The Great Human Diasporas: The History Of Diversity and Evolution [Paperback]

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (Author), Francesco Cavalli-Sforza (Author), Sarah Thorne (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 1996

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza draws upon his lifelong work in archaeology, anthropology, genetics, molecular biology, and linguistics, to address the basic questions of human origins and diversity. Coauthored by his son, Francesco, the book answers age-old questions such as: Was there a mitochondrial Eve? Did the first humans originate in Africa or in several spots on the planet at about the same time? How did humans get onto North America, the tip of South America, and Australia?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The title The Great Human Diasporas implies that this book is a history of human migration, but it is much more. It is a readable, accessible summary of the lifework of Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who has done more than anyone else to reveal the genetic makeup of human populations. Originally written in Italian with Cavalli-Sforza's filmmaker son Francesco, it maintains some qualities of an interview: The Great Human Diasporas is full of anecdotes about the Pygmies with whom Cavalli-Sforza works, the text is frequently personal yet not self-serving, and it clearly shows how he helped tie together population genetics, linguistics, and anthropology to offer a new, non-racist view of human diversity.

From Publishers Weekly

Stanford geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has spent more than 30 years studying genetic variations in DNA samples from the people around the world. The evidence, he says, supports the belief that modern humans originated in Africa, the Middle East or both regions, then spread around the planet. In this lucid report, written with his son Francesco, an educational film director, he uses genetic differences, maps, computer simulations and an analysis of linguistic changes in the world's languages to hypothetically reconstruct the mass migrations of people across continents since modern humans first appeared. He begins this scientific odyssey with an account of his hunt with pygmies-one of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers-in an African rain forest; then he discusses the spread of agriculture, cultural transmissions of behavior patterns, the Human Genome Project and the exceedingly slight differences among the races.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Perseus Books; 1st Ppbk Printing, Oct.1996 edition (November 6, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201442310
• ISBN-13: 978-0201442311
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #326,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars genes, languages, prehistoric human migrations, September 21, 2002

By 

los desaparecidos (Makati City, Philippines) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Human Diasporas: The History Of Diversity and Evolution (Paperback)

The most rewarding part of this popular science book is the middle, fifth to seventh chapters, in which Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Professor of Genetics at Stanford Medical School, draws on scientific research in human population genetics, in which he has been a well respected pioneer, to describe the migration of human populations beginning about 100,000 years ago out of Africa until recent times. Because patterns of genetic and linguistic evolution exhibit high intercorrelations--even though their respective elements and mechanics differ--he also cites linguistic evidence for this account of migratory prehistory.

The most valuable contribution of this book to popular understanding is that population genetics provides possibly the best though not sole scientific basis on which to construct the prehistory of human "races." By this evidence, we learn, for example, about the migration of modern Homo sapiens to Southeast Asia and Australia approximately 55,000 to 60,000 years ago or about the spread of Neolithic farmer-cultivators from the Middle East into Europe beginning about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. I suspect that readers unfamiliar with modern human evolution will find the genetic tree of the world's populations on page 119 intriguing. The diagram shows, for example, that Northeast Asians are more closely related to Europeans than Northeast Asians are to Southeast Asians.

For as rapidly advancing a science as human population genetics, it should not be surprising that some findings are dated. Recent evidence suggests, for instance, that North Asians descended from both southern China populations that gradually migrated northward as well as Caucasian populations that migrated eastward, so that some genetic mixing all across North Asia took place and is the source of the observed racial connections between North Asians and Caucasians.

In other chapters, Cavalli-Sforza tackles related topics somewhat unevenly. His anecdotes about the African pygmies are light and sympathetic. While his description of the hominid line is accurate for the time of publication, there are more insightful not to mention updated accounts now in print. His discussion of the links between genes and culture is engaging and humane but from the standpoint of science, no better than educated. His rejoinder to the controversial The Bell Curve (1994) is scientifically persuasive.

I very much enjoyed reading this book, the first I purchased at amazon.com.

91 of 110 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wandering through human nature, June 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Great Human Diasporas: The History Of Diversity and Evolution (Paperback)

This collaboration between one of the great population geneticists and his filmmaker son promises much but lets down on delivery. The style and content of the book are uneven. Some topics are told in detail and with compelling narrative, particularly the account of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza's work since the 1960s to establish correlations among genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for the history and relationships of the major human groups. Much weaker, however, is his grasp of cultural anthropology, whether in details or in methods. He attempts to convey an impression of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (predominant through almost all of human history until the last 10,000 years) through extended references to his field research among African pygmies.

Unfortunately, though he is quite sympathetic to the pygmies and their way of life, much of the effect is lost in empty generalities (p. 16: "The forest may look gloomy to us but pygmies feel entirely at home and safe there. It is a place where little that is untoward can happen to them, where danger is limited and life very pleasant."), and his cross-cultural examples come almost exclusively from pygmies or from his personal experience of various Western Europeans. Some points of history, used as examples, are in error (Bede was an English monk who lived from 672 or 673 to 735; not a "sixth-century Irish monk" p. 80).

Cavalli-Sforza also seems to have little knowledge of modern cultural anthropology. Chapter 8 "Cultural legacies, genetic legacies" is particularly weak, treating a number of topics in a very superficial way, showing no knowledge of the huge body of literature on, among others, marriage patterns and the incest taboo, national character, or "cultural evolution". Some of the problems with this book undoubtedly rest with the translator, who seems to have chosen occasionally awkward or confusing phrasings in English.

The book is best when it recounts Cavalli-Sforza's personal experiences and the quest for a unified picture of the relations among human groups. His anecdotes and observations add a human and historical perspective to the story of population genetics, and the technical matters are explained in a comprehensible and even entertaining way. He makes a strong case that differences among human "races" are only skin deep, reflecting adaptation to different climates over the last sixty thousand years, and tells some of his own part in the battle over the IQ and race debate (recently re-ignited with the publication of _The Bell Curve_). One suspects that he would be a great conversationalist at a dinner party, and the portrait of the author (along with his substantial knowledge of human genetics and historical linguistics) is what keeps one reading.

38 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb, informed discourse on genetics, race and evolution, March 25, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (New York, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Human Diasporas: The History Of Diversity and Evolution (Paperback)

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a well known and respected geneticist, has teamed up with his son, Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, to write a superb, well-informed, literate, and easy to read book on genetics, race, and evolution. Using the elder Cavalli-Sforza's own research and that of others, the team weaves a story, starting with research on the pygmies, that entertains as well as informs. I am a scientist, but not a geneticist; what I particularly liked about this book is that it spoke in non-jargon language, yet did not shy away from the sophistication and complexity involved in the subject matter. I also liked and applauded the way the authors forthrightly and honestly dealt with subjects of controversy, such as the concept of race, racism, race and IQ, and so forth. Their destruction of the arguments of Jensen, Shockley and Herrnstein that the differences in IQ between Blacks and whites is genetic is beautiful and complete. This is a wonderful book for the layperson as well as the expert who wishes to read outside his or her field.