A Brief History of Everyone who Ever Lived The Stories in Our Genes

‘A brilliant, authoritative, surprising, captivating introduction to human genetics. You’ll be spellbound’ Brian Cox

This is a story about you.

It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is to each of the 100 billion modern humans who have ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species – births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration and a lot of sex.

In this captivating journey through the expanding landscape of genetics, Adam Rutherford reveals what our genes now tell us about human history, and what history can now tell us about our genes. From Neanderthals to murder, from redheads to race, dead kings to plague, evolution to epigenetics, this is a demystifying and illuminating new portrait of who we are and how we came to be.

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‘A thoroughly entertaining history of Homo sapiens and its DNA in a manner that displays popular science writing at its best’ Observer

‘Magisterial, informative and delightful’ Peter Frankopan

‘An extraordinary adventure…From the Neanderthals to the Vikings, from the Queen of Sheba to Richard III, Rutherford goes in search of our ancestors, tracing the genetic clues deep into the past’ Alice Roberts