More books

Reading is definitely down from January levels, but I have finished two more books.

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution is a fascinating and easy read. The scientific evidence is not as solid as it was in Endless Forms Most Beautiful, but the authors' ideas seem probable and I'll be curious to see how future research supports or refines their ideas.

Similarly, vitamin D shortages in the new [agricultural] diet may have driven the evolution of light skin in Europe and northern Asia. Vitamin D is produced by ultraviolet radiation from the sun acting on our skin--an odd, plantlike way of going about things. Less is therefore produced in areas far from the equator, where UV flux is low. Since there is plenty of vitamin D in fresh meat, hunter-gatherers in Europe may not have suffered from vitamin D shortages and thus may have been able to get by with fairly dark skin. IN fact, this must have been the case, since several of the major mutations causing light skin color appear to have originated after the birth of agriculture. p 78

One of the most interesting chapters compared the European settlement of the Americas with the attempted settlement of Africa. In America, the native populations had not evolved immunities to the diseases the Europeans carried, and vast numbers died from disease. In Africa, the opposite was true. It was the Europeans who lacked immunity to the main disease (malaria).

But Africa did not become another America: Africans were not displaced by Europeans. In order for limited numbers of colonists to become the predominant population, the locals must die off, and Africans didn't. Powerful tropical diseases, combined with the local biological defenses (evolved at vast cost), kept Africa African. As in the case of the Columbian expansion, recent human evolution played a key role in determining the victors. p 173

I was also intrigued by the explanation of the how Indo-European languages became so wide-spread.

If this picture is correct, the occurrence of a single mutation [lactose tolerance] in a particular group of pastoralists [the Indo-Europeans] some 8,000 years ago eventually determined the spoken language of half of mankind. p 185-186

I also read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which was just awarded the Newberry Medal. I started it as a read-aloud with the big kids, but they decided they would rather I read it on my own instead. It has, I must say, the most disturbing opening to a children's book I can remember reading. Once you get past that though, it's an enjoyable book. The ending made me cry, but I don't think it would make most kids cry.