Ancestral Journeys

Jean Manco's Ancestral Journeys was a Brotherhood Books impulse buy, and I didn't really know what I was getting. It's actually quite a scholarly book, though packaged up appealingly with lots of pictures and break-out sidebars to break up the text. It's a multi-disciplinary approach to tracking the movements of peoples across (mostly) Europe during prehistory, drawing on archeology, genetics and linguistics to piece together the likely shifts of population, whether by invasion, wandering, retreat or expansion.

I must admit that some of the detailed explanations of DNA haplo-groups made my eyes water and I tended to skim those sections! But Ancestral Journeys excels at painting a big picture of climate changes, the spread of agriculture, and the rise and fall of empires. I found the sections about language the most engaging -- I'm always up for a discussion of Proto-Indo-European and its descendants in modern languages. Ancestral Journeys covers millennia, from the very first humans emerging from Africa, right up to the Vikings, in a relatively short and easy to digest package: a great overview.