A Short History Of Humanity: A New History Of Old Europe, by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe, translated by Caroline Waight

About the only thing to fault this book on, and that probably isn’t the fault of the authors, who appear to have originally written this book in German in 2019, and then found the book suddenly much more relevant in the aftermath of Covid-19, is the title of the book. The subtitle of the book gives a better sense of the book’s contents, as this is a book by genetic researchers (mostly by Krause, with Trappe serving mainly to shape the book into a better narrative) that gives an explanation of the explanatory power of cutting-edge genetic research. If you happen to be, like I am, a big fan of genetic genealogy as well as the use of genetics in achieving massive breakthroughs in understanding the history of humanity as a whole, this book has a lot to offer, and in somewhat unexpected ways, as the authors weigh in on everything from migration and the politics of immigration to the origins and timing of the Indo-European language family’s dispersion (and offer a theory as to its possible Iranian origins), as well as the relationship between plague and humanity in the arms race between human beings and bacteria over who can ruin the other more effectively.

This book is a relatively short book at almost 250 pages or so of material divided into ten chapters. Thea author begins with a short introduction and then discusses the birth of the new science of archaeogenetics due to the growth of our ability to recognize the DNA of the past and separate it from contamination (1). This is followed by a discussion of Europe’s fate of being settled by persistent waves of immigration, including multiple migrations of ancient Europeans into the continent and numerous other groups, which massively contributed to the DNA of the continent (2). The authors speculate that immigrants are the future (3), commenting that the spread of humanity allowed for its greater survival. The authors argue for the existence of parallel societies between ancient farmers (originally from Anatolia) and Western Hunter Gatherers with limited mixture between them (4). This is followed by a discussion of the single young men that entered into Europe with the Yamnaya expansion that brought the Ancient North Eurasian ancestry into the continent (that would also be passed on to Native Americans) (5). This is followed by a discussion of the authors’ thoughts about the Indo-European language family as well as earlier language families of Europe, including the relics of the languages apparently spoken by the early farmers in Basque, paleo-Sardinian, Etruscan, and others (6). The authors spend some time examining the role genetics has played in helping to better understand the migration of the Sea Peoples into the Middle East (7), as well as the repeated attacks of the plague on European populations going back thousands of years (8). This is followed by a look at the pandemics involved in the Columbian exchange (9), with a conclusion about the global melting pot (10) and the fact that most immigrants appear to prefer North America and the Middle East as places to go rather than Europe, for what it’s worth. The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, sources, image credits, and an index.

There are, to be sure, some imperfections with this book. There are those readers who will fault the writer for attempting to wade into cultural politics in the discussion of the desirability of immigrants to society, wishing he would stick to the obviously impressive scientific aspects of genetic research and leaving the political implications of such research to others. Similarly, the author could stand to be a bit more aware of the nature of bacteria in that the harm that they do to human beings stems from dysteleology, and that genetic therapy of bacteria themselves to make them less virulent because they are whole and undamaged would be a better way to resolve this arms race than more dubious ways to genetically engineer ourselves to be invulnerable. The author also repeats the untruths that a substantial amount of DNA is junk DNA, though helpfully the estimate has been reduced from 94% or so a couple of decades ago to about 50% today, reflecting a growing understanding of the many uses of the DNA code aside from encoding genes, which will hopefully continue in the future. Despite these flaws, though, a wise and discerning reader will be able to gather a lot of worthwhile information about cutting edge genetic research and will, like the body’s own systems of preserving ourselves from damaging mutations, leave what is profitless from this book excised and cut out of one’s thinking and memory.