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Spencer Wells Quotes

Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.

Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.

Spencer Wells
Book, Blood, Language

The greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in our DNA.

Spencer Wells
Book, Dna, Written
Spencer Wells (2012). “The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey”, p.195, Random House

DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.

Spencer Wells
Motivation, Inspiration, Dna

We are all Africans under the skin.

Spencer Wells
Skins

Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have.

Spencer Wells
Mistake, Long, Copying

So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.

Spencer Wells
Answers, Patterns, Ancestry
"Finding the roots of modern humans" by Marsha Walton, www.cnn.com. April 14, 2005.

Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people - not merely their language - from the steppe appears to be true.

Spencer Wells
Taken, Data, People
Spencer Wells (2012). “The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey”, p.167, Random House

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