Spencer Wells

Notable Quotes



If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.

From Spencer Wells

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.

From Spencer Wells

Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.

From Spencer Wells

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.

From Spencer Wells

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.

From Spencer Wells

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.

From Spencer Wells

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