Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53749 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-29
• Binding: Paperback
• 440 pages

John Terrell, Director of Anthropology, The Field Museum, Chicago
'Wonderfully readable and excitingly controversial . . . Readers who liked Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel will love this.'

Martin Richards, Researcher in Human Evolutionary Genetics
'To discover the real daughters of Eve, read on.'

Andrew Sherratt, Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford
'Readable but authoritative.'

Customer Reviews

Robust science in a charmingly written package
The book is trying to decipher one of the major questions faced by the paleontological scientific community today, namely the when, how and why Homo Sapiens, our species, managed to get to every last corner of the planet.
Such a vast problem requires, by default, a multidisciplinary approach, and that is exactly the author's method. He combines archaeological data, climate history studies and the latest in biological-genes research, in order to painfully and methodically reconstruct first the Exodus from Africa - birthplace of our species - and then the various phases of human diffusion. He proposes a single exodus from Africa theory, around 80.000 years ago and then follows the combined evidence (fossil record, tools, locations and genes) to trace the human voyage to Southern Asia, Australia, Northern Asia and Europe and finally the Americas.
The author makes a persuasive case and one may agree or disagree with his proposals or parts of them. Irrespective of that, one has to admire the robustly scientific approach to each and separate problem faced during this fascinating journey. Mr. Oppenheimer is the first to state the doubtful of his position in many instances and never passes mere hypotheses as facts. And, most important of all, since this is a book aimed at interested laymen, not scientists of the field, his prose is clear, as free of scientific jargon as possible and downright charming. The illustrations, maps and color plates complement the text in a most satisfying way, making for an excellent and very interesting read.

A "MUST-READ" WORK - MIGRATIONS OF THE ANCESTORS
HERE ARE THE DNA FINGERPRINTS AND FOOTPRINTS of our ancestors, as we have never seen them, thanks to breakthroughs in science. Swab traces taken from thousands of people living today, shows that, circa 80,000 years ago, a group of homo sapiens traversed the strait between Djibouti and Yemen, and became the first ever "out of africa" Sapiens. Or at least, the first whose genetic traces survived in our complex mitochondrial (maternal line) genetic make-up. Some of the group, wandering eastwards along the Indian Ocean's coastlines, in a few 1000 years, reached the Sumatra area. Their tools and traces have been found in the volcanic ash of the Toba Volcano explosion of 72,000 BC, and in Australia. It was only later around 45,000 to 40,000 BC, that a branch of this so-called "Cro-Magnon" group made its impact in Europe and slowly displaced the long-established Neanderthals. They had learned new skills on millennia-long trails that were evolutionary as well as geographical, and re-wrote Earth's history.