Politics and Prose had author Spencer Wells talk about his new book. Wells is a population geneticist and he discusses how we can explain major anthropological trends by looking at the historical markers in our DNA. From this, scientists have pieced together when humans first adopted agriculture, about 12ooo years ago, and that this adoption while making us expand quickly as a species, also made us less healthy than our hunter gatherer forebears. He can also see that at one point during the second ice age of about 10000 years ago, our population dipped to only about 2000 members and we were near extinction. This species stress caused us to begin a long trend of innovation, enabling us to survive and thrive.
The point of his book is to first show how much in common we all have, and to hope that the human species begins to draw from its common background to tackle the tough global, species level problems we have today such as resource constraint, overpopulation, and global warming.
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