Buy new:
$23.34
FREE delivery: Wednesday, April 24 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon
Sold by: BrosFire
List Price: $27.00 Details

The List Price is the suggested retail price of a new product as provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. List prices may not necessarily reflect the product's prevailing market price.
Learn more
Save: $3.66 (14%)
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Wednesday, April 24 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or fastest delivery Tuesday, April 23. Order within 22 mins
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$23.34 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$23.34
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon
Ships from
Amazon
Sold by
Sold by
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime
FREE delivery Friday, April 26 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or fastest delivery Tuesday, April 23. Order within 3 hrs 22 mins
Used: Very Good | Details
Sold by Rye Berry
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comment: Minimal wear, the pages are free of markings.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Other Sellers on Amazon
Added
$23.35
FREE Shipping
Get free shipping
Free shipping within the U.S. when you order $35.00 of eligible items shipped by Amazon.
Or get faster shipping on this item starting at $5.99 . (Prices may vary for AK and HI.)
Learn more about free shipping
on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Sold by: WHITE BLUE BALL
Sold by: WHITE BLUE BALL
(56 ratings)
98% positive over last 12 months
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Shipping rates and Return policy
Added
$23.37
FREE Shipping
Get free shipping
Free shipping within the U.S. when you order $35.00 of eligible items shipped by Amazon.
Or get faster shipping on this item starting at $5.99 . (Prices may vary for AK and HI.)
Learn more about free shipping
on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Sold by: srwilson62
Sold by: srwilson62
(8995 ratings)
100% positive over last 12 months
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Shipping rates and Return policy
Added
$25.00
FREE Shipping
Get free shipping
Free shipping within the U.S. when you order $35.00 of eligible items shipped by Amazon.
Or get faster shipping on this item starting at $7.47 . (Prices may vary for AK and HI.)
Learn more about free shipping
on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Sold by: HOSH LLC
Sold by: HOSH LLC
(41 ratings)
100% positive over last 12 months
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Shipping rates and Return policy
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the authors

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

The 10000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution Hardcover – January 27, 2009

4.3 out of 5 stars 421

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$23.34","priceAmount":23.34,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"23","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"34","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"snFZ%2BqCuMBT4mVJ8O%2F1FcgBZQvRFnQT2Ia%2Bpnmeuu3ND71ee%2BcmrHYD8Ye9zjDcM2aIkUJq8GPMmb4QLZHXbz1KcySIEsRaEj569wEujPL%2B3oXNhj%2F7ZwX4S52VoFW9f%2FoQdUBx9QElH0lU0prcrqdlRy%2Fvo6Esl61mSiWTrKojoIyWvIE037bi%2BMEY1yGSV","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$8.94","priceAmount":8.94,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"8","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"94","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"snFZ%2BqCuMBT4mVJ8O%2F1FcgBZQvRFnQT2SyaYUWMmlvxplX%2B0Nx0SFGwFft1jfHQodT0IOeZRogo0z8fmgKHvmdLfqNzds28PIfteT8WR9qDXiv023pAozXU%2B%2FeLcp1jccNdsQ1nj0lvMhZu%2BTImegklPkzGVmiBw0pKche8ceJ%2FUBaVLUrTF1MXK0f1WGsCs","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years. Scientists have long believed that the ";great leap forward"; that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked end of significant biological evolution in humans. In this stunningly original account of our evolutionary history, top scholars Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending reject this conventional wisdom and reveal that the human species has undergone a storm of genetic change much more recently. Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilization arose, they contend, and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews' rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the ear

The Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Frequently bought together

$23.34
Get it as soon as Wednesday, Apr 24
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by BrosFire and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
+
$17.95
Get it as soon as Wednesday, Apr 24
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Total price:
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
One of these items ships sooner than the other.
Choose items to buy together.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Arguing that human genetic evolution is still ongoing, physicist-turned-evolutionary biologist Cochran and anthropologist Harpending marshal evidence for dramatic genetic change in the (geologically) recent past, particularly since the invention of agriculture. Unfortunately, much of their argument-including the origin of modern humans, agriculture, and Indo-Europeans-tends to neglect archaeological and geological evidence; readers should keep in mind that assumed time frames, like the age of the human species, are minimums at best and serious underestimates at worst. That said, there is much here to recommend, including the authors' unique approach to the question of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, and their discussion of the genetic pressures on Ashkenazi Jews over the past 1,000 years, both based solidly in fact. They also provide clear explanations for tricky concepts like gene flow and haplotypes, and their arguments are intriguing throughout. Though lapses in their case won't be obvious to the untrained eye, it's clear that this lively, informative text is not meant to deceive (abundant references and a glossary also help) but to provoke thought, debate and possibly wonder.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Cochran and Harpending dispute the late Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that civilization was “built with the same body and brain” Homo sapiens has had for 40,000 years. Humanity has been evolving very dramatically for the last 10,000 years, they say, spurred by the very civilizational forces launched by that evolution. They initially retreat, however, to Gould’s 40,000-year benchmark to consider how H. sapiens replaced H. neanderthalensis and to argue for genetic mixing such that modern humans got from Neanderthals the innovative capacity for civilization. Later, agricultural life created problems necessitating adaptations, most importantly to disease and diet, that persist to this day among inheritors of the populations that made them. Lighter skin and eye color arose from other genetic reactions to environmental challenges, and less immediately obvious changes further discriminated discrete populations, as recently as late-eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jews, among whom intelligence burgeoned in, Cochran and Harpending contend, adaptive response to social pressure. A most intriguing deposition, without a trace of ethnic or racial advocacy, though directed against the proposition that “we’re all the same.” --Ray Olson

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (January 27, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465002218
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465002214
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 13 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 11 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 421

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
421 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2010
This book makes the astounding claim that our evolution has sped up 100 times faster in the past 10,000 years than the previous six million years. Even people 4,000 years ago were genetically and culturally different from us.

How do we know this? One way is from looking at both human and chimpanzee DNA. We know we split off from chimps about 6 million years ago, so we can compare the genetic differences and thus the long-term rate of genetic change. The rate of change the past few thousand years is 100 times greater than the long-term rate over the past few million years. If we'd always evolved at such a fast rate, the difference between chimp and human DNA would be much greater than it is.

If evolution this fast seems impossible, then consider how different dogs are from wolves. It took less than 15,000 years to go from wolf to a Chihuahua. There's no other mammal on earth with more varied forms and sizes than dogs. Dogs also vary widely in behavior. For example, some can learn much quicker than others. Border collies just need 5 repetitions of a new command to learn it and follow the command correctly 95% of the time, but a basset hound will need 80 to 100 repetitions and only obey correctly 25% of the time.

And it isn't just a dogs appearance, dogs are much better at understanding our commands and gestures than wolves are.

Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev created a domestic fox in just 40 years by selecting the most tame foxes in each generation.

As far as humans go, it's pretty obvious evolution has taken place the past 50,000 years - just look at all the varieties of skin, eye, and hair color. Such skin-deep appearances were all we could see until recently, but with genetic testing we can see more than superficial differences - we also vary in bones, liver and brain function, disease resistance, etc from each other quite a bit. All of us can speak and have evolved better hearing as well to understand complex language and perhaps to better eavesdrop.

For a long time scientists have been baffled about why humans made a very sudden shift about 50,000 years ago - suddenly advanced, complex art, culture, tools, and weapons came on the scene. For several decades now scientists have been trying to understand what happened.

This is different from the overall "prime mover" - of why we are the way we are. Recent evidence supports the thermal hypothesis, other proposals include Man the Hunter, tool making, speech, social intelligence, taming fire, a constantly changing climate, etc and most likely of all, a synergy of these and many factors not listed as Peter Corning explains so well in "Nature's Magic".

Once our amazing culture evolved, we were no longer bound by natural selection - we didn't need to evolve fur when we moved into colder climates, because we could make warm clothes, and we didn't need to evolve strong muscles to hunt large animals - we could build better weapons.

And once we had better weapons, such as the long distance spear throwing atlatl, humans didn't have to be muscular heavy hulks risking their lives every time they hunted. We became smaller, needed less food, and perhaps that's why we out-competed Neanderthals.

But how could we have evolved so rapidly 50,000 years ago? Here's the bombshell theory - we interbred with Neanderthals!

This book came out before the recent discovery we have one to four percent Neanderthal DNA. But none of the articles about this discussed the implications - that this is why we underwent such an explosive cultural change roughly 50,000 years ago and became fully modern humans.

The authors explain that a common misconception is that people think that Neanderthals were closer to apes than people, but that is not at all true. They also had large brains, speech, and cooperated highly with each other when they hunted together.

We had too small a population to have enough mutations to evolve quickly, the only way it makes sense for this sudden change to have happened is for us to have acquired useful genes from Neanderthals. All it would have take is for a few dozen half human - half-Neanderthal babies over thousands of years for us to gain their best genetic strengths.

What would be interesting to know is whether it was mainly male humans and female Neanderthals or the reverse. Such analyses were done on the ancestry of Mexicans, and their maternal ancestry is mainly Amerindian, but their paternal ancestry is Spanish.

Ultimately, the most important result of our recent evolution was our ability to innovate. Every new innovation led to new selective pressures, which caused us to evolve in new ways. The most important innovation, and the one that caused the most evolution the past 10,000 years, was the invention of agriculture.

Once we had agriculture, the human population grew enormously, which meant a much larger pool of potentially beneficial mutations happening - 100 times more than in the Pleistocene.

Agriculture also created diets early farmers weren't adapted to. They ate way more carbohydrates and less protein, didn't get all the vitamins they needed, and lived much shorter and unhealthier lives.

But mutations arose that changed that. Here's just one example (that you may know): About 8,000 years ago the ability to drink milk as an adult arose in Europe, and now about 95% of people in Denmark and Sweden have no problems with digesting dairy products, and 80% of the rest of Europeans, on average. A different mutation that did the same thing arose in East Africa, and now 90% of the Tutsi are lactose tolerant. Densely populated areas evolved disease resistance, the ability to drink alcohol, and many other non-skin-deep abilities that we can now "see" with genetic studies.

At times in the Old World, when war wasn't the main source of deaths, famine and malnutrition limited populations that reached carrying capacity. The poorest were so short on food that they didn't reproduce themselves, while the elite had more than the two children required to replace themselves and had twice the number of surviving offspring as the poor. The least successful rich children became the new farmers, with the result that after a thousand years or so, everyone was descended from the wealthy classes.

Once the ruling elites existed, they didn't have a hard time controlling farmers, who couldn't leave their land in protest, or they'd die, which stuck them with paying whatever taxes, being conscripted into wars and in general endure whatever the elites dished out.

The authors suggest that in the end, people were ultimately domesticated by elite rulers, who weeded out aggressive fighting peasants, just as farmers weed out their most aggressive animals. The elites selected for a population that submitted to authority. Attention deficit disorder doesn't exist in China - the elites completely bred that behavior out of the population. I found the whole idea fascinating and scary, the full discussion is on pages 110-113. Maybe that explains why Americans have allowed the greatest disparity in wealth between rich and poor in our nation's history to exist, haven't marched with torches and pitchforks on Wall Street, and so on.

A chapter of the book is devoted to why Ashkenazi Jews are so much brighter than other populations. Although they comprise less than one in 600 people, they've won one in four of all Nobel science and too many other achievements to list here. Basically the hypothesis is that because they were forced to hold difficult white collar jobs for centuries in finance and related areas, and couldn't marry outside their group, evolution selected for intelligence. Unfortunately, this selection comes with genetic disorders of Tay Sachs and other diseases.

Well of course the problem with book reviews is that they're too short and have no peer-reviewed scientific references, unlike the book, nor can the logic and details be explained, so if you think any or all of the above is crazy, read the book. And if you're at all interested in the mystery of how we evolved, this fills in a few of the puzzle pieces that I haven't seen explained elsewhere
43 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2014
This book about human genetics argues for the hypothesis that human biological evolution remains important. It argues against the more popularly accepted hypothesis, championed by the late Steven Jay Gould, that “Everything we call culture and civilization we built with the same body and brain.” Gould wanted us to believe that cultural flexibility eliminated the need for biological adaptation and evolution in humans. Therefore, this book, which believes that biological evolution is continuing, or even speeding up, is argumentative, important, controversial, and stirring.
The idea that culture has made humans so flexible that we can respond to environmental pressures at the societal and individual level, without any need for genetic selection, has become the dominant belief among social scientists and many biological scientists. That dominant belief is also comforting, since it is based upon the idea that all human gene pools form one essential entity, and that there are no important genetic group differences among us. Cochran and Harpending challenge this dominant belief system, and use a mixture of advanced genetic thinking, well thought out case studies, expansive hypothesis formation, and overgeneralization to build their case. This book is thrilling to read because its authors have the courage to take on the establishment, but this book is eerie to read because it mixes facts with probability statements, and because it opens a door to some shadowy and even dangerous innuendo.
The chapters of this book circle around population genetics case studies, some of which convincingly show that at least some biological evolution sometimes remains important. For example, there is no question that natural selection in cold, dark environments, such as Northern Europe, led to skin color change in our African derived species that was once entirely dark skinned. Light skinned people are adaptive mutants. Similarly, there is no question that most human beings lacked the ability to digest cow’s milk, or any milk after infancy, but that the adaptive advantage of being able to absorb nutrient rich milk led to the natural selection of lactose tolerant populations where milk was available. Milk drinkers are adaptive mutants. So far so good. Why shouldn’t many other important changes in human populations rest upon natural selection of genetic advantages? It only seems common sense to anyone who has recently watched a basketball game or a football game, that genetic differences in height, weight, reflex speed, coordination, and even psychological aspects of sport like concentration, determination, are all heavily genetically based, and also show distinct population group distributions.
However, some of the other examples in this book reveal weaknesses in the authors’ central argument. For example, Cochran and Harpending write that they believe the few Neanderthal genes, that have recently been proven to exist in European populations, conferred an adaptive advantage on the people who were products of Neanderthal mating with Homo sapiens. Since when does a science book argue based upon the idea “we believe”? The authors believe that the sudden burst of innovation that followed the expansion of modern humans out of Africa was due to the genetic enrichment secondary to interbreeding, but they cannot and do not prove that this correlation in time is a causal relationship.
In their thought-provoking chapter on agriculture, the authors argue that it not only changed our sustenance, but that it changed our characters, due to natural selection that favored deferred gratification (harvesting a crop takes a lot more time than killing an animal), patience, self control, advance planning, group cooperation, and many other changes. However, the eerie shadow of their argument is that over time agriculture increased “ant-like behavior” in people and “selection for submission to authority” that sounds “unnervingly like domestication.” The implication is that human populations may have been selected over time biologically for obedience rather than for problem solving. The authors extend their argument, (on page 127): “Science either does not exist or is appallingly feeble in the majority of the world’s populations…Science does not exist in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Islamic world today.” They further quote Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist, as saying, “No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.”
In what ways do these arguments rest upon proof? Are the authors providing evidence or simply scathing speculation? How do these observations refute Gould’s hypothesis that all the observable differences are culturally based? The authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion continuously imply that large-scale differences in large population groups are genetic rather than cultural, and they base their implications upon circumscribed case examples, temporal correlations and innuendo.
In another chapter, the authors argue that the large number of Nobel prizes and other signs of high intelligence seen in Jews of Eastern European descent derived from adaptation to the conditions under which Eastern European Jews existed for a period of about 1,000 years. This chapter is based on a previous and more thoroughly scientific article that they published in The Journal of Biological Science in 2005.
Cochran and Harpending seem to be peeking into, tiptoeing around, or implying racial and ethnic advantages, disadvantages, and differences in core biological features such as intelligence, in a manner that is daring and dangerous. Many of their arguments are subtle, and important. For example they show that an entire group does not have to genetically evolve in order for the group to nevertheless show significant advantage or disadvantage in particular traits when compared to other groups, because a small shift in the statistical mean will also create a significant shift in the tail of the normal curve, a phenomenon which they summarize as, “outliers are important.” Group advantage may not be conferred on every individual in the group, but may derive from a threshold effect at population extremes. It takes only a hundred brilliant outliers of high intelligence to create a population that will dazzle the world with one hundred new brilliant inventions or discoveries. “A modest difference in the mean of some traits can have a tremendous effect on the frequency with which members of the group exceed a high threshold…Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Charles Darwin made larger intellectual contributions as individuals than other entire civilizations did over a period of centuries.” Newton, Maxwell, and Darwin, all from the British Isles, radically altered human history by founding physics and biology, and they represent intellectual exceptions even within their own white, male, population base, yet they can be understood to represent a statistically probable group of outliers. However, this conjunction of talent could also be statistical artifact, like three coin tosses that all show up heads; or, better yet, it could be understood as the product of empire, power, and wealth compounded by historical situation.
Few books have evoked in me more internal thought and argument. Because of this book, I found the issue of human genetic group differences, which had been slumbering peacefully on my mind, awakened and in tumult. The 10,000 Year Explosion, deserves and requires many readers and many critics.

Review by Paul R. Fleischman author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant.
13 people found this helpful
Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
Narahari
5.0 out of 5 stars A history from the perspective of Genetics
Reviewed in India on October 23, 2018
An excellent read on humans, our history and the way we are progressing
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars good read , a plausible case
Reviewed in Canada on March 18, 2016
l found it very interesting , plausible but not totally proven. lt sounds like eugenics. Some cases have little evidence.
Paul Trehin
5.0 out of 5 stars Non l'évolution ne s'est pas arrêtée avec l'apparition de l'Homo Sapiens
Reviewed in France on November 4, 2015
Les auteurs nous font prendre conscience que les civilisations ont aussi joué un rôle dans l'évolution humaine et que ce rôle a été particulièrement sensible au cous des dix mille années précédant notre époque.
Encore une fois dommage que ce livre ne soit pas traduit en français tout comme bien d'autres livres sur la psychologie évolutionnistes qui sont seulement disponibles en anglais. cela prive les non anglophone d'une importante littérature scientifique.
4 people found this helpful
Report
Riccardo Notte
5.0 out of 5 stars An indispensable book for orientation in the most recent anthropological research
Reviewed in Italy on July 29, 2013
This book provides a very detailed overview of the latest developments of anthropology, but its value lies mainly in having attacked without hesitation the well-known taboo of substantial genetic immutability of the human species and the related idea that the human being both physically and mentally practically "unchanged" from over a hundred thousand years. The two authors make use for this purpose of an impressive series of cross-sectional studies, beyond that of a thin deductive art. Riccardo Notte, professor of cultural anthropology at the Brera Accademia, Milano, Italy
Gabor Laszlo Varkonyi
5.0 out of 5 stars Instead of being over, evolution has actually been at its fastest over the past 10,000 years
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2011
In this fascinating book the authors explain how human evolution has continued since the invention of agriculture, and how it has affected the course of history.

This is a very compelling account of how and why human evolution could not have stopped and indeed has accelerated over the past tens of millenia, and especially since the onset of agriculture. Radically changed environments (first Europe/Asia/etc. instead of Africa, then agricultural environment and gradually strenghening law enforcement instead of hunting-gathering and tribal or even lower level anarchy) and a swelling population (supplying an ever increasing number of useful mutations) meant a huge acceleration of evolution.

The book doesn't shy away from questions of race. They convincingly argue what others (most notably Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele in 
Race: The Reality of Human Differences ) have already shown, that race is much deeper than skin-deep.

It's not very long (a bit more than 200 short pages, including a number of pictures) and is well-written and easy to read, I finished it on a Sunday afternoon, so if you take it with you for a long vacation take some other books as well...
3 people found this helpful
Report