Re: SCF Recommended Book List
by Forest_Dump on August 13th, 2020, 7:52 am
David Reich 2018 "Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past".
Many may think I can be pretty hard to please when it comes to science books particularly when it comes to topics that appear to be kind of distant from my kinds of field work and interpreting empirical data. So while I have liked reading some stuff from people like Dawkins, Pinker, etc, I often find their stuff to be too far removed from the field and not of much use to someone like me who spends a lot of time squinting at soil particles or measuring little flakes of broken rock (chert, Flint or rhyolite) with calipers trying to find some great mystery from the past. Well finally some lab geek has written a book that will have me going back to relook at all those old texts and papers with illustrations of stratigraphy and artifacts and rethink the evolutionary processes behind them. This one is about some of the results from genome analysis of humans today and from the prehistoric past. As we should know, human fossils have become the most heavily sampled line of evolution known and since the recovery of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA (and even older stuff since) we (or at least I) have been waiting for some kind of Synthesis of this plus more recent stuff materials covering the past few tens of thousands of years. This book is it and I can't recommend it highly enough. If you have any interest in human (or other) evolution, genetics, evolutionary theory, or even mundane archaeology, you are going to want to read this one a few times. I can barely get through a paragraph without having to put the book down and think of check materials from my library. Definitely anyone who has taken or taught a course on World Prehistory, etc, will be frantically rechecking maps, artifacts illustrations,etc, to pull it all together, critically review, etc.