Before the Dawn

Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

By: Nicholas Wade

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

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 35,000 years between the emergence of fully modern humans and the first settlements?

This will be the most talked about science book of the season.

©2006 Nicholas Wade (P)2006 Tantor Media Inc

Critic reviews

"Wade presents the science skillfully, with detail and complexity and without compromising clarity." (Booklist)
"This is highly recommended for readers interested in how DNA analysis is rewriting the history of mankind." (Publishers Weekly)

Stimulating, but a little speculative

I decided to read this book as a counterpoint to Jarrod Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs, and Steel, which focused on geography and domestication of plants/animals as an explanation for the rise of human civilization. Wade argues that this point of view doesn’t take into account recent scientific evidence that human genes have continued to evolve over the past few thousand years, sometimes as an apparent result of civilizing forces.

This is an area of political controversy for obvious reasons, but Wade respectfully and even-handedly explores the known facts, tracing the divergence of modern humans from a small founding population in Africa to the branches and subgroups that exist today. If you’re interested in learning more about where the state of the art in human population genetics stands (or stood in 2006), and how this field, archeology, and linguistics corroborate each other’s findings, there’s lots of information in Before the Dawn. I particularly enjoyed learning about the quirks of mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA that make them useful tools in resolving questions of ancestry, and about techniques for tracing the roots of language back thousands of years. I also was interested in his thoughts on the origins of religion, which he argues emerged from behaviors needed to share resources.

Wade, however, doesn’t make a very convincing case that Jarrod Diamond is wrong. In fact, he grudgingly acknowledges the “ingenuity” of Diamond’s thesis, then makes an unsupported argument that humans *might* have evolved a “settling down” gene before they learned to domesticate plants. I’m not saying that he’s necessarily incorrect, but I didn’t buy it. Diamond never claimed that ancient people instantly went from nomadic to settled, but that they probably lived a hybrid lifestyle for a while.

Similarly, some of Wade’s other claims feel rather speculative. He attributes a decline in violent behavior to genes, but this may not be the primary explanation. Consider reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature for a more in-depth exploration of the topic. In the chapter that explores why Ashkenazi Jews have statistically higher IQs than people of other groups, the data *might* suggest that evolutionary pressures in medieval times were the cause, since Jews were forced into intellectual non-farming jobs and had a scholarly religious tradition that uplifted the brightest, but there could be other explanations for the phenomenon.

As I said in my review of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I think that societies and cultures are a lot malleable than genes are, and more likely to change in response to environmental pressures. Still, when there is cultural stability in one place over long periods of time, then genes might be selected to fit that culture. More research is undoubtedly needed before it can be determined what we really owe to variations in our hardware versus variations in our “software”.

If you’re interested in such questions, though, this is a stimulating read. Of course, I also recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel. Another fine book is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Marvelous Book

Before the Dawn is an engrossing and thought-provoking book that connects the evidence DNA and the newest techniques for dating archeological artifacts to propose new ideas about our history and development as humans. If you are a fan of the late Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond, this book will be fascinating to you. The narration is fabulous, too.

Excellent Overview

Well written and entertaining overview of the origins of humans. Backed up by research and well explained. Excellent beginning text for the beginner, and enough in depth information for someone who has some knowledge of the subject.

wow!

so much interesting info that I want to listen to it again (a first). I'm going to buy the book for my scientist son-in-law, I think it will be much discussed!

Ohhh boy...

So...there's a lot of interesting stuff in the first half of this book--I especially enjoyed the chapter on language--but I also had some serious reservations. I felt like Wade said, "must have" and "doubtless" with reference to prehistoric society without backing those statements up in any convincing way a few times too often, and I found the writing really sloppy; for instance, when talking about dogs, he says that people didn't domesticate wolves, wolves domesticated themselves. Then about two sentences later he says something like, "besides the invention of the dog, these people did so-and-so." Whaaat? First of all, you said wolves (dogs) domesticated themselves. And secondly, invention is a very different thing than domestication. Also, as other folks have mentioned in their negative reviews, there are a few too many things that sounded, well...racist. Whether he meant them to or not, that's how they came across to me.

Anyway, there was still some pretty facinating information squeezed in between the awkward bits, so I kept on going. Only then I hit the second half of the book and he just...totally lost me. He started making all sorts of assertions that seemed...absolutely nonsensical to me regarding trust and religion and male/female relationships--again, without giving any real evidence to back those statements up--and it just got more and more absurd from there.

I'm walking away from this one, kids.

A 2 for the laughs

This book is worth the price just for the laughs alone. The only thing more ridiculous than some of these theories are the means of arriving at them. Everything but creation is put fourth as a theory and none of it is worth the time it takes to read it.

A caricature of genetic determinism

I have no problem with the fact that we are a product of both our genes and our environment. However, Wade takes genetic determinism to an almost absurd level. He presents speculative assumptions as if they were well established and accepted facts. This book is swimming with misinformation.

Outdated

Advances and discoveries in this field in the last 15 years have shown that much of the important information in this book is outdated and incorrect.

Unfortunately Inaccurate

From the outset, the author makes several outdated claims. After claiming chimpanzees to be more similar to gorillas than humans--a statement that would require the author to ignore altogether what was known in 2006 from genetic and cladistic study--I gave up in fear that I might not catch other egregious inaccuracies.