a brief history of everyone who has ever lived

The “Out of Africa” argument is alive and well, but it’s complicated. In the first half of the book, Rutherford charts how we came to be. A random sample includes: why the distribution of wet and dry ear wax in humans suggests that the people of South Korea might be the least smelly on earth why the idea of a Danish Viking conquest of the British Isles involving rape and pillage is not borne out by a genetic legacy and why monoamine oxidase A, the so-called “warrior gene”, ought not to be a valid defence in criminal trials. The myriad storylines will leave you swooning. Rutherford’s follow-up to his highly regarded first book Creation is an effervescent work, brimming with tales and confounding ideas carried in the “epic poem in our cells”.

But then a writer who suggests his book is a continuation of Steve Jones’s masterpiece The Language of Genes is clearly not short of confidence. Imagine if Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were updated with the addendum “as told by genes” and you’d get a sense of the scale of the ambition. In untangling this mesh, Rutherford aims at no less than a retelling of human history.

Family trees, it seems, collapse and fold in they zigzag across generations to produce a bewilderingly entangled mesh. If you take the notion that you have two parents, that they each also had two parents, and work backwards to an ever expanding family tree, then by the time you reach the eighth century and Charlemagne you will have accounted for 137,438,953,472 individuals, more people than have ever existed in total on the planet.

A brief history of everyone who has ever lived