Gods, Genes and Climate -
- an alternative history of the last 100,000 years.
Is it possible to create a single story that explains all the mysteries of the ancient world?
The conventionally accepted story of how mankind evolved and developed contains many things that are surprising and illogical. There are mysteries that the generally accepted story does not explain well.
When a reputable science journal describes as "bizarre" a finding about the DNA of Europeans it is clear that we have much still to learn. When farmers migrated from the fertile crescent into Europe, spreading farming, they also spread a new DNA ‘marker’ into the European genome. The mystery is that the scientists have no idea where the population in which this marker developed came from. It must be a population that had remained distinct and separated from the hunter-gatherer groups that occupied Europe for the thousands of years up to this point. And the marker is not present in any of the populations known to exist at this time, in Africa or Eurasia.
Gods, Genes and Climate constructs a somewhat different story of our history, that accepts all those parts of the conventional story that are undoubtedly true, but which also explains the ‘uncomfortable facts’ - things we know to be true that scholars avoid explaining because they don’t fit the accepted story.
My starting point is to make just three conjectures that you might think unlikely to be true. But if they are true, would that allow us to construct a more complete story? One that can explain the mysteries as well.