The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (32 page)
Merritt Ruhlen’s
A Guide to the World’s Languages
(cited above) and
The Origin of Language
(John Wiley, New York, 1994) and
Charles Barber’s
The English Language
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), give general accounts of linguistic classification and the history of linguistics.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
edited by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 1997) is an excellent reference. Cavalli-Sforza’s work on genetics and language is reviewed in
The History and Geography of Human Genes
cited above, and the relationship between cultural and biological evolution is examined in greater detail in Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman’s
Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach
(Princeton University Press, 1981). The search for the Indo-European Homeland is reviewed in Colin Renfrew’s
Archaeology and Language
(Cambridge University Press, 1987) and in Jim Mallory’s
In Search of the Indo-Europeans
(Thames and Hudson, London, 1989) – both wonderfully engaging books.
Mark Seielstad and colleagues’ work on patrilocality and Y-chromosome variation was published in
Nature Genetics
(20: 278–80, 1998), as was the work of Stoneking and colleagues on the matrilocal tribes of northern Thailand (
Nature Genetics
29: 20–1, 2001).
Nationalism and the rise of monolingualism is briefly summarized in Timothy Baycroft’s
Nationalism in Europe, 1789–1945
(Cambridge University Press, 1998). The extinction of the world’s languages is discussed in David Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s book
Vanishing Voices
(Oxford University Press, 2000). The US census data is available on a US government website (
http://www.census.gov/
). The statistics on race identity were taken from an article on the census by Steven Holmes in the
New York Times
(3 June 2001).
Spencer Wells was born in 1969 and grew up in Texas. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1994, focusing on population genetics and evolution. He subsequently moved to Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow with Luca Cavalli-Sforza. While there he began his research on the genetics of human populations in Central Asia, which he continued after moving to Oxford University in 1999. After heading the population genetics research group at Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, he served briefly as research director at an American biotechnology company. Since 2001 he has been a freelance scientist, writer, and filmmaker. His films have aired on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the National Geographic Channel.
Dr. Wells is author or co-author of over thirty scientific publications, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, NATO, and the National Geographic Society. He divides his time between the U.S.A. and France, where he lives with his wife and two children.
