Before the Dawn

Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

By: Nicholas Wade

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

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 35,000 years between the emergence of fully modern humans and the first settlements?

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

©2006 Nicholas Wade (P)2006 Tantor Media Inc

Critic reviews

"Wade presents the science skillfully, with detail and complexity and without compromising clarity." (Booklist)
"This is highly recommended for readers interested in how DNA analysis is rewriting the history of mankind." (Publishers Weekly)

Superb account of the origins of modern humans

I've been absolutely enthralled with this book, a seamless narrative that knits together the latest theories of human evolution and pre-history with the latest advances in genetics, paleontology, and archaeology. The narration is smooth (and I love the narrator's deep, trained voice), and the subject matter is both fresh and deeply fascinating.

The book starts with an account of how scientists were able to surmise the earliest date of fitted & sewn clothing by analyzing the DNA of the body louse, and continues on from there, covering topics as wide-ranging as social dynamics and warfare in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, to the genetic history of isolated populations like Icelanders and Ashkenazi Jews, from the first domestication of dogs to a long-running Russian experiment in domesticating silver foxes. Other topics discussed include efforts to find the proto-language of the first modern humans; race and genetics; warfare among chimpanzees as compared to warfare as practiced in prehistory; whether Celts were pushed into remote corners of the British Isles or assimilated into the general population after the Saxon conquest of England; and the origins of organized religion.

Thought-provoking and has certainly gotten me to rethink a few things.

Densely packed

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This book certainly lived up to my expectations. Wade does his level best to give you a deep understanding of human evolutionary history within one book. For me, the lengthy section on linguistic reconstructions is a bit more than I needed, but I'd rather a science book gave me too much information than too little. Alan Sklar is outstanding as usual.

Informative

Interesting information that helped fill in background on DNA genealogy for me. I thought the narration was good.

fascinating account of genetic proof of evolution

this book provides a detailed and fascinating account of recently discovered genetic evidence that provides rich details and solid support for evolution. Although at times the style is necessarily dry and scientific,for the most part it is highly engrossing,entertaining and easy to listen to.

Excellent

The main thing I got from this book is that we are not ALL might-makes-right, me-first, violent-impulses. (I am paraphrasing of course and putting it very simply.) For a number of years people have been saying (in popular culture) that we just can't help our selfish and violent impulses because we are descended from chimps and there was an evolutionary advantage to certain me-first behaviors. Well this book says we are half Bonobo, a more peaceful and social primate, and it explains why bonobos are more peaceful and social (because they didn't have to compete with gorillas for food.) I am probably horribly oversimplifying this but the upshot is we are only HALF violence-prone, me-first, and HALF altruistic. If we choose to believe there's a fight going on in our natures between altruism and violence, well maybe there is! Maybe our evolution doesn't dictate that we give in to our most selfish or violent impulses. Maybe there was an evolutionary advantage in half our ancestry for altruism and nonviolence. The book was about much more than this, but this is the life-changing lesson I took away.

interesting information + incorrect extrapolations

This book intertwines some very interesting reporting on modern science of genetics & linguistics (which I enjoyed) with some uninformed, irritating and wordy/repetitive extrapolations to genetic explanations of culture (which made me feel like arguing). As one little example near the end of the book (hard to check references with an audio book), there is speculation that the difference between East Asian and West European ways of thinking is due to the difference between rice farming and the lives of ancient Greeks. But ancient Greeks are not a dominant element of European genes, as the book said earlier. There may be something to the "Asian rice farmer" idea, but the comparison has to be to the waring groups who dominated Europe until recently; an earlier passage on the "civilization" of Europe similarly ignores history. And the huge influence of Genghis Khan in the Eurasian gene pool (documented earlier in the book) similarly disappears in talking about possible influence of genes on culture. Overall, the cultural discussions follow this model: see a cultural pattern and make up a story about how genetics could have caused it. Or identify a genetic pattern and tell a story about its effects that confirms your prior cultural biases. Don't worry about internal contradictions between different parts of the book. Over-generalize across societies and ignore exceptions when you want to say that human genes cause a universal cultural trait and caricature cultural differences (and over-generalize within continents) when you want to make a racial difference argument. Totally ignore alternate explanations for the phenomena. On the genetic front, he talks as if genes have goals and purposes. But evolution is about statistical distributions.

A FEW GOOD FACTS

There are some fascinating facts in this book about the history of humans - but those facts are embedded in a mountain of dull lead. This book could have been half as long and twice as good.

What DNA hath wrought!

If you could sum up Before the Dawn in three words, what would they be?

deoxyribonucleic acid research

What did you like best about this story?

The author takes you through the march over the centuries and its relation ship to the DNA in which today we take for granted.

Any additional comments?

This book was simply amazing, and which is now my understanding of how the human race evolved on this planet and how the DNA structure in the discovery of such has given us an insight to where we as humans came from. The author's mind and understanding of the medical issues cross referenced through DNA research is presented in a way a person can understand the points presented in our evolution to what we are now. Unless you are really interested in the evolution of man you would need a little patience at times with this book. However, stay with it because by the last chapter you will be glad you did.

A lucid synthesis, comprehensive, authoritative

Wade brings together all the most recent scientific information on "the human revolution," the emergence of fully modern humans some 50,000 years ago. He integrates findings from genetics, paleo-anthropology, geography, evolutionary psychology, and linguistics.

E. O. Wilson and Lionel Tiger both rightly identify this book as the currently best available synthesis of information in the field.

"Before the Dawn is by far the best book I have ever read on humanity's deep history. With courage and balance, Wade has pulled together the explosion of discoveries now ongoing in diverse fields of biology and the social sciences on the origin of our species, and he explains a large part of what is necessary to comprehend the human condition." E. O. Wilson.

"Into the turmoiled and sultry fray of controversy about human evolution and human nature, Nicholas Wade has delivered an impeccable, fearless, responsible, and absorbing account of the real story. . . . Bound to be the gold standard in the field for a very long time." Lionel Tiger.

Wade decisively puts to rest the fallacies promulgated in narrow-school EP about the monolithic EEA and the cessation of human evolution over the past 50,000 years or so.

Wade is always judicious and measured, never harshly polemical, but he directly confronts the chief alternatives to his views on the ongoing process of evolutionary change. He takes up Jared Diamond's geographical thesis and lightly touches the central weaknesses in Diamond's arguments.

He offers an incisive account of Robin Dunbar and Geoffrey Miller vs. Derek Bickerton and Richard Klein on the origin of language.

For comparison, Larson's book Evolution is just a pedestrian summary.

Highest recommendation.

Excellent overview of recent research

Good, new information put together in a comprehensible and listenable way.