Genes, Peoples and Languages

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question -- anticipated by Darwin -- with a decisive yes. Genes, Peoples, and Languages is a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goat 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 between 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.A panoramic tour of the major discoveries in genetic anthropology, Genes, Peoples, and Languages gives us a rare firsthand account of some of the most significant scientific work of recent years. Enthralling, profound, and lively, this is popular science writing at its best.