Books
Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes By Steve OlsonHoughton Mifflin, $25
The Molecule Hunt: Archaeology and the Search for Ancient DNABy Martin Jones Arcade Publishing, $26.95
One of the things that turned Jurassic Park into a blockbuster in 1993 was that it seemed possible. The technology for grabbing pieces of DNA and reading their sequences was just getting up to speed. Maybe, just maybe, if you found a piece of amber that contained a mosquito that had sucked the right drop of blood 70 million years ago, you could isolate the genes of Tyrannosaurus rex. By the time Jurassic Park II came out in 1997, scientists realized that cloning a dinosaur is pure fantasy, because we cannot recover DNA more than a few hundred thousand years old. But genetic forays into the more recent past have yielded a stunning consolation prize: DNA—from fossils and living organisms—is rendering obsolete the standard textbook version of human origins and the rise of civilizations.
Martin Jones's The Molecule Hunt and Steve Olson's Mapping Human History offer different but complementary accounts of this revolution. Jones, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, surveys dozens of examples of how DNA (as well as proteins, fatty acids, and other organic molecules) has radically changed the nature of his work. Where archaeologists once had only sherds of pottery for clues to a vanished people, they can now get information about the biology of the humans who made the pottery. They can study the DNA of the animals and crops those humans raised and even the pathogens that made them sick. Moreover, Olson contends that understanding the ancient history gleaned from DNA bears directly on two of the world's hot-button issues: race and ethnicity. His book demonstrates just how naive some of our ideas about our human ancestry have been.
