Spencer Wells
Spencer Wells
Spencer Wellsis a geneticist, anthropologist, author, entrepreneur, adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and owner of Antone's, an iconic nightclub in Austin, Texas. He led The Genographic Project from 2005 to 2015, as an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth6 April 1969
CountryUnited States of America
adapting amount enormous natural profoundly spent suddenly time unnatural
We spent an enormous amount of time as hominids and as primates living as hunter-gatherers. That is the natural way for us to live, and we're suddenly living in this profoundly unnatural way, and we're still in the process of adapting to it and working out how to live with it.
crises
Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.
african alive ancestry dna homeland tells trace turns wherever
It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live.
america cells genetics inside prove science scrape single
What if I told you every single person in America - every single person on Earth - is African? With a small scrape of cells from the inside of anyone's cheek, the science of genetics can even prove it.
chain connects far genome great linked
If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.
mistake long generations
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.
answers patterns ancestry
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.
taken data people
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.
skins
We are all Africans under the skin.
motivation inspiration mushrooms
DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.
book dna written
The greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in our DNA.
book blood language
Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.