"Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes."
"DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back."
Source: Spencer Wells (2012). “The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey”, p.195, Random House
About the author
Spencer Wells
Geneticist
Spencer Wells is a geneticist and anthropologist known for his research on human migration and genetic diversity, particularly through his work 'The Journey of Man'.
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"So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology."
"The greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in our DNA."
"We are all Africans under the skin."
"Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people - not merely their language - from the steppe appears to be true."
"Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have."