Ancestral Journeys
The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings (Revised and Updated Edition)
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Ancestral Journeys
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Narrated by:
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Corrie James
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By:
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Jean Manco
About this listen
Who are the Europeans? Where did they come from? New research in the fields of archaeology and linguistics, a revolution in the study of genetics, and cutting-edge analysis of ancient DNA are dramatically changing our picture of prehistory, leading us to question what we thought we knew about these ancient peoples.
This paradigm-shifting book paints a spirited portrait of a restless people that challenges our established ways of looking at Europe's past. The story is more complex than at first believed, with new evidence suggesting that the European gene pool was stirred vigorously multiple times. Genetic clues are also enhancing our understanding of European mobility in epochs with written records, including the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, the spread of the Slavs, and the adventures of the Vikings.
Now brought completely up to date with all the latest findings from the fast-moving fields of genetics, DNA, and dating, Jean Manco's highly accessible account weaves multiple strands of evidence into a startling new history of the continent, of interest to anyone who wants to truly understand Europeans' place in the ancient world.
©2013, 2015 Thames & Hudson Ltd. (P)2020 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 164
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 134
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 133
The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Well researched but narrator is terrible
- By John M. on 01-17-21
By: Barry Cunliffe
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Saxons, Vikings, and Celts
- The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland
- By: Bryan Sykes
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 415
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 355
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Story4 out of 5 stars 356
WASPs finally get their due in this stimulating history by one of the world's leading geneticists. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is the most illuminating book yet to be written about the genetic history of Britain and Ireland. Through a systematic, ten-year DNA survey of more than 10,000 volunteers, Bryan Sykes has traced the true genetic makeup of British Islanders and their descendants.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Thesaurus taxing mind numbing travelog
- By Twang on 01-07-14
By: Bryan Sykes
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Children of Ash and Elm
- A History of the Vikings
- By: Neil Price
- Narrated by: Samuel Roukin
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,504
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,295
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,290
The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding
- By Than on 10-06-20
By: Neil Price
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A Short History of Humanity
- A New History of Old Europe
- By: Johannes Krause, Thomas Trappe, Caroline Waight - translator
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 164
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 133
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 134
Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a brilliant pioneer in the field of archaeogenetics - archaeology augmented by DNA sequencing technology - which has allowed scientists to reconstruct human history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time. In this surprising account, Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe rewrite a fascinating chapter of this history, the peopling of Europe, that takes us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the present.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not a short history of humanity
- By Brent on 05-02-21
By: Johannes Krause, and others
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The Year 1000
- When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began
- By: Valerie Hansen
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 577
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 481
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Story4 out of 5 stars 476
People often believe that the years immediately prior to AD 1000 were, with just a few exceptions, lacking in any major cultural developments or geopolitical encounters, that the Europeans hadn’t yet reached North America, and that the farthest feat of sea travel was the Vikings’ invasion of Britain. But how, then, to explain the presence of blond-haired people in Maya temple murals at Chichén Itzá, Mexico? Could it be possible that the Vikings had found their way to the Americas during the height of the Maya empire?
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1 out of 5 stars
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Long on Speculation, Short on Evidence
- By Phyllis on 10-10-20
By: Valerie Hansen
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1491
- New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
- By: Charles C. Mann
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
- Length: 16 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,754
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,229
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,216
Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus' landing had crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago; existed mainly in small nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas were, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last 30 years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Exposes Non-Academic Audience to The Debate Between Ideas of Pre-Colombian America's
- By Christopher on 01-19-17
By: Charles C. Mann
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Against the Grain
- A Deep History of the Earliest States
- By: James C. Scott
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 870
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 724
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 719
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative.
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4 out of 5 stars
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World without Women
- By Paul Richards on 04-28-18
By: James C. Scott
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Who Discovered America?
- The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas
- By: Gavin Menzies, Ian Hudson
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 95
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 83
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Story4 out of 5 stars 84
Greatly expanding on his blockbuster 1421, distinguished historian Gavin Menzies uncovers the complete untold history of how mankind came to the Americas - offering new revelations and a radical rethinking of the accepted historical record in Who Discovered America? The iconoclastic historian's magnum opus, Who Discovered America? calls into question our understanding of how the American continents were settled, shedding new light on the well-known "discoveries" of European explorers, including Christopher Columbus.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Like reading an appendix
- By D. McCracken on 01-23-15
By: Gavin Menzies, and others
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Traced: Human DNA's Big Surprise
- By: Nathaniel T. Jeanson
- Narrated by: Will Stauff
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 95
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 82
What happened to the ancient Egyptians? When their civilization fell, did the Egyptian people disappear? Or do their descendants exist to this day? What about the ancient Persians? Romans? Mayans? For years, the answers to these questions have been hidden. But no more. Nathaniel T. Jeanson, a Harvard graduate with a PhD in cell and developmental biology, has discovered a DNA-based, generation by generation family tree for global humanity. This tree uncovers the origin and fate of these ancient peoples—and connects them to peoples alive today.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Bending Science to Support Biblical View
- By Darrell OSullivan on 05-26-22
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River Kings
- A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads
- By: Cat Jarman
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 61
Three years ago, a Carnelian bead came into Catrine Jarman's temporary possession. River Kings sees her trace the path of this ancient piece of jewelry back to eighth-century Baghdad and India, discovering along the way that the Vikings' route was far more varied than we might think—that with them came people from the Middle East, and that the reason for this unexpected integration between the Eastern and Western worlds may well have been a slave trade running through the Silk Road, all the way to Britain.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Like school
- By Amazon Customer on 09-08-24
By: Cat Jarman
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Before the Dawn
- Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 937
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 527
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 528
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing information
- By Albert on 06-15-07
By: Nicholas Wade
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Lost Civilizations
- 10 Societies That Vanished without a Trace
- By: Michael Rank
- Narrated by: Kevin Pierce
- Length: 3 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4 out of 5 stars 48
Whether it is Plato's lost city of Atlantis, a technological advanced utopia that sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune"; the colony of Roanoke, whose early American settlers were swallowed up in the wild forest lands of the unexplored continent, or the Ancient American Explorers, who managed to arrive to the New World 2,000 years before Columbus, the disappearance of these societies is as cryptic as it is implausible. This book will look at cultures of the 10 greatest lost civilizations in history.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Another Great Book from Michael Rank
- By MICHAEL H on 07-17-14
By: Michael Rank
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The Neanderthals Rediscovered
- How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story (Revised and Updated Edition)
- By: Dimitra Papagianni, Michael A. Morse
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 404
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 354
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 353
In recent years, the common perception of the Neanderthals has been transformed, thanks to new discoveries and paradigm-shattering scientific innovations. It turns out that the Neanderthals' behavior was surprisingly modern: they buried the dead, cared for the sick, hunted large animals in their prime, harvested seafood, and communicated with spoken language. Meanwhile, advances in DNA technologies are compelling us to reassess the Neanderthals' place in our own past.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating Subject... Soporific Reader
- By Andrew E. Yarosh on 11-21-17
By: Dimitra Papagianni, and others
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Denisovan Origins
- Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of the Giants of Ancient America
- By: Andrew Collins, Gregory L. Little
- Narrated by: Micah Hanks
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 150
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 139
Tracing the migrations of the Denisovans and their interbreeding with Neanderthals and early human populations in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas, Andrew Collins and Greg Little explore how the new mental capabilities of the Denisovan-Neanderthal and Denisovan-human hybrids greatly accelerated the flowering of human civilization over 40,000 years ago. They show how the Denisovans displayed sophisticated advances, including precision-machined stone tools and jewelry, tailored clothing, celestially-aligned architecture, and horse domestication.
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2 out of 5 stars
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There are better sources to get real information
- By cfeagans on 09-06-19
By: Andrew Collins, and others
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1177 B.C. (Revised and Updated)
- The Year Civilization Collapsed
- By: Eric H. Cline
- Narrated by: Eric H. Cline
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 646
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 563
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 562
This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Look past the one-star reviews: this is an enlightening and engaging read.
- By Alonzo Nightjar on 03-07-22
By: Eric H. Cline
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