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The Five-Million-Year Odyssey: The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture Hardcover – August 2, 2022
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The epic story of human evolution, from our primate beginnings more than five million years ago to the agricultural era
Over the course of five million years, our primate ancestors evolved from a modest population of sub-Saharan apes into the globally dominant species Homo sapiens. Along the way, humans became incredibly diverse in appearance, language, and culture. How did all of this happen? In The Five-Million-Year Odyssey, Peter Bellwood synthesizes research from archaeology, biology, anthropology, and linguistics to immerse us in the saga of human evolution, from the earliest traces of our hominin forebears in Africa, through waves of human expansion across the continents, and to the rise of agriculture and explosive demographic growth around the world.
Bellwood presents our modern diversity as a product of both evolution, which led to the emergence of the genus Homo approximately 2.5 million years ago, and migration, which carried humans into new environments. He introduces us to the ancient hominins—including the australopithecines, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals, and others—before turning to the appearance of Homo sapiens circa 300,000 years ago and subsequent human movement into Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas. Bellwood then explores the invention of agriculture, which enabled farmers to disperse to new territories over the last 10,000 years, facilitating the spread of language families and cultural practices. The outcome is now apparent in our vast array of contemporary ethnicities, linguistic systems, and customs.
The fascinating origin story of our varied human existence, The Five-Million-Year Odyssey underscores the importance of recognizing our shared genetic heritage to appreciate what makes us so diverse.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateAugust 2, 2022
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100691197571
- ISBN-13978-0691197579
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“Peter Bellwood is the foremost expert on the spread of farming and peoples around the world. In this wonderful book, he tells the story of humans and protohumans during the past five million years, since our ancestors and chimpanzees’ ancestors parted evolutionary company. Bellwood’s comprehensive, balanced, and fascinating account is a masterpiece of making complicated events understandable. Put this book at the top of your reading pile!”—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel
“Five million years of humanity unlocked by combining multiple lines of evidence, not only from the archaeological record but also from human genes and families of related languages. Peter Bellwood gives a rich and lucid account of where we come from and how our migrations shaped the modern world. A brilliant book that deserves a place on your nightstand.”—Martine Robbeets, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
“An engaging and insightful tour of human evolution and cultural history from our origins more that five million years ago to the global spread of modern humans and the beginnings of agriculture. Bellwood masterfully weaves together the wealth of scientific evidence from paleontology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics to elucidate our evolutionary trail and how we got to be us.”—Terry Harrison, New York University
“A magisterial account of the history of our species on its long journey from small-brained ape-like creatures to the people we understand ourselves to be. Peter Bellwood is a giant in his field, and he brings a breadth and depth of knowledge to this book that is marvelous to behold, deftly unrolling five million years of human evolution—both physical and cultural—with consummate authority and skill. A grand tutorial for anyone interested in the deep history of humankind.”—Christina Thompson, author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
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- Publisher : Princeton University Press (August 2, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0691197571
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691197579
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #815,180 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #211 in Physical Anthropology (Books)
- #2,748 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #3,426 in Biology (Books)
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So blandly but truthfully notes Peter Bellwood, author of “The Five Million Year Odyssey”, a fine book telling the story of man and his ancestors. As luck would have it, we are in no danger of suffering this fate, the nature of knowledge being what it is. Old facts are constantly reassessed and assigned new meanings; old discoveries are disproved, shown either to be incomplete, in error, or simply frauds; finally, old truths are tossed out, only to be picked back up, dusted off and put in wisdom’s temple once again. We still search the ancients’ writings for understanding. And modern science and scientists are no wiser for being modern. At last check, the latest in scientific discovery is that men can become pregnant.
Bellwood’s truism is proven every day.
Man’s journey began in Africa. Somewhere between 9.6 and 6.5 million years ago, hominins (a group of primates consisting of modern humans and all our immediate ancestors) separated from panins, a genus that includes chimpanzees and bonobos. From that evolutionary split emerged Australopithecus, whose fossils are first found in east Africa 4.5 to 4 million years ago. It is from Australopithecus that the genus Homo emerged approximately 2 million years ago.
By around 1 million years ago Australopithecus became extinct; however, prior to that moment hominins had long since migrated out of Africa in a number of movements. Hominins reached China between 2.4 and 2.1 million years ago and Homo fossils were found in the Caucasus dating to 1.7 million years ago. The question of how many Homo migrations into Eurasia occurred must remain a mystery because of the incompleteness of the fossil record.
Between 2 and 1 million years ago several new species of Homo emerged. In fact, up to eleven have been discovered so far. The ancestor of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens emerged 1.2 million to 600,000 years ago. That ancestor still has not been discovered, merely postulated. Generally speaking, the Neanderthals were confined to Europe and west Asia, the Denisovans to Siberia and east Asia, and sapiens, at least initially, to Africa. Interestingly, DNA analysis shows that the various hominid species interbred with one another and that may have been a cause of the extinction of the former two species. Non-African humans have between 1 to 4% Neanderthal DNA present in their genes even today.
Current DNA evidence points to a date of 250,000 years ago for the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa. Oddly, it wasn’t until 70,000 to 50,000 years ago that sapiens settled in Eurasia and Australia. Around that time all other hominin species became extinct and sapiens, after crossing the Bering land bridge around 15,000 years ago, became master of all continents save Antarctica.
The next stage of man’s odyssey, as related by Bellwood, is marked by the invention of agriculture. This is where Bellwood is most comfortable, as a quick glance at his prior works reveals this is where he has focused his career. And his telling of man’s development of agriculture is not uninteresting. The reader will be interested to learn about how the major language groups seemingly arose from the first great agricultural societies and then spread through migration. Also, the story of how the islands of the west and central Pacific were populated in spite of sapiens’ primitiveness is proof of our boldness and guile.
As with some other reviewers, I wish Bellwood spent more time on the early hominids and the various Homo species, including Neanderthal and the Denisovans. Doubtless man’s invention of agriculture was of unsurpassed importance for our past and present and, from a historian’s point of view, much better understood due to is proximity in time and wealth of evidence. But in a book that covers five million years of history, it seems disproportionate that over 60% of the book is devoted to .002% of the time covered.
One last quibble in an otherwise good work. So many authors that belong to the academy must chant the liberal shibboleths of our time, whether they believe them or not. While I imagine for some it is the price to be paid to get a book published or garner favorable reviews from peers, it is nonetheless grotesque in a free country and must be called out.
Early on in the book during a discussion on ancient climate change (yes, the climate has never not changed while the Earth has been spinning) Bellwood drops this line: “Today, human activity is prolonging the current warm interglacial climate towards uncertain outcomes.” This is a fact-free assertion based on nothing more than hysterical slogans of the modern climate cult. Where is it written that interstadials must last a certain span of years? And does Bellwood think the Earth has a thermostat that is or can be properly regulated by nature or man? But, all in all, this is a small blemish on an altogether decent book and the student of man’s deep past should enjoy it.