The Road to Homo sapiens, which I recently read, is slightly better than archaeology. It is not a simple analysis of the time when words existed, but a further analysis of human genes, thus explaining various factors of human evolution and the migration and encounter of human ancestors.
I have to introduce the author here, Johannes krause, a professor at the Institute of Prehistory and Medieval Archaeology of Bingen University, the director of Max Planck Institute of Human History Science, the director of Max Planck-Harvard Research Center, and an academician of Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Many titles are followed by the author's professionalism, and the research completed on this basis is more convincing.
Thomas Trapet, a well-known journalist, mainly reports news related to science and politics, and has reported the relevant research of Johannes krause many times. This book was written under the tacit understanding of two people, and the reliability and readability of the content are obvious.
First, introduce homo sapiens. Who is Homo sapiens? At first, when I saw the name, I could only understand it on the basis of modern Chinese. I thought Homo sapiens was a wise man, so I was embarrassed to make a joke. According to the book, Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus about 6.5438+0 million years ago, and evolved into Rhodesian in Africa, Neanderthal in the West and Denisova in the East about 600,000 years ago.
It seems that Homo sapiens was the name of a long time ago, and we are modern humans gradually evolved from those ancestors, so the development path of Homo sapiens is the evolutionary history of our human beings.
The study in the book comes from a phalanx of Altai Mountain on the western border of China, which is a human skeleton 70,000 years ago, thus unexpectedly discovering that it is a brand-new race-Denisova, which indirectly proves the close relationship between early Europeans and Neanderthals.
You are wondering how to prove what race this is from a bone tens of thousands of years ago? This magical skill is known as DNA testing. I believe many people have seen this technology in TV series. In the past, we could only identify a long-lost father and son by blood matching, but now we can find out whether two people are related by DNA matching. DNA testing is based on genetic comparison between two people, and high similarity can explain their relationship.
Unexpectedly, DNA gene detection can also detect the genome in ancient human bones, thus inferring the origin and source of the deceased. Someone may ask, how to detect human bones buried for tens of thousands of years? It turns out that scientists will grind bones into powder bit by bit and measure the genome through a sophisticated sequencer. They can not only detect the genome from human bones, but also extract samples from teeth and soil for testing.
From these subtle studies, we constantly infer the course of human evolution, sometimes it may be a gap of tens of thousands of years, and sometimes it may be a brand-new discovery of human beings. However, two core themes of human beings-devastating plague and immigration tide-have been found in this genome.
In fact, this is not difficult to understand. In a simple theory, people in the past evolved from animals. Animals basically have no thinking ability. They live by instinct and look for food. After eating food in one area, they will go to other places to feed. After all, they stopped producing long ago. Limited food, in the face of fixed species, is definitely not enough, so biological migration is needed.
Every time they go to a new place, they need to integrate with local species, or they may seize other people's territory, so that more species can merge and differentiate, and gradually there will be genetic mutations. In order to meet the needs of survival, Homo erectus appeared, paving the way for later races.
Primitive human era, almost the hunting era. They can't produce their own food, but they use their own hands to make weapons to plunder food. That era can be said to be eating blood and drinking blood, but it is also the most primitive form. Later, people found that some plants in the field were edible, so they had a settled life. Everyone began to slowly cultivate domesticated animals to meet daily needs.
However, everything will not be smooth sailing. When people gradually adapt to life, another species-plague is not to be outdone. It thinks that you humans can evolve, so can I, and they may just be a kind of cell that has mutated in the process of human evolution. They are tenacious and live only to continue from generation to generation.
In history, there are countless recorded plagues. It has been following the pace of human beings, and many people have died at its hands. At the same time, when people have no way to deal with the virus, they can only migrate and seek development in other places. What they can think of is flying, which stems from the development of medical care. When a large-scale plague occurs, the increase in mortality also urges medical workers to study hard.
This book quotes plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, etc. And there are different kinds of viruses in each period. In the past, a virus could survive for a long time, and there was nothing people could do about it. Now, our medical technology is more and more developed. In the face of the virus, we can take many measures to deal with it, and at the same time, the speed of our research on new drugs has doubled.
All kinds of viruses mentioned above are not only recorded in the history of various countries, but also obtained the DNA of viruses in the genetic detection of human bones, thus identifying the existence of history more accurately.
When people have a deeper understanding of the current human progress and history, they will find that we are not only human beings, but also the crystallization of tens of thousands of years of human wisdom, thus enhancing our pride as human beings.
A popular science book with more than 200 pages is also a best seller. Other bestsellers may tell us a truth about life, or something fresh and modern, but this book "The Road to Homo sapiens" tells us the progress of mankind, which is a brand-new cognition, which not only makes a further textual research on the original simple history of human development, but also more clearly expounds various deeds in the process of human development.
It can become a best seller. First, its content is novel. Second, the author's simple writing style is not as abstruse as academic works, but has added simple and easy-to-understand text descriptions that many modern people can read, making this book more readable.