Genes, Peoples, and Languages

North Point Press, 2000

A distinguished expert in genetics offers an explanation and exploration of his lifelong research into humankind's genetic heritage, discussing where humans evolved, how societies spread through the world, how languages develop, the nature of race, and much more. Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. He and others have answered this question with a decisive yes. This book comprises five lectures thgat serve as a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goal of which has been nothing less than tracking the past 100,000 years of human evolution. Cavalli-Sforza raises questions that have serious political, social, and scientific import: When and where did we evolve? How have human societies spread across the continents? How have cultural innovations affected the growth and spread of populations? What is the connection betweem genes and languages? Always provocative and often astonishing, Cavalli-Sforza explains why there is no genetic basis for racial classification and proposes that a comparison of blood types is a far better means of determining `genetic distance' and explaining linguistic and cultural differences...