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The 10000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution Hardcover – January 27, 2009
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateJanuary 27, 2009
- Grade level11 and up
- Reading age13 years and up
- Dimensions7 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
- ISBN-100465002218
- ISBN-13978-0465002214
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From Booklist
Review
"Did human evolution come to a screeching halt fifty thousand years ago when Homo sapiens emerged from Africa, thus ensuring the psychic unity of mankind? Don't be silly, say the authors of this latest addition to the fast-emerging discipline of Biohistory. In clear prose backed by a wealth of hard data, Cochran and Harpending add a biological dimension to the history of our species, and hammer another nail into the coffin lid of 'nothing but culture' anthropology."
Bruce G. Charlton, MD; Professor of Theoretical Medicine, University of Buckingham, Editor in Chief of Medical Hypotheses
“The 10,000 Year Explosion offers scientists and historians a new and fertile direction for future research, and provides the general public with a better explanation of the past, present, and future of human beings....I was motivated to read the entire book in a single marathon session.”
John Hawks, author of Human Evolution
"For years, human geneticists have been uncovering a picture of human evolution. But now, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending are encouraging us to 'fast forward' the discussion."
Booklist
“A most intriguing deposition, without a trace of ethnic or racial advocacy, though directed against the proposition that ‘we’re all the same.’"
Publishers Weekly
“There is much here to recommend… and their arguments are intriguing throughout…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.”
Wall Street Journal
“Important and fascinating…the provocative ideas in ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’ must be taken seriously by anyone who wants to understand human origins and humanity's future.”
Seed
“The 10,000 Year Explosion would be important even if it were only about population genetics and evolutionary biology, but Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending…have written something more. This book is a manifesto for and an example of a new kind of history, a biological history, and not just of the prehistoric era.”
New Scientist
“The evidence the authors present builds an overwhelming case that natural selection has recently acted strongly on us and may be continuing unabated.”
About the Author
Gregory Cochran is a physicist and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. For many years, he worked on lasers and image enhancement in the field of aerospace. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Henry Harpending holds the Thomas Chair as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. A field anthropologist and population geneticist, he helped develop the “Out of Africa” theory of human origins. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s research has been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, Atlantic Monthly, Science, Seed, and more.
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
- Best Sellers Rank: #441,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #292 in Genetics (Books)
- #759 in History of Civilization & Culture
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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
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.
Top reviews from other countries
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.
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...







