Summary
The history of ancient DNA, by a co-founder of the field: A story of exploration and scientific discovery told through the lens of caves and ancient bones, climate change and our evolutionary history.
Outline:
This book describes the history of ancient DNA, and my career developing the field from its start in 1989 Berkeley. It covers the discoveries and new ideas that have changed our understanding of the past, illustrated through my adventures hunting ancient skeletons in remote caves and museum basements around the world. The scientific areas covered will appeal to a broad readership, including popular topics such how we have survived past climate change, genetic ancestry and forensics, the evolution of cognition and modern lifestyle diseases.
Each chapter describes novel science in exotic locations, working with indigenous peoples, and provocative new ideas and models about how the impacts of past climate change provide guidance for our world today. The narrative follows the evolutionary history of humans, with a focus on my work in the caving world studying human genetic evolution, past environmental change, geomagnetism, ancient microbiomes and cave art. It includes new discoveries about how we left Africa, or more accurately Arabia, and how the genetic adaptations we made to deal with the new cold environments we encountered now predispose us to modern diseases. Humans have become the best evolutionary model system we have ever had, due to the generation of full genomes from millions of modern individuals, as well as thousands of ancient humans. We can look deep within the genome of a Siberian hunter 45,000 years ago shortly after we left Africa, as easily as a nearby Neandertal living some 30,000 years earlier. This amazing new power enables us to trace the development of our own genetics and behaviour over a long enough time frame to actually see how evolution works, and the remarkable impacts of climate. What we see is quite different to what the textbooks suggest, and far more interesting.
The full treatment is available for download at the link below.
Biography
Alan Cooper is one of the pioneers of ancient DNA, and started the field with Nobel Prize Winner Svante Paabo at UC Berkeley in 1989. He is a leading innovator in the combination of ancient DNA with other scientific fields. He was the first to demonstrate that ancient DNA could be retrieved from ancient skeletons (1992) and ancient sediments (2003), to sequence an extinct genome (2001), and to reconstruct the complex human histories of Europe (2014) and Aboriginal Australia (2018). His pursuit of ancient human groups, giant extinct mammals and birds, and records of past climate changes has taken him from permafrost Alaska and Canada to Antarctica, the Atacama desert and Australian outback, and island caves from Madagascar to Indonesia. He has built world leading ancient DNA research centres as a Professor at Oxford University (1999-2005), and the University of Adelaide (2005-2020). His multi-disciplinary approach has resulted in a series of major advances ranging from ancient humans and their microbiomes, to evolutionary genetics, and the impacts of climate change and earth’s magnetic field. These studies have led to breakthroughs such as discovering genetic records in ancient sediments and ice, calcified bacteria on ancient teeth, the evolutionary impacts of solar weather, and the use of molecular clocks to date evolutionary events. He has been awarded a series of prestigious Fellowships and scientific prizes, and now runs a scientific consulting business, Blue Sky Genetics. He enjoys presenting science to the general public in a friendly, interesting and accessible manner via radio, print (eg the Conversation), and public lectures. His research, papers, and a few sample podcasts are available at www.blueskygenetics.com
Competition
This book is unique in presenting a personal view of the adventurous fieldwork hunting and sampling ancient skeletons and climate records in caves around the world. It contains unique perspectives about how we and other species have survived past periods of climate change, and adapted at the gene level, and what this tells us about the future.
Other books have covered human evolutionary and archaeological history more generally, but with few insights into the impacts of climate change. Notable recent books include:
· Yuval Hariri (Hebrew University) – Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (2015)
Hugely successful and comprehensive overview of human history, religion, economics and philosophy. This book created a massive audience who will find the new views about genetic evolution and surviving climate change very appealing.
· David Reich (Harvard) - Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018). A comprehensive, quite technical and very detailed description of the analysis of human history using ancient DNA and population genetics methods.
· Tom Higham (Oxford) - The world before us (2021)
Popular but quite technical book on the science of carbon dating, and the discovery of the Denisovans in Siberia.
· Gaia Vince – Nomad Century – how to survive the climate upheaval (Aug 2022)
Popular book examining the impacts of climate change and the likely largescale changes in migration and population distributions that will occur in this century.
Chapter 1
1. Hunting extinct species
· Solving evolutionary mysteries using ancient DNA. Dropping into a Madagascan cave chamber searching for elephant bird bones, dodging crocodiles while being mobbed by bats.
Chapters 2-4
2. The underground world
3. The birth of Ancient DNA
4. Getting blood from a stone
5. Human Evolution - the genetic revolution: 150,000 years ago
Chapter 6
5. Out of Arabia …. (not Africa)
· The central role of climate change in human evolution, and how genetic adaptation to cold during the movement Out of Arabia, now predisposes us to modern lifestyle diseases.
Chapter 7
6. Sex with Neandertals
Ancient DNA reveals how we had sex with male Neandertals, and who, where and when it happened. The resulting children were girls, and contributed important new genetic traits to all non-Africans.
Chapters 8-12
8. Seizing the world – dispersal across Eurasia: 55-50,000 years ago.
9. Nature strikes back – surviving climate cycles and glacials: 42-15,000 years ago
10. The Adams Event – when North became South: 42,000 years ago
11. After the Ice - Farming changes everything: the last 10,000 years
12. Surviving the Apocalypse – past lessons for surviving climate change
Potential - Book 2
Extinct species I have known
Summary:
Each chapter details the story of the hunt for specimens of these famous extinct species in caves and museums around the world, searching for those with surviving ancient DNA. The scenes and stories involved in finding and sampling small pieces of bone or teeth of each of these amazing animals vary enormously, but in each case I was the first to find and use ancient DNA to reveal their unique evolutionary story. Untangling the mysteries behind each of these famous examples of evolution brings them to life, highlighting their physical adaptations, how they hunted and lived, and their role in the environment. In each case the question is what could we do to replace them to try and reverse the declines in biodiversity and climate we have set in motion by driving them extinct.
Prologue:
I’ve cut or drilled into more famous extinct animals than anyone else alive. Probably in history. Strange claim to fame I’d agree, but there you go. From the Dodo and giant Moa, to Neandertals and hobbits, via cave lions, sabre-tooths, and mammoths. I’ve met and admired them all, before using my trusty portable Dremel drill kit to carefully remove a small piece of bone or tooth from these once powerful and incredible creatures roaming now vanished landscapes. It’s all to easy to get too deeply immersed working on these animals, and I’ve often had to make a hasty dash straight from the dusty basement of some museum to the local airport to catch a connecting flight, still covered in bone dust and smelling distinctly of that Ice Age odour. No neighbouring passenger has ever said anything rude, for which I thank them profusely, but they also probably didn’t suspect they were getting covered in collateral mammoth or Neandertal bone dust during the flight. I’ve forced my way through rush hour pedestrian traffic in Wellington New Zealand with the metre long leg bone of a giant elephant bird projecting ridiculously out of my tiny khaki army backpack. Again, not a comment or wayward glance. Commuters are made of tougher stuff, especially in New Zealand.
Over the years I have met many interested members of the general public who have urged me to write this book, and it is designed to appeal to them. But the heroes of this story are the animals themselves, and the amazing stories given voice by their preserved DNA, still talking thousands of years after the last of their kind looked out forlornly on an empty landscape.
Draft Chapter ideas
1. Dead as a Dodo - the evolution of the emblem of extinction
2. The Roc and other Giant killer birds: Madagascan elephant bird and New Zealand moa
3. The Unicorn - a giant Persian rhinoceros: Elasmotherium
4. Sabre-toothed cats – all teeth, no bite: Smilodon and Homotherium
5. North American cheetah - the fastest puma in the world: Miracinonyx
6. Giant cats - The Cave and American lions - Leo spelaea and Leo atrox
7. When camels ruled the world - Camelops, Gunaco
8. Weird horses of North America – Hippidion, Equus
9. Giant carnivorous bears - Arctodus and Arctotherium
10. Dire Wolf – the history of Los Angeles
11. The enigmatic Falkland Island Wolf - a bizarrely friendly dog in the mid-Atlantic
12. The rise and fall of Bison in Europe and America
13. Cave hyenas, from Central Asia to the UK
14. New Zealand wrens, and adzebill – evolution in isolation
15. Extinct Hawaiian geese and ducks
16. The interactive history of climate, humans, Brown and Cave Bears
17. Giant kangaroos, and giant marsupials of Australia
18. The Marsupial lion - the original drop bear: Thylacoleo
19. The arrival of the Dingo, and extinction of the thylacine and devil
Sampling a baby mammoth jaw, Dawson, Yukon Territory. (Eyelashes covered in mammoth tooth powder).