Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Nicholas Wade (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2006

Based on a groundbreaking synthesis of recent scientific findings, critically acclaimed New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade tells a bold and provocative new story of the history of our ancient ancestors and the evolution of human nature.Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings-driven by revelations discovered in the human genome-has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors-the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization. Sure to stimulate lively controversy, he makes the case for novel arguments about many hotly debated issues such as the evolution of language and race and the genetic roots of human nature, and reveals that human evolution has continued even to today.In wonderfully lively and lucid prose, Wade reveals the answers that researchers have ingeniously developed to so many puzzles: When did language emerge? When and why did we start to wear clothing? How did our ancestors break out of Africa and defeat the more physically powerful Neanderthals who stood in their way? Why did the different races evolve, and why did we come to speak so many different languages? When did we learn to live with animals and where and when did we domesticate man's first animal companions, dogs? How did human nature change during the thirty-five thousand years between the emergence of fully modern humans and the first settlements? This will be the most talked about science book of the season.

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scientists are using DNA analysis to understand our prehistory: the evolution of humans; their relation to the Neanderthals, who populated Europe and the Near East; and Homo erectus, who roamed the steppes of Asia. Most importantly, geneticists can trace the movements of a little band of human ancestors, numbering perhaps no more than 150, who crossed the Red Sea from east Africa about 50,000 years ago. Within a few thousand years, their descendents, Homo sapiens, became masters of all they surveyed, the other humanoid species having become extinct. According to New York Times science reporter Wade, this DNA analysis shows that evolution isn't restricted to the distant past: Iceland has been settled for only 1,000 years, but the inhabitants have already developed distinctive genetic traits. Wade expands his survey to cover the development of language and the domestication of man's best friend. And while "race" is often a dirty word in science, one of the book's best chapters shows how racial differences can be marked genetically and why this is important, not least for the treatment of diseases. This is highly recommended for readers interested in how DNA analysis is rewriting the history of mankind. Maps. (Apr. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Genetics has been intruding on human origins research, long the domain of archaeology and paleoanthropology. Veteran science journalist Wade applies the insights of genetics to every intriguing question about the appearance and global dispersal of our species. The result is Wade's recounting of "a new narrative," which also has elements of a turf war between geneticists and their established colleagues. He efficiently explains how an evolutionary event (e.g., hairlessness) is recorded in DNA, and how rates of mutation can set boundary dates for it. For the story, Wade opens with a geneticist's estimate that modern (distinct from "archaic") Homo sapiens arose in northeast Africa 59,000 years ago, with a tiny population of only a few thousand, and was homogenous in appearance and language. Tracking the ensuing expansion and evolutionary pressures on humans, Wade covers the genetic evidence bearing on Neanderthals, race, language, social behaviors such as male-female pair bonding, and cultural practices such as religion. Wade presents the science skillfully, with detail and complexity and without compromising clarity. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (April 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594200793
• ASIN: B000RWD3T6
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (128 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,558,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dear Amazon Reader,
I'm the author of two books on recent human evolution. They are addressed to the general reader interested in knowing what the evolutionary past tells us about human nature and society today.
One, Before the Dawn, traces how people have evolved during the last 50,000 years. As of this writing the book has received almost 100 reviews from Amazon readers, most of whom have been kind enough to say they liked it.
The other, The Faith Instinct, looks specifically at religion. In it I first explore how religious behavior evolved in early humans, and then follow the cultural development of religion from hunter gatherer societies to those of the present day. One of the book's themes is that religious behavior evolved because it conferred significant advantages on the first societies to practice it, and that it is of continuing value today. The book should be of interest both to people of faith and to those with none. It does not attack the central position of either side, having nothing to say about whether or not God exists; it's about religious behavior, which everyone agrees does exist. Publication date is November 11, 2009.
How did I came to write these books? Not by any very direct or logical route. I was born in Aylesbury, England, then a rural outpost where cattle were stalled in the central town square on market days. I was educated at Eton, a school founded for poor scholars by Henry VI in 1440 AD, and then at King's College, Cambridge, also founded by Henry VI. Perhaps this connection with the medieval past gave me a fondness and respect for history. Still, I got my degree in science and have spent much of my life as a journalist writing about scientific issues of various kinds.
My first serious job was at Nature, a leading weekly scientific magazine based in London, after which I moved to Washington DC to join Science, Nature's principal rival in the United States. Nature and Science exist mostly to publish research findings but both have news sections addressed to scientists. It was in the course of writing news articles for Science that I learned of the epic rivalry between Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally to win the Nobel prize. Their 21 year race was the subject of my book The Nobel Duel, (now alas out of print).
Another book that grew out of reporting for Science was Betrayers of the Truth, written with my colleague William Broad. We analyzed the many cases of scientific fraud we had reported for Science, trying to find common patterns in who commits fraud, why they do it, and why they are almost never detected by the vaunted checking mechanisms of science like peer review and replication. The book appeared many years ago, but nothing has changed since. Fraud continues to be detected by those with personal knowledge of the deceiver, not by the official procedural safeguards of science.
Leaving Science, I joined the New York Times as an editorial writer and wrote about political issues to do with science, the environment and defense. After 10 years of issuing opinions, I moved to the more objective realm of the paper's science section, first as its editor and then as a reporter. A great benefit of reporting is that the job requires speaking to the leading experts in a field, through whom one has the chance to become very well informed - the perfect vantage point from which to write books. I wrote Lifescript (2001), an account of the race to sequence the human genome and its consequences. Then followed Before the Dawn (2006), the story of evolution since modern humans dispersed some 50,000 years ago from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa.
Before the Dawn gave me the idea of trying to reconstruct the genesis of religion, a crucial social behavior that clearly emerged before modern humans left Africa. The Faith Instinct takes the reader from the religious practices of the ancestral human population, to the spring and harvest festivals of early agricultural societies, the historical origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the role of religion today in morality, reproductive behavior, warfare and statecraft. I learned much fascinating information from writing the book and reached conclusions that I hadn't at all expected to arrive at. If a book is a surprise to its author, as this one was to me, there's a chance it will contain something new and interesting for the reader, as I hope will be the case.
- Nicholas Wade

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

386 of 395 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Dawn of New Knowledge: Fascinating, But Bound to Be Controversial, April 30, 2006

By 

William Holmes "semloh2287" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Hardcover)

"Before the Dawn" is a very well written survey of what genetics can teach us about the origin and evolution of the human species. Starting with the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees 5 million years ago, Wade explores the latest theories about the development of the "hominid" line and explains why homo sapiens evolved differently from our cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos.

Most of the books about human origins tend to focus on paleoanthropology and related disciplines. "Before the Dawn" does a great job of synthesizing the discoveries of paleoanthropolgists with the findings of geneticists--in some cases, examination of human DNA has confirmed what paleoanthropolgists have long believed, in others it has raised new and sometimes disturbing questions.

Without becoming overly technical, Wade explains how scientists use the study of DNA to determine when signficant events occurred in human evolution--for example, when humans began to use fully modern language (about 50,000 years ago), the size of the ancestral population of modern humans (as small as 150 people), or when the ancestral population left the African continent (also around 50,000 years ago).

Some of Wade's observations may surprise and trouble many people. Creationists will not be pleased with the book's basic view that Darwin's theory of natural selection is absolutely correct and that it applies to people as well as animals. Others will be troubled by the ideas that our DNA contains evidence that our ancestors practiced cannibalism; that homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthal and Homo ergaster populations in genocidal warfare that spanned millenia; that hunting and gathering societies are much more warlike than modern, settled ones; that our DNA suggests that humans became more sociable and less violent roughly 15,000 years ago, finally enabling human societies to settle down and begin farming; that human evolution did not stop 10,000 or 50,000 years ago as some have argued, but that it continues down to the present day and will continue into the future (either naturally or artificially); that in rare cases, unusual selection pressures have produced populations that, on average, are either more intelligent or more physcially capable in certain respects than others. Wade handles each of these delicate propositions with care, but some will be disturbed by the implications of what he is saying. (Perhaps that's why E.O. Wilson, in the blurb on the back of the book, praised Wade's "courage and balance.")

"Before the Dawn" is a superb survey of what scientists know (or think they know) about human origins in 2006. But this is a report from the cutting edge of genetics and paleoanthropology, so stay tuned for further developments. In the meantime, Wade's book is an excellent introduction to a new dawn of knowledge.

203 of 219 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fascinating, meticulous and wide in scope, April 20, 2006

By 

David Fernandez (Bronx, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Hardcover)

I liked this book a lot. The material is complicated, but familiar at the same time. When I thought about it, I found that I had a number of ingrained notions about ancient human life. I had a picture in my mind of a relatively peaceful caveman, the same one from grade school textbooks and the natural history museum- I had never really thought about ancient human history, or what humanity's predecessors might have been like. This book examines those points in depth- how our ancestors might have walked, made tools, begun to speak, and spread across the world. A main point of this book is that scientists' growing understanding of the information encoded in DNA, along with integrating information from other disciplines, can provide a window into human history we have never had before.

The breadth of disciplines that apply to this topic are amazing, encompassing history, biology, primatology, archaeology, linguistics, paleontology, sociology, behavioral science, and many others- it was enjoyable to learn about different fields of normally esoteric knowledge from someone who can explain it all clearly and interestingly. And delicately- for example, the chapter on race is an artful discussion of the new questions we can ask about race and evolution with DNA, describing with precision what sort of meaningful things can and cannot be said about race from a biological standpoint, versus a sociological one.

This book is reminiscent in some respects to Guns, Germs, and Steel, another book looking at humans from a more biology-focused perspective (in fact, Mr. Wade addresses a couple of claims made in it), and people who liked that book would almost certainly enjoy this one. This book is similarly broad in scope, yet surprisingly concise, which I suppose might be expected from a journalist. Anyway, it is a well-written, fun and interesting book, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in science in general and human history and biology in particular-

83 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow, a great read, April 20, 2006

By 

Robert Busko (North Carolina) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Hardcover)

For those of us science junkies Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade is a wonderful fix. Wade does a masterful job at making the science easy to understand and "wows" the reader with terrific examples at how modern genetic research is lifting the curtain on human history.

Wade links together diverse areas in his discussion of modern genetics. Language development is an interesting example, but he also looks at how the scientific evidence is also shedding new light on to areas of human development such as social behavior, and even ideas about the rise of religion, and also includes an interesting discussion of racism.

Organized in a logical manner with interesting chapters, Wade also includes great notes. At 320 pages the book is easily a weekend read and would be a great companion at the beach. Some of his conclusions will raise the ire of some readers, but Before the Dawn is a must read for those who want to stay on top of whats happening in human research.

Perhaps most refreshing of all is the application of genetics research to a topic of great interest and importance of all of humankind. Genetics in Before the Dawn isn't a punch line in some television show but hard science.

I highly recommend this book.