Description
What exactly is Europe, and who or what counts as European? Contemporary Europe is not a distinct continent but an appendix—an island-ringed peninsula projecting into the Atlantic from the western end of Eurasia.
Europe is a place of mongrels—and Europeans are “very special bastards indeed”. There can be no more dangerous concept than the idea of racial or genetic purity. The emergence of modern Homo sapiens owed much to Europe, the global centrifuge where our forebears had one final opportunity to trade DNA with other members of the hominid line—before we moderns were the last ones standing.
Gene-sequencing studies have shown that people of European and Asian descent today carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, less than 2 percent of their total genome on average. It is not the same 2 percent from one person to the next: taken together, up to 40 percent of the Neanderthal genome lives on. Recent research links lingering Neanderthal DNA sequences to variations in hair and skin color, sleep patterns, moodiness, and susceptibility to illnesses like diabetes.
Weekly Topics
I – Tropical ( 100 to 34 million years ago)
Week 1 Chapters 1-3 pp.1-26 Destination Europe
Week 2 Chapters 4-6 pp.27-53 Origins of Europe
Week 3 Chapters 7-12 pp.54-80 New Dawn
II – Continental (34 to 2.6 million years ago)
Week 4 Chapters 13-15 pp.81-101 La Grande Coupure
Week 5 Chapters 16-18 pp.102-121 Europe’s Apes
Week 6 Chapters 19-21 pp.122-144 Lakes and Islands
III – Ice ages (2.6 million to 38,000 years ago)
Week 7 Chapters 22-24 pp.145-167 Return of the apes
Week 8 Chapters 25-28 pp.168-197 Neanderthals and Bastards
Week 9 Chapters 29-31 pp.198-225 Ancestor’s drawings
Human Europe (38,000 years ago to the future)
Week 10 Chapters 32-34 pp.226-244 The domesticators
Week 11 Chapters 35-37 pp.245-266 Survivors
Week 12 Chapters 38-41 pp.267-292 New Europeans
Week 13 Chapters 42-44 pp.293-315 Europe’s Spring
Bibliography
Text: Tim Flannery, Europe: a natural history, 2019, 357 pp.
