Great narrator, easy to digest and great prose.

This was a great listen. Easy to follow and the natrator was good to listen to.

5 people found this helpful

Great content, monotonous narration

I love this subject and the work that has gone into it is fascinating. But the narration is like a screen reader on downers.

2 people found this helpful

Great book. Terrible Reader.

David's writing kept me engaged through Johns monotone droning. This books needs a re-record. I look forward to David Reich's next work.

1 person found this helpful

Badly done

This is read as though by Noah Weather radio computers on a faulty voice activated recorder. I don’t think that a single sentence begins without half of the word not being recorded. It makes it very difficult to understand.

1 person found this helpful

I have a number of feelings about this book

First off, aDNA work is amazing. It's going to answer questions that we've never even been close to knowing before, like the identity of the founders of the Indus river valley civilization. This will be a cool field to watch going forward, and this book gives a number of great examples of what already has been and what soon will be discovered.

At the same time, this is only *sort of* a book about aDNA. The first part focuses on it exclusively, but then there's this big section in the middle where the author tends to use a lot more data from modern populations due to the paucity of aDNA data. This is fine, but technically is a slight diversion. In the near future, I do hope we get more data from East Asia / the Americas, as those are the main areas where data is lacking (with the caveat that the data must be collected ethically).

The final part of the book is more of an address of the social ramifications of aDNA research. This is referenced throughout the text (ie. the political ramifications of non-south asian ancestry in India), but the final chapters really focus on it. I think it's good to have this part, but the author is wandering into an area that he is less well suited to address. On the whole I agree with him (most especially his point that academic institutions discouraging genetic studies to avoid sounding racist is actually harmful, because it drives the field away from peer review and towards politically radical pseudo-scientists), but if you find controversy in the book you'll find it in these chapters.

All in all, I would still strongly encourage anyone with an interest in anthropology, history, applied molecular biology, or bioinformatics to give this a read. I fully believe the author when he posits that aDNA with be of the same order of importance as carbon dating, and even for the general public this isn't something to be left ignorant on! I do hope though to see a proper synthesis of the field in a decade or two when the data are more complete.

Important

This book is highly important for the breaking of barriers between cultures and perceptions on race.

Very rich and informative

This book contains tons of scientific findings. I felt lost in some chapters but overall it gave me a lot of unbiased information. if you are interested in human genetics and how it relates to cultures and languages this is an awesome book to read.

Too much genetics and not enough paleoanthropology

This book is far too technical for my liking although this should in no way detract from the knowledge and groundbreaking work of the author. For those who are more interested in genetics, this book is probably wonderful. But I wanted to get the paleoanthropological history of humanity without so much technical detail.