Books to Change Your Life--Before the Dawn

Before the Dawn, Recovering the lost history of our ancestors

by Nicholas Wade

How a child’s scalp ticks changed everything.

A child came home from school with a note he had ticks in his scalp.

The father, an American geneticist, mused that the ticks had to adapt eons back when humans started wearing clothing. The same hooks that they used to cling to our skin wouldn’t work with clothing. But when?

Starting with current genes, science was able to work backward and identify the time we started wearing furs: about 75,000 years ago.

But that was just the first revelation.

Using that technique, a prehistoric story opened up.

A sample of the findings:

-- All men are descended from one man; all women are descended from one woman, as shown in the genetic material shared by all.

-- We started has nomadic hunter-gatherers but then started to settle down in favorable locations and specialize our tasks. Contrary to the experts' opinion, agriculture developed after this new stage, not before. Dogs were the key.

-- Dogs played a crucial role in two ways: first, as guardians alert us to enemies, allowing us to settle down, and second, by bonding to a single person or family, giving us the first notion of private property. Dogs weren’t shared, unlike the kills of the nomadic tribes.

--All dogs are descended from one ancestor.

-- We almost became extinct, but emigrated out of East Africa, headed east through India and Malasia, then Australia, and only then back to Eurasia

--The idealized state of nature, beloved by some philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau who accused humans of corrupting this heritage, cannot be found. Every time a new civilization is discovered, eventually proof of barbaric customs emerges.

-- Evil exists in our species. It’s not going away.