A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived Read online

  I was tutored and schooled by Professor Steve Jones, at University College London and beyond. On the first day of his undergraduate genetics course in 1994, he offered to compensate any of us impoverished students the profit if we bought a copy of his masterpiece The Language of the Genes. I claimed that 55 pence. Over the years he has influenced me intellectually perhaps more than anyone else, and in many ways, this book is, with his permission, a continuation of that classic. In 2012, when I was invited to give a prestigious lecture for the British Humanist Association, Steve introduced me. He joked, I hope, that he had a strong sense that I was waiting for him to die so I could truly inherit his living. Because he’s still not dead, and for the 55 pence, I dedicate this book to

  STEVE JONES

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Author’s note

  Introduction

  Part One: How We Came to Be

  1. Horny and mobile

  2. The first European union

  3. These American lands

  4. When we were kings

  Part Two: Who We Are Now

  5. The end of race

  6. The most wondrous map ever produced by humankind

  7. Fate

  8. A short introduction to the future of humankind

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  References and further reading

  Text and image credits

  Index

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  BY SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE

  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.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Science demands collaboration. There are no lone geniuses, never evil geniuses, and very rarely any heretical geniuses. Almost all science is done by very normal people working in teams or in cahoots with others in similar or dissimilar fields, and they build knowledge on the shoulders of historical and contemporary giants, as Isaac Newton once suggested, parroting the words of the eleventh-century philosopher Bernard of Chartres, who was referencing the Greek myth of the temporarily blinded hunter Orion, who saw further by sitting a dwarf on his shoulders.

  The science in this book is perhaps more collaborative than most, as it involves the introduction of a new discipline, genomics, into older ones, namely history, archaeology, paleoanthropology, medicine, and psychology. Author lists of genetics papers can now run into the dozens, hundreds, and occasionally thousands. Long gone are the days when Victorian gentlemen could idle away their inheritances in hot pursuit of the fabric of nature.

  Many people have helped me with the writing of this book, and I have used numerous research papers, which are listed at the back. For the most part, though, I have not included specific references in the text, nor individual rese
archers, simply to add to the flow of the stories herein. A large number of the studies involve Mark Thomas at University College London, and I am very grateful for his guidance and friendship over the years. The particular field of ancient DNA is led by a few labs currently, though it is spreading at a feverish pace as the techniques become better and easier to deploy, and as more and more data is accrued. Several of these tales are drawn from the work of Svante Pääbo, Turi King and the Richard III project, Joe Pickrell, David Reich, Josh Akey, Joachim Burger, Graham Coop, Johannes Krause, and a few others, who have all helped me directly or indirectly. The work is theirs; any errors are mine. There is a glossary of some of the technical or less than friendly terms that geneticists use.

  Introduction

  “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches . . . Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

  “Chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion” in On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859

  This is a story about you. It concerns the tale of who you are and how you came to be. It is your individual story, because the journey of life that alights at your existence is unique, as it is for every person who has ever drawn breath. And it’s also our collective story, because as an ambassador for the whole of our species, you are both typical and exceptional. Despite our differences, all humans are remarkably close relatives, and our family tree is pollarded, and tortuous, and not in the slightest bit like a tree. But we are the fruit thereof.

  Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. All of them—of us—are close cousins, because our species has a single African origin. We don’t quite have the language to describe what that really means. It doesn’t, for example, mean a single couple, a hypothetical Adam and Eve. We think of families and pedigrees and genealogies and ancestry, and we try to think of the deep past in the same way. Who were my ancestors? You might have a simple, traditional family structure or, one like mine, handsomely untidy, its tendrils jumbled like old wires in a drawer. But no matter which, everyone’s past becomes muddled sooner or later.

  We all have two parents, and they had two parents, and all of them had two parents, and so on. Keep going like this all the way back to the last time England was invaded, and you’ll see that doubling each generation results in more people than have ever lived, by many billions. The truth is that our pedigrees fold in on themselves, the branches loop back and become nets, and all of us who have ever lived have done so enmeshed in a web of ancestry. We only have to go back a few dozen centuries to see that most of the 7 billion of us alive today are descended from a tiny handful of people, the population of a village.

  History is the stuff that we have recorded. For thousands of years, we have painted, carved, written, and spoken the stories of our pasts and presents, in attempts to understand who we are and how we came to be. By consensus, history begins with writing. Before that we have prehistory—the stuff that happened before we wrote it down. For the sake of perspective, life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago, as far as we know, in pockets in the east and north of Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

  For comparison, the book you are holding is around 115,000 words, or 685,000 characters long, including spaces. If the length of time life has existed on Earth were represented as this book, each character, including spaces, is around 5,957 years. Anatomically modern humans’ tenure on Earth is equivalent to

  . . . the precise length of this phrase.

  The time we have been recording history is an evolutionary wing-flap equivalent to a single character, the width of this period<.>

  And how sparse that history is! Documents vanish, dissolve, decompose. They are washed away by the weather, or consumed by insects and bacteria, or destroyed, hidden, obfuscated, or revised. That is before we address the subjectivity of the historical record. We can’t agree definitively on what happened in the last decade. Newspapers record stories with biases firmly in place. Cameras record images curated by people and only see what passes through the lens, frequently without context. Humans themselves are terribly unreliable witnesses to objective reality. We fumble.

  The precise details of the events of September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, may well remain obscure because of conflicting reports and the chaos of those horrors. Witness testimonies in courts are notoriously defective and are always subject to squint-eye scrutiny. Flit back a few centuries, and there is no contemporary evidence even for the existence of Jesus Christ, arguably the most influential man in history. Most of our tales about his life were written in the decades after his death by people who had never met him. Today, we would seriously question that, if it were presented as historical evidence. Even the accounts that Christians rely on, the Gospels, are inconsistent and have irreversibly mutated over time.

  This is not to disparage the study of history (nor Christianity). It’s merely a comment on how the past is foggy. Until recently it was recorded primarily in religious texts, business transaction documents, and the papers of royal lineages. In modern times we have the opposite problem—far too much information and almost no way to curate it. In every purchase you make online, every Internet search you do, you volunteer information about yourself to be captured by companies in the ether. Books, sagas, oral histories, inscriptions, archaeology, the Internet, databases, film, radio, hard drives, tape. We piece together these bits and bytes of information to reconstruct the past. And now, biology has become part of that formidable swill of information.

  The epigraph at the beginning of this introduction is Darwin’s single reference to humans in On the Origin of Species, right at the end, as if to tease us that there will be a sequel. With his proposed theory of descent with modification in the distant future, light will be shed on our own story: to be continued.

  That time has come. There is now another way to read our pasts, and floodlights are being shone on our origins. You carry an epic poem in your cells. It’s an incomparable, sprawling, unique, meandering saga. About a decade ago, fifty years after the discovery of the double helix, our ability to read DNA had improved to the degree that it was transformed into a historical source, a text to pore over. Our genomes, genes, and DNA house a record of the journey that life on Earth has taken—4 billion years of error and trial that resulted in you. Your genome is the totality of your DNA, 3 billion letters of it, and due to the way it comes together—by the mysterious (from a biological point of view) business of sex—it is unique to you. Not only is this genetic fingerprint yours alone, it’s unlike any other of the 107 billion people who have ever lived. That applies even if you are an identical twin, whose genomes begin their existence indistinguishable, but inch away from each other moments after conception. In the words of Dr. Seuss:

  Today you are you! That is truer than true!

  There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

  The sperm that made you started its life in your father’s testicles within a few days before your conception. One single sperm out of a spurt of billions ground its head against your mother’s egg, one of just a few hundred. Like a Russian doll, that egg had grown in her when she was growing inside her mother, but it matured within the last menstrual cycle and, taking its turn from alternating ovaries, eased its way out of the comfort of its birthplace. On contact, that winning sperm released a chemical that dissolved the egg’s reluctant membrane, left its whiplash tail behind, and burrowed in. Once inside, the egg set an impenetrable fence that stopped any others breaching her defenses. The sperm was unique, as was the egg, and the combination of the two, well, that was unique too, and that became you. Even the point of entry was unique. Your mother’s egg being roughly spherical, that sperm could’ve punched its way in anywhere, and at the behest of cosmi
c happenstance, it penetrated its quarry at a singular point, a point that set waves of chemicals and effectively began the process of setting your body plan—head at one end, tail at the other. In other organisms, we know that if the winning sperm had come in on the other side, the embryo that became you would’ve started growing in a different orientation, and it may well be the same in us.

  Your parents’ genetic material, their genome, had been shuffled in the formation of sperm and egg, and halved. Their parents, your grandparents, had provided them with two sets of chromosomes, and the shuffle mixed them up to produce a deck that had never existed before, and never will again. They also bestowed upon you just a bit of unshuffled DNA. If you’re a man, you have a Y chromosome that was largely unchanged from your father and from his father and so on back through time. It’s a stunted shriveled piece of DNA, with only a few genes on it and a lot of debris. The egg also had some small loops of DNA hiding inside, in its mitochondria, tiny powerhouses that provide power for all cells. It has its own mini genome, and because it sits inside the egg, this only comes from mothers. Together, these two make up a tiny proportion of your total DNA, but their clear lineages have some use when tracking back through genealogies and ancient history. However, the vast majority of your DNA was forged in the shuffle of your parents’, and theirs in theirs. That process happened every time a human lived; the chain that precedes you is unbroken.

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  I offer no comment on the psychological or parental aspects of Philip Larkin’s poem, but from a biological point of view, it’s spot on. Each time an egg or sperm is made, the shuffle produces new variation, unique differences in the people that host them. You’ll inherit your parents’ DNA in unique combinations, and in that process—meiosis—you also will have invented some brand new genetic variations, just for you. Some of those will get passed on if you have children, and they will acquire their own as well.