What a fascinating and factual article as well as a lively read.

The DNA on your graphic is wrong. It should twist to the right, have about 3.5 nucleotides per turn and it lacks a major and minor groove. Why does everyone get this wrong? stop screwing up the DNA!

according to Stephen Oppenhimer, author of The Real Eve. Otherwise, an interesting article.

At least you're not wasting your money on the faux lineage certificates sold at the mall kiosks where guaranteed you always just happen to be related to royalty. The odds favor many, many people in your past were fucking someone they weren't supposed to be fucking. Proof that it really doesn't matter where you've been so long as you know where you're going.

Proof: an exhumed Inuit corpse wearing this shirt: "My parents migrated across the Bearing land bridge and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Other historians have unearthed banners reading: "Reunite Pangea!"

Nice story, but you claim that "African-Americans want to know which part of the mother continent their people were stolen from." Did you get this from advertising material or personal bias? Sadly, most people, of any race, who were enslaved were sold by family members, not stolen.

I know, I know. Not very PC. Flame on.

What an unfortunately superficial coverage of this topic. As a biologist and family historian, when I read an article as thin as this on a subject I know well, I find myself wondering whether Salon (or any other newspaper or magazine) is doing just as shallow a job on topics which I don't know well enough to detect it.

Thanks to Laura for another intelligent article. But from her description of the book, I am lead to suspect that this Nicholas Wade, himself, might be descended from a race of dull-witted but well-meaning wishy-washy people who like to hear themselves talk more than they like to actually think—possibly inbred on both sides. What else, but genetics, could explain it? Even for an evolutionary biologist, his questions about human culture and behavior are shallow, half-baked, and unexamined, his insights benighted. It's not just that he makes sweeping generalizations, it's that his pronouncements seem lacking in any substantive meaning. For instance, what does it mean that "evolution lies behind the transformation" from "aggressive and warlike" cultures to "more peaceful, settled communities"? (I presume Laura is accurately paraphrasing him.) But what is a warlike culture? What is a peaceful culture? Do we even agree that any such transformation has ever occurred? What a bunch of feel-good, hand-waving nonsense. Sounds to me like this guy doesn't get out much. But that's just one simple point brought out in the article (one which, surprisingly, Laura passes over without question), and they go downhill from there.

Furthermore, it doesn't sound like Wade did even the minimal homework regarding the related disciplines he brings into his arguments. Laura brings up some examples regarding research about sexual behaviors. But, more to his central thesis: Are there any archaeologists or anthropologists who still argue that Anatomically Modern Humans left Africa 50,000 years ago? Numbers are now going back to more like 75 - 100,000 years ago (as someone else here pointed out). For a great illustration of early human migrations, which takes into account all the recent archaeological finds and DNA evidence, see Stephen Oppenheimer's excellent illustration and discussion of the data at

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

This is the latest speculation and some details are controversial. Some of the discussion is a bit technical, but the Flash animation is pure fun :^)

Evolutionary biology/ecology/psychology can be powerful tools to help us gain insights about who we are, as a species. And, believe it or not, there are actually a few sociobiologists out there who are capapble of nuanced thinking and some degree of real human insight. But like all science, it needs to be prosecuted intelligently and carefully, always with a critical eye turned on your own assumptions and biases, and with a clear understanding of what your data actually tells you and when your conclusions say more about yourself than what you are trying to study. Sadly, sociobiology seems to be the new refuge for all manner of people who want to defend their own cherished illusions about the world by dressing them up as science. Wade gives sociobiologists a bad name.

I really enjoyed this article. I suspect it was a little light on the facts, but what I did learn was plenty enough, a good starting point for our shared genetic history. If we can get past our own cultural biases, we may learn something yet about our real history.

Evolutionary psychologists, for example, have a tendency to blithely theorize about human sexuality when they clearly don't know much about how human beings really behave sexually. True, there's not much solid data to be had.

But some people in this field advance their pet theories even when there is more than enough solid data to show them up.

For example, rape trauma. Which evolutionary psychologist was it who spent the nineties claiming from the pages of glossy magazines that women experienced rape trauma because over an evolutionary time scale, they learned rapists made bad fathers? I forgot his stupid name -- he wrote about "The Female Mind" -- who was he?

Anyhow, if his theory was true then why do men experience rape trauma? Why do old women and children experience rape trauma?

You see, the field of rape trauma was already fairly well developed and it was already understood that rape trauma is a type of PTSD and PTSD happens completely outside the context of sexual reproduction and there never WAS ANY NEED WHATSOEVER to explain rape trauma as a separate phenomenon apart from other types of trauma.

How on earth can you excuse creating a theory about rape trauma that is absolutely uninformed by any actual current data coming from survivors of rape or people who work with them?

Since that episode, I have very little respect for the field as a whole.

Superficial

What an unfortunately superficial coverage of this topic. As a biologist and family historian, when I read an article as thin as this on a subject I know well, I find myself wondering whether Salon (or any other newspaper or magazine) is doing just as shallow a job on topics which I don't know well enough to detect it.

-- TFN

TFN, your letter is as superficial and shallow as you accuse Laura Miller of being. Aside from announcing your superiority, have you a demonstration to make of it? Fill us in: provide us with some of the depth and insight that is so sorely lacking. You make an accusation of shallowness, yet you provide not the first example of it.

You've also apparently missed the whole point of the article: it's a book review. The writer's task was to review the book, and provide some additional context, not to do an in-depth, investigative report on the subject of the book.

So instead of (predictably, as this happens every time an article is published in Salon, and I'm pretty sick of it) injecting poison, accentuate the positive: enlighten us with your insights. Thanks in advance.