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Adam's curse A future without men Bryan Sykes W.W. Norton & Company, New York, New York, USA. 2004. 320 pp. $25.95. ISBN: 0-393-05896-4 (hardcover).
Genghis Khan attacks a village, slaughters its men, and rapes its women. He and his four acknowledged sons do the same throughout Asia as they build their empire. According to Bryan Sykes's book Adam's curse: a future without men, this is "guy" behavior. Genetics corroborates par: of this story: 8% of men in that region, roughly 16 million, now carry the same Y chromosome, and it's presumably Genghis Khan's.
The use of genetics to examine fragments of human history is the subject of about one-third of the book. Mitochondria! and Y-chromosomal markers are used to trace maternal and paternal lineages, respectively. Surprisingly, some real jaw-droppers are missing from this text: thejeffersonian Y chromosome carried by one descendant of Sally Hemings (Sl); the shared Y chromosome within the Jewish priesthood (S2, S3) - striking because it corroborates an early portion of the biblical narrative (S4) yet oddly absent given this book's biblical title (by way of Yeats); the discovery of this same Y chromosome in a Bantu-speaking black African population (SS, S6); and the disputed finding of European Y-chromosomal markers in Indian Brahmins (S7-S9). These are reminiscent of Schliemann's discovery of Troy - startling support for what...