Historians relying on written records can tell us nothing about the 99.9% of human evolution which preceded the invention of writing. It is the study of genetic variation, backed up by language and archaeology, which provides concrete evidence about the spread of farming, the movements of peoples across the globe, the precise links between races - and the sheer unscientific absurdity of racism.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question--anticipated by Darwin--with a decisive yes. "Genes, Peoples, and Languages "comprises five lectures that serve as a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goal of which has been nothing less than tracking the past hundred thousand years of human evolution.
Cavalli-Sforza raises questions that have serious political, social, and scientific import: When and where did we evolve? How have human societies spread across the continents? How have cultural innovations affected the growth and spread of populations? What is the connection between genes and languages? Always provocative and often astonishing, Cavalli-Sforza explains why there is no genetic basis for racial classification.