The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey Out of Africa

Out of one, and only one, major exodus from Africa 80,000 years ago by migratory African ancestors was the entire non-African world in all its racial and cultural diversity ultimately populated—so argues Stephen Oppenheimer in this groundbreaking volume that has stirred heated controversy among authorities in geology, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology. Thoroughly researched and meticulously argued, with dramatic evidence garnered from recent advances in the field of genetics through DNA analysis, Oppenheimer traces the evolution of modern humankind out of a common African ancestry. For again and again, Oppenheimer’s extensive genealogical research, based on our gender-specific so-called Adam and Eve genes, has led him straight back to Africa and placed him in direct opposition to the multiregionalists. Whereas they maintain that archaic human populations, like the Neanderthals in Europe and Homo erectus in the Far East, evolved locally into the races we know today, Oppenheimer establishes that European Neanderthals, for instance, are not ancestors of modern humans but cousins who have stemmed from the same African root. Unsettling long-established anthropological and cultural assumptions—and prejudices—Oppenheimer’s provocative exploration of our human origins provides a fresh new perspective on the nature of the human destiny that all of us share.