Adam Rutherford

“Krause and his team unearthed the evolution of Yersinia pestis, and the genomic tracks of its terrible journey. An earlier study had…

— Adam Rutherford

“Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the…

— Adam Rutherford

“according to the genetics, there wasn’t a point where a group of genetically similar people spread into the extremities of the British…

— Adam Rutherford

“lies Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Chile. There, in 1830, Captain Robert Fitzroy docked an exploration vessel, and as part…

— Adam Rutherford

“Eighty-five percent of human variation, according to the genetic differences in blood groups, was seen in the same racial groups. Of the…

— Adam Rutherford

“In the words of Dr. Seuss: Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is…

— Adam Rutherford

“Furthermore, some researchers have suggested a strong association with the presence of the protective gene in populations who have historically farmed yams.…

— Adam Rutherford

“In December 2016, in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama signed legislation that allowed Kennewick Man to be…

— Adam Rutherford

“I need not point out that being redheaded is not a maladaptive condition. It’s a very lovely condition. It is an absurdity,…

— Adam Rutherford

“In the penultimate stages of writing this book, the date of the great exodus from Africa may have shifted more than 10,000…

— Adam Rutherford

“the European story is one in which the movement of people is inherent. Even though we have national identities, and pride and…

— Adam Rutherford

“Twain wrote in 1869 that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Galton had explored extensively in the 1840s, as privileged…

— Adam Rutherford

“All this means is that we made assumptions about patterns of migration that were much more linear and spread like ripples, rather…

— Adam Rutherford

“No matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of…

— Adam Rutherford

“They may have shaped the lands and defined and defended borders, and given us the days of the week (and hundreds of…

— Adam Rutherford

“But the real kicker came with the revelation that Denisovan DNA was alive and well in contemporary Melanesians—the indigenous people of Fiji,…

— Adam Rutherford

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

— Adam Rutherford

“Ruth McQuillan and a massive international team scanned the DNA of 35,000 people across twenty-one European countries, and looked for identical genetic…

— Adam Rutherford

“We know that height is highly heritable. Dozens of studies over a century have shown that the vast majority of differences in…

— Adam Rutherford

“there is virtually no trace of the Danes in the British genome. Compared to the Angles’ and Saxons’ and even the Norwegians’…

— Adam Rutherford

“The Neanderthals were a proto-species, an embryonic light that flickered in evolutionary time, but was not strong enough to stand across epochs.”

— Adam Rutherford

“DNA also reveals behavior. Culture can become embedded in our cells just as it gets buried in the floors of caves, bogs,…

— Adam Rutherford

“it’s hard to see what the evolutionary advantage might be for lactase persistence in the absence of a regular supply of fresh…

— Adam Rutherford

“Within the region of DNA that was apparently undergoing evolution in response to the plague is a family of genes with typically…

— Adam Rutherford

“Island populations often breed strange and interesting genomes. Because Iceland is so small, with a precisely known chronology of inhabitation to the…

— Adam Rutherford