Journey Of Man

Tin Man (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
$12.95
I saw part of the Tin Man on TV and missed one episode. When I saw I could purchase a copy I was tickled pink. This was a really good science fiction version of the Wizard of Oz and was extremely well done. Family members are now borrowing it and giving the same thumbs up.

Journey of Man
$24.99
This is a beautiful video, with breathtaking landscape and a good flow of narrative. It was also very eye-opening in terms of the theories of how human migration may have occurred in pre-historic times. I've always wondered how humans existed in Africa, Eurasia and the Americas long before ship-building could be perfected. Eurasia and Africa not so much, but the Americas just seemed too far away. I admit to never really looking this up; it was just idle wonder about how people could have accomplished more than 10,000 years ago the same kind of things that Columbus and Vasco Da Gama were considered heroes for repeating barely 600 years ago. This video was priceless to me in just being able to provide theories that address these questions better than my imagination of a bunch of enterprising pre-historic humans that built an enormous raft and just floated themselves across the Atlantic.

The video also ends on a very important contemporary note, which addressed a lot of the puzzlement I felt about the simplistic presentation throughout. This video aims to reach the widest audiences possible, and for that, a lot of emotional and personal content seems to have been included. Far more than I'm comfortable with, but understandably so. I would probably have rated it at 3 stars if not for that closing note that sort of justified the travelogue-like presentation for a supposedly scientific discovery narrative.

In summary, I would have loved for there to have been a companion edition of this DVD with much more details on the discovery process (sorely lacking here) and much less footage of pleasantries being exchanged and of Wells 'spreading the message of science'.

National Geographic: The Human Family Tree
$19.98
This was a fascinating look on not only the great expansion of humankind but, most importantly, how closely linked we all are. I especially liked how they illustrated this at the end, with people positioned in the region of their ancestors, and then going back in time until eventually we all came from one of two groups.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey
$14.95
The Journey of Man, by Spencer Wells, is a disappointment to anyone interested in human pre-history and even slightly knowledgeable about recent scientific developments. While Wells, a geneticist himself, gets the basics correct, his interpretation is apparently caught up in the academic feud between his mentor, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and Oxford professor of genetics Bryan Sykes. Brilliant men can disagree in academic debate, but to completely ignore Sykes' contribution to mitochondrial DNA simply makes this book suspect.

It is likely that prejudice that also encourages Wells to employ an overtly sexist interpretation to the exclusion of a more balanced approach. While much of his analysis is based solely on one branch of genetics - the evolution of male Y-chromosomes - other researchers have found ways to present this material objectively without resorting to stale sexual stereotypes.

This approach is probably more apparent to me because I had purchased this Wells book at the same time as The Seven Daughters of Eve by Sykes. Although Skyes'personalization of early mDNA findings is a bit over the top at the end, by creating fictional scenarios of early human life, his book, overall, is a much more balanced view of genetic research presented in an objective and interesting way.