“Out of Eden: The Peopling of the world”

Imagine an airline check-in queue in London, which has seven people standing in line. They stand silently and avoid eye contact because they don´t know each other. And yet they are actually related – all of them have an African female and male ancestor in common.

Not only are we all ultimately African, but what´s more it can now be proved that all modern non-Africans sprang form a single exodus out of Africa, rather than peopling the Earth in multiple waves of migration. In a brilliant synthesis of genetic, archaeological and climatic evidence, Stephen Oppenheimer reveals the story of how a group of no more than a few hundred souls crossed the mouth of the Red Sea some 85,000 years ago.

The people of the exodus, like their African brothers and sisters, were already intellectually modern in the fullest sense. The book follows their halting progress around the world – to Australia, the Asian heartland and the now submerged continent of Beringia, and on to the last great unpeopled lands of the Americas. It is a revolutionary account that is both scholarly and entertaining, a remarkable picture of the kinship of all humans.