seen explained elsewhere

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Evolving as we speak

The ideas exposed in Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpering's book "The 10,000 year explosion How civilization accelerated human evolution," seem 'way out' at first. but I suspect in little time most will be considered conventional wisdom. It is clear that the science of genetic anthropology will leap forward in the 21st century. As the human genome is delved deeply into (along with the genome of prehistoric man, animals and extinct hominids) a new paradigm will form to explain our origins.
In chapter 2 "The Neanderthal Within" they suggest that Neanderthal and modern humans mated. Even if this was occasional advantageous alleles from this union may have entered the gene pool by the hybridization of the species and increased with time. "In just this way, a tiny bit of Neanderthal ancestry thrown into the mix tens of thousands of years ago could have resulted in many people today, possibly even all modern humans, carrying the advantageous Neanderthal version of some genes." (page 44) They go on to hypothesize that some of these advantageous genes may have led to a creative explosion or leap forward in innovation. This possibly helped modern man 40,000 years ago to populate Europe eventually resulting in the extinction of Neanderthals.
This sure seemed 'out there' against all conventional wisdom at the time the book was published in 2009.
However in the May 6, 2010 edition of Science Green, et al reported that they had sequenced almost all of the Neanderthal genome using bones from three Neanderthals living in Europe 40,000 years ago. They compared this to DNA from five people from France, China, West and South Africa and Papua New Guinea. They found that up to 4% of the DNA of modern man from all regions other than Africa were Neanderthal DNA. Presumably this hybridization happened in the Mid East 60,000 years ago after homo sapiens moved out of africa, but before they dispersed throughout the world.
Whether this was the spark that led to modern man's competitive advantage over Neanderthals remains to be seen. You never know what may be published in the next few years.
Other chapters describe evolutionary changes brought on by agriculture, mutations allowing tolerance of milk/lactose in adults, loss of pigment in northern climates to prevent Vitamin D deficiency, disease resistance aiding the European conquest of the new world and how the Ashkenazi Jews got their smarts.
Many of their contentions are controversial. It will be interesting to see how many withstand the test of time.
I highly recommend this book. It makes you think.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years.

Scientists have long believed that the ?great leap forward? that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked end of significant biological evolution in humans. In this stunningly original account of our evolutionary history, top scholars Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending reject this conventional wisdom and reveal that the human species has undergone a storm of genetic change much more recently. Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilization arose, they contend, and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews' rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the early Indo-Europeans that allowed for a new way of life, increased disease resistance among the Europeans settling America, and new versions of neurological genes among European Jews.

Ranging across subjects as diverse as human domestication, Neanderthal hybridization, and IQ tests, Cochran and Harpending's analysis demonstrates convincingly that human genetics have changed and can continue to change much more rapidly than scientists have previously believed. A provocative and fascinating new look at human evolution that turns conventional wisdom on its head, The 10,000 Year Explosion reveals the ongoing interplay between culture and biology in the making of the human race.

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