Adam Rutherford

“We are all Rumsfeldian, if we are doing science right.”

— Adam Rutherford

“The unglamorous truth is that there are but a handful of uniquely human traits that we have clearly demonstrated are adaptations evolved…

— Adam Rutherford

“Except if you’re of European descent. Your lactase continues to work throughout your life. This unusual phenomenon is called lactase persistence, and…

— Adam Rutherford

“One fifth of people alive a millennium ago in Europe are the ancestors of no one alive today. Their lines of descent…

— Adam Rutherford

“Nineteen teeth from twelve sixth-century plague pits in Aschheim near Munich provided the source of the Code of Justinian. In among the…

— Adam Rutherford

“There are dozens of documented cases of Roma or Irish Travelers being falsely accused of stealing children over the twentieth century, and…

— Adam Rutherford

“There’s a cave in this hinterland of Siberia, called Denisova, named after an eighteenth-century eremite called Denis who lived there.”

— Adam Rutherford

“brain activity in a heartbeat. All of that says Richard. But the DNA in consort with the paper trail of a genealogy…

— Adam Rutherford

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . . says Darwin in The Descent of Man, his study of the…

— Adam Rutherford

“crunching. The amount of introgression from Neanderthals is proportionally lower on the modern X than on the rest of the chromosomes. X…

— Adam Rutherford

“Mind you, Darwin fretted about a lot of stuff, especially his health, his kids, and maybe with just cause. On occasion he…

— Adam Rutherford

“Pedigree is a word derived from the middle French phrase pied de grue—the crane’s foot—as the digits and hallux spread from a…

— Adam Rutherford

“The oldest genome of a European comes from a 37,000-year-old square-jawed man who washed up on the banks of the mighty River…

— Adam Rutherford

“By 5500 BCE, we were making cheese. Sieves and pottery colanders resembling modern cheese strainers had been found in Poland, and in…

— Adam Rutherford

“Amylase digests starchy, carbohydrate-rich foods, and helps generate glucose from them, which would provide much needed energy for the evolving and highly…

— Adam Rutherford

“evolution of the lactase persistence allele, and it locates it in an area engulfing Slovakia, with Poland to the north and Hungary…

— Adam Rutherford

“And then around 5,000 years ago, another major wave of easterners arrive. The Yamnaya came from the Russian Steppes, driving sheep, riding…

— Adam Rutherford

“One of the more obvious differences between modern humans is skin color. We make crude visual distinctions and effectively meaningless categorizations based…

— Adam Rutherford

“the Galtons were Quakers and gunsmiths, which might seem an unlikely combination given that religion’s commitment to nonviolence. Francis was born to…

— Adam Rutherford

“We look to statistics for reassurance in these types of situations. Here is one: 100% of mass shootings have been enabled by…

— Adam Rutherford

“Diet is not easy to validate in the deep past, but the clues from genetics suggest that the basis for the Paleo…

— Adam Rutherford

“Galton, by comparison, was more a polymath, and made not insignificant contributions to a whole range of fields. His myriad gifts to…

— Adam Rutherford

“These gene maps powerfully suggest that that the Beringian Standstill hypothesis is correct: All Native Americans, north and south, have versions of…

— Adam Rutherford

“In 1874, Francis Galton sent out questionnaires to families and superintendents of various hospitals in order to collect data for estimating the…

— Adam Rutherford

“Denis’ cave to be such a regular haunt for hundreds of thousands of years is not usual. You can see why though.…

— Adam Rutherford