Hubris

Humans are the most intelligent beings this planet has ever produced.  But how is it that we can travel into space, cure diseases and decode the fundamentals of life and, at the same time, find ourselves faced with an existential crisis that threatens to overwhelm us?  What lies behind this uncharacteristic failure to master the most important challenge of our existence?

In this compelling book, the leading archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe investigate what DNA can tell us about how we got to where we are and what our future might be. They show how the first humans were defeated again and again and suffered fatal setbacks, and how Homo sapiens succeeded in conquering continents, overcoming natural borders and bringing other species under their control.  But the genetic blueprint that enabled us to get to where we are today had one flaw: it didn't factor in planetary boundaries.  Now that we are approaching those boundaries for the first time after millions of years of evolution, an urgent question arises: can we learn to live within the available planetary limits, or are we doomed by our DNA to continue to expand, consume, and absorb the resources around us to the point of exhaustion, consigning ourselves and other species to extinction?  Has our seemingly unstoppable rise met its ultimate end?

While the looming climate crisis does not augur well for humanity's capacity to adapt to the new situation in which we find ourselves, we are not at the mercy of our DNA - or, at least, we don't have to be.  But can we harness the lessons of the past to survive the present?

Johannes Krause is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Thomas Trappe is a senior editor at the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel, specializing in science and healthcare.