Friends like John Marks actually send me stuff like this John Derbyshire National Review book review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. Derbyshire's essay is argumentative and intriguing—the very qualities that Wade seems to have mastered in his book.
Marks pulled this quote for his email: "Then a tremendous event occurred. A small band of modern humans—it may have been as few as 150 people — crossed from Africa into Arabia via the Bab al-Mandab (“Gate of Grief”) at the southern end of the Red Sea. Their descendants proceeded to populate all of Eurasia, Australasia, Oceania, and the Americas. Moses and Mao Tse-tung, Socrates and Sitting Bull, Gandhi and Geronimo, Queen Anne of England and Queen Kamehameha of Hawaii, are all descended from that same tiny band. Those modern humans who were left behind in Africa of course had 50,000 years of history ahead of them, too, and Wade covers it fully; but it is no slight on anyone to say that for sheer drama and wonder, the epic of that little group of emigrants and their descendants, told in this book, takes some beating."
That's an understatement. Thanks, John!
