Before The Dawn: Recovering The Lost History Of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade

Though there are a lot of areas where I fault this book, I view this book with a certain degree of respect as well, and see it as useful even though it is deeply flawed. The author seeks two purposes from this book–which is pretty obsolete as far as its understanding of human origins is concerned, it must be admitted. The first of these purposes is to present a narrative of human evolution, and though a great deal about this narrative is flawed–including the author’s misguided insistence that the neo-Darwinian synthesis has been good at explaining how complex organs can be the result of stepwise evolution–the book is testament to the human need to tell narratives and stories, which this author shares with a great many people who have told truer tales. The second intent of this book is not as honestly acknowledged as the first intent, but it is evident from the design and structure of the book and a great deal of its commentary, and that is a desire to defend the largely neglected sexual selection view of Charles Darwin that was at the heart of Darwin’s book On The Descent Of Man, the much-neglected follow-up to his vastly overrated On The Origin Of Species. Each of the book’s chapters begins with a quotation from Darwin’s work, and a great many of the author’s comments support the idea that sexual selection is the cause for inclusive altruism as well as the conquests of Genghis Khan and the modesty laws of contemporary Muslim society, to say nothing of the peacock’s tail.

This book is between 250 and 300 pages long and it is divided into 12 chapters. The first chapter discusses genetics and genesis, making reference the writings of the biblical author of Genesis as he does, quite naturally (1). This is followed by a chapter on metamorphosis (2), specifically as it relates to the transformation of human beings from chimp-like to humans (3). After this comes a discussion of the development of language (3) as an important aspect of making humans human. After this comes a discussion of the author’s view of an East African Eden (4) in which humanity grew and developed. This is followed by a convenient and clean (but not entirely accurate) tale of mankind’s Exodus from Africa to its settlement of the entire world (5), which was followed by a period of tens of thousands of years of seeming statis before mankind moved into more modern ways of living (6). The author spends a chapter talking about the demands that settlement (7), even before agriculture, required of people, and the ways that increasing sociality (8) allowed early settlers to gain a decisive numerical edge over hunters and gatherers that led to the eventual domination of civilized people over the globe. This is followed by a delicate discussion of the importance of race to an understanding of human behavior, despite the unsettling nature of race in contemporary discourse (9). After this, the author casts his lot with the lumpers who believe in the ability of using mass comparison to connect the languages of the world in a phylogenetic tree (10). After this comes a chapter on history (11), where the author discusses the role of genetics in uncovering family lineages and exploring the reasons why certain Mendelian genetic diseases exist. The last chapter, on evolution (12), shows the author tiptoeing towards an advocacy of eugenics or encouraging the speciation that Wells was horrified by in The Time Machine, with the development of different levels of humanity, presumably with different rights and treatment (12). The book ends with notes, acknowledgements, credits, an index, and information about hte author.

Although it seems almost uncharitable to point out the many ways that this book falls short of its goal of presenting a scientifically up-to-date account of the origins of mankind, the author’s focus on genetics makes it possible to at least point out some of the areas where the author’s efforts fall short. The author, for one, fails to address the impact of interbreeding as a fundamental part of human origins. Genetic research has indicated that Neanderthals had about 6% or so of human DNA, while most non-Africans have up to 2% or so of Neanderthal genes (my own genetic testing has shown a pretty typical 1% Neanderthal origin for myself), which apparently resulted from an interaction that took place at the exit out of Africa, at least as scientists currently explain it–it may change tomorrow. The author knows nothing of Denisovans, which apparently had at least two encounters with modern humans, once in East Asia, giving Tibetans the ability to live on the high-altitude Tibetan plateau, and the second in insular Southeast Asia, giving the Melanesians a very high degree of Denisovan DNA that sometimes goes as high as 25% or so, a massive contribution to DNA that the author seems not to know anything about (which makes sense, as the book was published in 2006). Similarly, for all of the author’s interest in the genetics of Africa, the author is unaware that there were at least two large encounters between modern human beings and a “ghost” population of near-relatives that took place first in East Africa and then in West Africa from hominins that have not yet been identified by scientists. The author gives a smooth tale that had a lot of plausibility, but the tale of human origins has been made far more complicated by the survival of evidence of interbreeding between related stocks of human beings throughout the world, which undercuts at least some of the points that the author tried to make here about the alienness of even related species of human beings as being a reason why humanity extinguished all of its relatives. The truth is, as it usually is, far more interesting and far less clear-cut.