Book description
In The Journey of Man, renowned geneticist and anthropologist Spencer
Wells traced human evolution back to our earliest ancestors, creating a
remarkable and readable map of our distant past. Now, in his thrilling
and thoughtful new book, he examines our cultural inheritance in order
to find the turning point that led us to the path we are on today, one
he believes we must veer from in order to survive. Pandora s Seed takes
us on a powerful and provocative globe-trotting tour of human history,
back to a seminal event roughly 10,000 years ago, when our species made
a radical shift in its way of life: we became farmers rather than
hunter-gatherers, setting in motion a momentous chain of events that
could not have been foreseen at the time. Although this decision to
control our own food supply is what propelled us into the modern world,
Wells demonstrates with the latest genetic and anthropological data that
such a dramatic shift in lifestyle had a downside that we re only
beginning to recognize. Growing grain crops ultimately made the planet
more crowded, sedentary and unhealthy. The expanding population and the
need to apportion limiting resources such as water created hierarchies
and inequalities. The desire to control and no longer cooperate with
nature altered the concept of religion, making deities fewer and more
influential, foreshadowing today s fanaticisms. The proximity of humans
and animals bred diseases that metastasized over time. Freedom of
movement and choice were replaced by a pressure to work that is the
forebear of anxiety and depression millions feel today. Wells then
offers a hopeful prescription for altering a life to which we were
always ill-suited, changing priorities and self-destructive appetites
before it s too late. A riveting and accessible scientific detective
story, Pandora s Seed is an eye-opening book for anyone fascinated by
the past and concerned about the future. Spencer Wells is a leading
population geneticist, documentary filmmaker and author of The Journey
of Man and Deep Ancestry. He received his PhD from Harvard University in
1994 and conducted his post-doctoral training with Luca Cavalli-Sforza
at Stanford University. His landmark research findings from a field
study that encompassed 25,000 miles of Asia and the former Soviet
republics led to advances in the understanding of the male Y chromosome
and its ability to trace ancestral human migration. He was previously
director of the Population Genetics Research Group at the Wellcome Trust
Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford and was recently appointed Frank H.
T. Rhodes Visiting Professor at Cornell University. Wells is currently
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and spearheads the Genographic
Project. He lives with his wife, a documentary filmmaker, in Washington,
DC.
