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Origin
- A Genetic History of the Americas
- Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau, Jennifer Raff - Interview, Yvonne Russo - Interview
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
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Publisher's Summary
From celebrated anthropologist Jennifer Raff comes the untold story - and fascinating mystery - of how humans migrated to the Americas.
Origin is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. Origin provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution.
Twenty thousand years ago, people crossed a great land bridge from Siberia into Western Alaska and then dispersed southward into what is now called the Americas. Until we venture out to other worlds, this remains the last time our species has populated an entirely new place, and this event has been a subject of deep fascination and controversy. No written records - and scant archaeological evidence - exist to tell us what happened or how it took place. Many different models have been proposed to explain how the Americas were peopled and what happened in the thousands of years that followed.
A study of both past and present, Origin explores how genetics is currently being used to construct narratives that profoundly impact Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It serves as a primer for anyone interested in how genetics has become entangled with identity in the way that society addresses the question "Who is indigenous?"
What the critics say
"Social and genetic history cannot be disentangled. ORIGIN also highlights the colonizers’ evolving cultural myths that shape and are shaped by their science. This is a valuable read for consumers of popular genetics who are not aware how much science is built on colonial theft, and how Indigenous peoples push back to improve science." (Dr. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, Canadian research chair in Indigenous peoples, technoscience, and society, and author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science)
"Rarely does a book combine the scientific, the compassionate, and the respectful when engaging with genomes, histories, and the movement of peoples. Even more rarely does a non-Indigenous scientist listen to - and learn from - Indigenous interlocutors, past and present. Jennifer Raff’s ORIGIN deftly weaves a critical narrative of discoveries, biases, achievements, faults, and possibilities, offering an integrative, caring, and scientifically rigorous approach to thinking with and about the histories of the First Peoples of the Americas. Filled with complex but accessible archeological, historical, and genomic analyses presented in the context of honest and often difficult narratives, ORIGIN is a necessary and elegant text." (Agustín Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and author of Why We Believe)
"Ancient DNA, extracted from bones thousands upon thousands of years old, has the potential to rewrite the story of the human past. In ORIGIN, Jennifer Raff expertly explains the complicated science behind it, how it can tell us who the first inhabitants of the Americas really were, and how they got there. ORIGIN balances its cutting-edge command of the science and its interpretation with a deep commitment to the ethical implications of this work. The result is a lively, learned, and wonderfully told guide to a fascinating topic." (Patrick Wyman, author of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World and host of Tides of History)
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What listeners say about Origin
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mark F Sperring
- 2023-07-02
Such an interesting topic but...
Sadly this was really more a series of political virtue signaling interspersed by science. Admittedly very well presented science but the constant drifting into her opinion those politics became a distraction and made it difficult to keep my head in the science. Shame really because she really has a knack of explaining DNA technology in a way that even this old guy can wrap his head around. Still if you can get past the ethics lecture parts it's worth a listen.
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- Amazon Customer
- 2022-03-24
Excellent and empathetic survey of the origins of the Americas
As an archaeologist who collaborated with Indigenous communities I really really REALLY appreciated the empathetic way that Raff engages with the complicated and problematic history of archaeological and genetic research in the Americas. She does an incredible job summarizing our most recent understandings of the science and punctuates this with evocative stories that provide necessary texture to the book. My biggest critique is that the narrator was clearly not provided with pronunciations ahead of time and a number of communities and archaeological traditions are WILDLY incorrect and I found this not only distracting but (unintentionally) offensive. I really hope they can go back and fix these as the mispronunciations take away from the care that Raff herself puts into her discussions of communities in the book.
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- Bob
- 2022-09-26
Excellent book full of science and history
I really enjoyed this book. I’ve been wondering about the peopling of the Americas after I listened to Who We Are and How We Got Here. I’ll listen to both again cuz I’m sure I missed things. Love history and social science themes.
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- pete Vanderzwet
- 2023-04-05
Light on science, heavy on ideology.
Anyone with a basic understanding of the topic over the last decade will find nothing new here. The author talks about herself, at length, and saturates each chapter with a checklist of fashionable (for now) buzzwords conforming submissively and uncritically to ideological demands of the far left. Only the last few chapters address scientific knowledge gained through genomic research, The remaining is ideological fluff.
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