Spencer Wells Quotes

Creativity is imagining something that isn't there and making it real.

— Spencer Wells

What if I told you every single person in America - every single person on Earth - is African? With a small scrape of cells from the inside of anyone's cheek, the science of genetics can even prove it.

— Spencer Wells

“Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.”

— Spencer Wells

“If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.”

— Spencer Wells

“Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have.”

— Spencer Wells

“We spent an enormous amount of time as hominids and as primates living as hunter-gatherers. That is the natural way for us to live, and we're suddenly living in this profoundly unnatural way, and we're still in the process of adapting to it and working out how to live with it.”

— Spencer Wells

“It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live.”

— Spencer Wells

“Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.”

— Spencer Wells

“The greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in our DNA.”

— Spencer Wells

“DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.”

— Spencer Wells

We are all Africans under the skin.

— Spencer Wells

Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people - not merely their language - from the steppe appears to be true.

— Spencer Wells

“So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it
the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.”

— Spencer Wells