Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade
Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade
8 Rating(s)
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Before the Dawn
Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

Author: Nicholas Wade

Narrator: Alan Sklar

Unabridged: 12 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/01/2006


Synopsis

Based on a groundbreaking synthesis of recent scientific findings, critically acclaimed New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade tells a bold and provocative new story of the history of our ancient ancestors and the evolution of human nature.

Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings—driven by revelations discovered in the human genome—has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors—the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization. Sure to stimulate lively controversy, he makes the case for novel arguments about many hotly debated issues such as the evolution of language and race and the genetic roots of human nature, and reveals that human evolution has continued even to today.

In wonderfully lively and lucid prose, Wade reveals the answers that researchers have ingeniously developed to so many puzzles: When did language emerge? When and why did we start to wear clothing? How did our ancestors break out of Africa and defeat the more physically powerful Neanderthals who stood in their way? Why did the different races evolve, and why did we come to speak so many different languages? When did we learn to live with animals and where and when did we domesticate man's first animal companions, dogs? How did human nature change during the thirty-five thousand years between the emergence of fully modern humans and the first settlements?

This will be the most talked about science book of the season.

About Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade is a longtime reporter for The New York Times's Science section, which studies by the Times have shown is the most popular section of the paper around the country. Before writing for the Times, Wade was the deputy editor of Nature magazine in London, one of the world's most prestigious science publications, and a reporter for Science magazine, the world's premier science journal. He is the author or coauthor of six books, including A Natural History of Vision.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on December 23, 2017

Review: This review will be in 2 parts; an overview of how I felt about it & a bunch of notes on interesting things I want to remember about it. This book puts together, in layman's terms, the results of anthropologists, biologists, & gene mapping into a comprehensive history of the human race. Since......more

Goodreads review by Nate on July 26, 2008

In my experience, it has been hard to find good, popular books about human evolution and prehistory. The most interesting books I’ve found on the subject are Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” and “Guns, Germs and Steel.” Nicholas Wade’s book “Before the Dawn” is an excellent addition to that sh......more

Goodreads review by ☘Misericordia☘ on August 13, 2018

Some brilliant stuff - glottochronology, for one. Of course, it's unreliable, which the author illustrates well enough. Some questionable stuff. Such as the predominance of high IQ in some populations. I'm not entirely persuaded in IQ measurements applicability to anything, nor in the suggestion tha......more

Goodreads review by Thomas Ray on March 01, 2022

Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade, 2006, 312pp., Dewey 599.938. This came out just 3 years after the first complete sequencing, in 2003, of a human genome. p. 2. Rather comprehensive: combines linguistic, genetic, and bones-and-tools evidence to illuminate the distant past; continues into ancient and mod......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on February 22, 2012

Interesting, but speculative I decided to read this book as a counterpoint to Jarrod Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs, and Steel, which focused on geography and domestication of plants/animals as an explanation for the rise of human civilization. Wade argues that this point of view doesn’t take into acco......more