The drive to explore has taken humans to most of the habitable planet
Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images
The Explorer’s Gene
Alex Hutchinson (Mariner Books (UK, 10 April; US, on sale now))
Approximately 50,000 years ago, our ancestors – the first modern humans – set out from their African homeland in droves. We don’t know for sure what prompted this mass uprooting (sometimes known as “the Great Human Expansion”), but our species’ staggering geographic spread is proof of its success.
In relatively short order, humans made it to more or less “every habitable corner of the planet”, writes Alex Hutchinson, a journalist,…
