Quotes About Origins

Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Homo sapiens comes into being from 300,000 years ago, according to specimens from Morocco and east Africa, and by 100,000 years ago we have bodies pretty much the same as we do today.

They may have shaped the lands and defined and defended borders, and given us the days of the week (and hundreds of other words: "a berserk freckly husband is a blundering guest in hell"), but they don't appear to have left any distinctive DNA.

We know that some early humans migrated into Asia and Europe within the last quarter of a million years, but their dominion outside of Africa was temporary, and they probably leave no descendants today. Around seventy thousand years ago another group of people drifted away from Africa, and the process of setting down new roots all over this planet began.

A thousand years ago, we Europeans share all of our ancestry. Triple that time and we share all our ancestry with everyone on Earth.

No matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

The key finding was that the sequences of DNA generated implied that the human that led to us diverged from those who led to the Neanderthals around 500,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every White supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian ancestors, as does everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy.

It is far easier to sell the case for occupation and enslavement if you are persuaded that the indigenous people are different, have different origins, and are qualitatively inferior to colonists.

Not only were we diverse in our skin color long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin color before we were our own species.

All abilities are evolved, which doesn't mean that they all have common roots.

For our purposes, if we are to look at the evolution that led to where we are now, instead of the nice neat tree, I think it could reasonably be described as one big million-year clusterfuck. Whenever humans met - Sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovans - they had sex. What a time to be alive.

Despite our differences, all humans are remarkably close relatives, and our family tree is pollarded, and tortuous, and not in the slightest bit like a tree. But we are the fruit thereof.

life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago as far as we know, in pockets in east and north Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.

We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.

Scratch a Russian, and you'll find a peasant.

There's a character, Eon, I did back in the 'Captain Marvel' story. Eon came from a greasy smudge on a paper bag inside my kitchen being used for garbage. I went and got a paper and pencil, drew it up, and he became a character in that story. Things come from everywhere.

Gay people are made and not born.

One thing that was pretty eye-opening to me was that red pepper came from the New World in the 15th or 16th century. So these things that we think of as inherently Korean actually have an even longer history than that.

At the last census it indicated that about 22 per cent of Australians were born overseas.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

The Malays can hardly be said to have an indigenous literature, for it is almost entirely derived from Persia, Siam, Arabia, and Java. Arabic is their sacred language.