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Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]If you go back exactly 100 years from now and count your ancestors, two parents, four grandparents, eight, 16, and so on. If you go back just 1,000 years, then mathematics says that the number of your ancestors should be more than the number of people born on earth so far. But is that not possible? Then where is the secret of this impossible number? The answer is one.

[00:00:30]You and I, every person on this earth, are related to each other, very close relatives, and in every cell of your body, the history of this entire relationship is hidden in the DNA of 39 billion letters. The history of this entire relationship is not written in any book, not carved in stone, but you carry it yourself.

[00:00:52]This book is called A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, written by Adam Rutherford, a genetic theorist, BBC science presenter, and a man whose own identity repeatedly reminds him of how complex and incredible humanity really is.

[00:01:12]Rutherford's mother was Indian. He was born in Guyana, South America. His father was English, from Yorkshire. He himself grew up in that small town in Suffolk. At the age of eight, some boys called him a bird, and he punched that boy in the stomach that day.

[00:01:30]This story is in the middle of the book. But I think this one incident is the soul of the entire book.

[00:01:36]Because a man who is half Indian and half British. When he delves deeper into genetics, he discovers a surprising truth. He discovers that the boys of that safak and he are actually so closely related that there is no genetic basis for separating the two words bird and British.

[00:01:57]And this book was written to tell that truth.

[00:02:00]Wait a minute. There are about 37 trillion cells in your body now.

[00:02:07]There is DNA inside every cell. There are about three billion letters written in that DNA. If you were to print all those characters and make a book, the book would be several hundred meters tall.

[00:02:19]Every page of this book contains the story of your ancestors. A story of four billion years.

[00:02:25]Rutherford says, "You carry an epic poem in every cell of your body." And learning to read this poem is called modern genetics.

[00:02:36]Let's read that poem a little. The story begins like this. About 45 thousand years ago. On the banks of a river in Siberia. A man died. His bones went into the river mud.

[00:02:51]In 2008, a Russian artist who makes jewelry from mammoth bones found a thigh bone while searching along the river.

[00:02:58]Sent to scientists.

[00:03:02]A complete genome emerged from that bone. The oldest complete human genome in the world. He was named Ust Ishim.

[00:03:11]And by analyzing his genome, scientists learned that this man was the ancestor of both European and Asian populations.

[00:03:20]That is, from the lineage of this one man, one group went west to Europe, another group went east to Asia. If you have any European or Asian lineage, that man is your ancestor.

[00:03:34]A man died by the side of a river 45,000 years ago, and today you know his story.

[00:03:43]After reading this, you have to be quiet for a while because this is not just science. It is a kind of world.

[00:03:50]Now let's come to the cave of the Neanderthals, because if you don't tell this story, the whole picture is incomplete.

[00:03:57]You may have studied in school. The Neanderthals are extinct, we came, they went.

[00:04:03]But in 2010, a Swedish scientist named Svante Pääbo did something that changed history. He extracted DNA from a Neanderthal bone and created a complete genome. Then they compared that genome with that of today's humans.

[00:04:19]And what he found was incredible.

[00:04:22]You have Neanderthal DNA. On average, two to four percent. In the case of people of European and Asian descent. Rutherford himself conducted the test at 23 and me. His results showed 2.7 percent Neanderthal DNA.

[00:04:40]He calculated that this amount of DNA equals about 80 million letters.

[00:04:46]More than six complete chromosomes in humans.

[00:04:49]What does that mean? That means Neanderthals were not truly extinct. They have merged with us. Our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals.

[00:05:00]Their children were born into that family, and you are the one today.

[00:05:05]Rutherford wrote that for centuries Neanderthal people were stigmatized as brutish grunting cavemen. But beauty is a very subjective matter. And just because you don't fancy them doesn't mean that your ancestors didn't definitely have sex with them. That is, your ancestors thought they were beautiful. It makes you smile a little, but at the same time, a much deeper truth comes to mind.

[00:05:36]We, who have other languages, who have different ancestors, have also been our family for millions of years, but not the Neanderthals. There were more.

[00:05:48]In 2008, a child's finger bone was found in the Denisovan cave in Siberia.

[00:05:54]Just one bone. Just one bone.

[00:05:58]DNA was extracted from that bone. And that DNA showed that it was neither ours nor the Neanderthal's. It was a completely different human species. It was named Denisovans. And later it was found that the DNA of the people of today's Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Melanesia, including the people of Melanesia, has up to 5 percent Denisovans DNA in its DNA. And the Tibetan people can survive in high mountains because they have a special gene that came from the Denisovans, an extinct species that we only know from a finger bone and a tooth.

[00:06:34]They survive through today's people. The history of mankind is actually a vast, complex, beautiful history of union. Now let's move on to Europe because many surprises have happened here. Do you know where the people of Europe came from? Many people think my ancestors have always been here.

[00:06:54]German people think they have always been in Germany. The French think they have always been in France. But the genetic theory says the facts are completely different. Today's Europeans are essentially a mixture of three major waves. The first wave were the early hunter-gatherers who left Africa and reached Europe 40-45 thousand years ago. They were a strange combination in appearance. Dark skin but blue eyes. Because the blue eye gene and the pale skin gene evolved separately.

[00:07:28]Imagine that the first Europeans were dark- skinned, blue-eyed people. The second wave brought farmers from the Middle East and Türkiye about 9,000 years ago. They brought with them wheat, barley, goats, and cows. Agriculture began in Europe. The third wave was about 5000 years ago. The Yamnaya people came from the steppe region of Russia. They used horses. They made bronze weapons.

[00:07:54]They spread so quickly and so widely that their imprint is the strongest in the DNA of today's Europeans.

[00:08:00]These three waves combined to form today's Europeans.

[00:08:07]But the most surprising part of this story is the milk. You might be adding milk to your tea every day now. This is a very natural thing for you.

[00:08:15]But this is actually not normal at all. The ability of all mammals to digest milk decreases with age. Because after the baby is old, there is no need for mother's milk. But a large portion of people, especially Europeans and some Africans and Middle Easterners, can digest milk even as adults.

[00:08:35]Why? Because of a genetic mutation, when humans started raising cows and goats, those who had this mutation got extra nutrition.

[00:08:44]With that nutrition, they had more children, and that mutation spread.

[00:08:50]Scientists call this gene culture coevolution.

[00:08:53]Culture changes genes, and genes change culture. The habit of giving milk to your tea is actually a genetic mutation from 8,000 years ago. If you think about it this way, even your morning tea looks a little different, right? Now let's come to Britain. Because Rutherford himself is British and he said this part very well. In 2015, a large study called People of the British Isles was conducted. The DNA of 2039 British people was analyzed. The only condition is that all four of their grandparents must be residents of the same area. Everyone was stunned when they saw the results.

[00:09:32]Clear regional differences in Britain's genetic map. The people of the Orkney Islands are different from the rest of Scotland. Because the Norwegian Vikings stayed there. Wales and England are different. Even Cornwall and Devon are different. But the most surprising fact is that Danish Vikings ruled England for 200 years.

[00:09:50]But there is almost no sign of them.

[00:09:53]And the Romans ruled Britain for 400 years. They also have no sign.

[00:09:59]Why? Because governance does not mean merging.

[00:10:02]Political power does not mean genetic power. The Anglo-Saxons came and mixed in, so there are their traces. The true evidence of history is hidden in human DNA, not on the battlefield. Now we come to a part of the book that makes you dizzy when you read it.

[00:10:20]Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor of the 8th-9th centuries. One of the most powerful rulers in Europe.

[00:10:27]He had at least 18 children. The question is, are you his descendant? Yale University mathematician Joseph Chang answered this question.

[00:10:36]Just by math, without any DNA tests. His calculations show that just 600 years ago, a man lived who was the ancestor of all today's Europeans. Go back a little.

[00:10:48]A thousand years. Everyone who lived in Europe at that time and has descendants is the ancestor of every European today. Every person. I mean, Charlemagne is definitely your ancestor, and he's not just yours, but Christopher Lee's, Obama 's, Hitler's, Taylor Swift's, Pope Francis's. Rutherford says you're of royal lineage because everyone is of royal lineage. This is not a specialty, it's math. But if you go deeper into this math, Chang is even more surprising. He also calculated how long ago the most recent common ancestor of all people on earth was. The answer came only 3400 years ago.

[00:11:30]3400 years ago. This is a very recent time in human history. At this time, Ramesses II of Egypt was reigning. The Chinese civilization was in the Vedic era.

[00:11:45]And at that time, there was a man who was the common ancestor of you and any person on earth. At the end of Chang's research paper, there is something written that is rare in academic papers. He wrote No Matter the Languages Spoken or the Color of a Skin. Share Ancestors Planted Rice on Banks of Yangtze First Domesticated Horse on Steppe of Ukraine Hunted Giant Sloths in the Forests of North and South America and Labored to Build Great Pyramid of Khufu.

[00:12:24]No academic paper ends like this, but this truth was so big that he had to say it this way. I'm talking about the person you're thinking of, the person who seems completely different from you, different language, different country, different religion. You had a common ancestor only 3400 years ago. It takes a while to digest this truth.

[00:12:57]Now let's move on to a detective story. Because Rutherford didn't just tell history. He showed how DNA can solve the mysteries of history. The Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

[00:13:13]King Richard the Third of England was defeated. His body was stripped naked and hung on horseback and paraded through the city. Then he was hastily buried in the Grave Rayers Abbey in Leicester.

[00:13:24]Then Henry VIII demolished the monastery.

[00:13:28]Richard's grave was lost. For 527 years, no one knew where he was.

[00:13:37]In 2012, a team from the University of Leicester began digging under a car park. He got two legs on the first day. That skeleton rose. Scoliosis, a curved back.

[00:13:50]Two serious head injuries. A wound so deep that it scars even into the bone. Is this Richard the Third? A geneticist named Tori King got to work.

[00:14:04]They descended from Richard's sister, Anne of York.

[00:14:06]Almost twenty generations.

[00:14:09]Two living descendants were found. A Canadian Michael Ibson is a Wendy Daldic. Their mitochondrial DNA was matched to that of Leicester's skeleton.

[00:14:26]Richard the Third was found under a parking lot 527 years later.

[00:14:30]DNA is a way to reach the truth by overcoming all the lies of the passage of time and not just the stories of kings but also of ordinary people.

[00:14:40]DNA tells the stories of billions of ordinary people whose names are not in history but whose DNA is in the bodies of today's people.

[00:14:51]Now we come to the boldest and most important part of the book: race.

[00:15:00]Rutherford directly states that from the perspective of gene theory, there is no such thing as race. When you hear this, at first you might think, is this a political statement? What ideals are you talking about? No. This is science.

[00:15:14]But before understanding, let's go into a little history.

[00:15:18]Francis Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin.

[00:15:21]He was the father of eugenics. That is, the father of the idea that humans can be divided into higher and lower species and that the reproduction of lower humans should be reduced.

[00:15:34]He was an avowed racist. But he was also an extraordinary scientist. He created many fundamental concepts in statistics.

[00:15:46]Galton was the first to use the words correlation and regression.

[00:15:51]Rutherford is making an important point. The scientist who laid the foundation for the science that Galton had created later proved his ideas wrong.

[00:16:00]That's the beauty of science.

[00:16:05]Now to the real question. Why is there no such thing as race in the language of science? We have to return to Africa to understand the reason.

[00:16:17]Africa has the greatest genetic diversity among humans. Because we were there the longest. The rest of the world's people actually descend from a small sub-group in Africa.

[00:16:27]This means that two African people are much less genetically different from each other than two Europeans are.

[00:16:37]And the bigger truth is that the genetic difference between an African and a European may be less than the difference between two Africans. That means the classification of black and white is genetically meaningless.

[00:16:54]So what are skin color, eye shape, hair texture?

[00:17:00]These are signs of adaptation to the environment over thousands of years of evolution. There is less sunlight in Northern Europe, so it is better to stay in the shade to facilitate the production of vitamin D. But these external differences are a very small part of our total genetic diversity.

[00:17:18]Rutherford says the genetic difference between two people is only 0.1 percent. And even within that 0.1 percent, the difference that we think determines race is even smaller.

[00:17:35]So where does the racism we see, the discrimination we see, come from? It comes from culture, from history, from power politics, not from genes. Racism is real and harmful. But it has no biological basis. Rutherford is speaking for himself. Those boys from Safak called him a bird.

[00:17:56]But they didn't know that according to gene theory, they were more similar to Rutherford than to each other, the African American actors of the TV show Irene Kara and Gene Anthony Hay fame. It didn't bother him to say it. Rather, he says, knowing this truth changes the world a little.

[00:18:16]Now let's come to a story that shows how the greed for power can genetically destroy a lineage.

[00:18:22]Charles II of Spain died in 1700 at the age of just 39.

[00:18:28]Her life without children was like pain. He could n't walk for four years. He didn't speak until he was eight years old. His tongue was so big that he couldn't close his mouth. Always drooling. The doctor who performed his postmortem wrote that the heart was as small as a peppercorn, the lungs were rotten, and only one testicle was as black as coal. Why is Carlos in this condition? Because the Habsburg dynasty has intermarried with each other for generations to maintain its political power. In Carlos' case, if you do the math, out of six generations of supposed 62 ancestors, there were only 32. Joanna of Castile alone is in nine different places on Carlos' family tree.

[00:19:19]Spanish geneticist Gonzalo Alvarez calculated Carlos's inbreeding coefficient. F equals 0.254.

[00:19:29]This is more than a sibling's child. The result is that in every cell of his body, there are two bad copies of each gene pair instead of one good copy.

[00:19:38]Hundreds of recessive diseases appeared simultaneously. The Habsburg dynasty destroyed its own genetic diversity in an attempt to maintain power. And there is a profound truth here that is not just about history.

[00:19:52]Diversity is strength. Now let's come to a chapter in the book that we often talk about but don't think about properly. Do genes determine our fate? In 2006, Davis Bradley Wardrup of Tennessee murdered his wife's friend and nearly killed his wife. The hanging is certain. But his lawyer told the court that Wald Drupe has a special version of the MAOA gene in his body.

[00:20:19]The media called it the warrior gene.

[00:20:22]This gene increases the tendency to aggressive behavior.

[00:20:25]And he was abused as a child.

[00:20:27]So, due to this combination of genes and environment, he lost conscious control. The jury believed Waldrup escaped execution.

[00:20:36]Rutherford is saying something very important about this incident.

[00:20:42]This warrior version of MAO is one-third white male. They are not murderers. A gene gives probability, not destiny. But we fall into this trap again and again. Scientists discovered the gene for X. We see this headline all the time.

[00:20:59]Rutherford did a great job.

[00:21:02]He has collected some headlines like Scientists Discover the Gene for Cocaine Addiction. Scientists Discovered the Gene for Musical Genius. Scientists discovered Gezin. Study finds genes predict what time of day you'll die. Every headline is a false oversimplification. Because almost all complex human traits, including intelligence, height, personality, and disease risk, are influenced by a combination of hundreds or thousands of genes.

[00:21:30]And each gene itself is influenced by the environment. Scientists call this polygenic. Many genes work together.

[00:21:40]And let me tell you a surprise. In 2000, the world's top geneticists sat in a bar in Cold Spring Harbor.

[00:21:48]A young scientist named Ewan Burney made a bet. Who can most accurately estimate how many genes a person has?

[00:21:56]460 scientists made a bet. The highest estimate was 3 lakh. The bravest said 70 to 80 thousand. What is the actual number?

[00:22:06]Only a few thousand. All the world's best gene theorists were wrong. Skyscraper mistakes.

[00:22:12]Rutherford liked this incident very much because it showed that science is a process of making mistakes and learning. It is not a weakness, it is a strength. Now let's come to a chapter in the book that leaves a lasting impression on the mind. The winter of 1944. The Netherlands was on the verge of defeat.

[00:22:33]As a last revenge, the Nazis cut off the food supply to the western Netherlands. The Hunger Winter began. About 18,000 people died. They tried to survive by eating tulip bulbs. The bread allocation was reduced to 800 grams per month.

[00:22:47]Then it decreased even more. 15-year-old Audrey Hepburn survived that winter. Later, she suffered from health problems all her life.

[00:22:55]She said that she made biscuits with tulip bulb flour and ate them. But despite this horror, science made an incredible discovery that mothers were pregnant during that famine. Their children grew up to be more obese than normal. The more diabetics there are, the more mental problems there are. This is not unexpected. But then the scientists were even more surprised.

[00:23:20]The children of those children, the third generation, also showed some problems. The mother's experience is affecting her grandchildren's bodies.

[00:23:31]That's epigenetics.

[00:23:37]Small chemical tags can be placed on DNA without changing the letters of the DNA. These tags determine which genes will be activated and which will not. Rutherford compared it to an orchestra.

[00:23:49]The notes or DNA of the melody remain the same. But how will those notes survive given the conductor's environment or experience? Some are loud, some are soft. Whether any survive at all and in some cases, that annotation even passes on to the next generation. Some of what your ancestors experienced, the environment they lived in, may still be within you today.

[00:24:15]If you feel this, you have to stop for a moment.

[00:24:19]But Rutherford is warning. There is a lot of exaggeration about epigenetics.

[00:24:24]Some say that meditation will change your genes.

[00:24:28]This is wrong. Epigenetics is not biology magic. Now, towards the end of the book, we come to a remarkable question: are humans still evolving? A TV producer once asked Rutherford when humans would be able to fly. Rutherford's immediate answer was, " We can fly now. There are airplanes, there are helicopters." The producer said, "No, no, I mean, through evolution." Rutherford finished the pizza, thanked him, and left. Because humans will no longer evolve that way. We have removed much of the pressure of evolution. Now, a child born with a weak gene no longer dies. There is treatment, there is medicine, there is a vaccine. Now people who used to die of cold don't die anymore. There is warm clothes, there is a house. But does this mean that evolution has stopped? No, Rutherford clearly says yes, we are still evolving, just the pattern has changed.

[00:25:32]He gives an example: Some girls may have a fourth photosensitive cell in their eyes.

[00:25:38]Ordinary people can distinguish three colors of light.

[00:25:41]These girls may have four. Maybe they are seeing colors that we cannot even imagine. Is this a sign of future evolution? Maybe it is being said now, but Rutherford's big message is that we are not just victims of evolution.

[00:25:58]We are also participants in evolution.

[00:26:02]Our culture changes our genes.

[00:26:04]Our genes change our culture. This interdependence is the most amazing feature of humanity. Now let's come to the epilogue of the book.

[00:26:14]Rutherford writes that he is sitting on a crowded train on the London Underground. People of different races from different countries are all around.

[00:26:23]Some are tired, some are looking at their phones, some are buried in books. Rutherford thinks that each of these people has four billion years of uninterrupted life behind them.

[00:26:36]Every person is the end point of an impossible journey.

[00:26:39]Every face is beautiful. But part of the same huge story. He writes, "I've never been anyone quite like you before."

[00:26:50]Never Will Be Again. But at the same time, you write that your DNA comes from billions of ancestors. You are a point where the past and the future meet.

[00:27:01]And then he quotes Joseph Chang, " No matter the languages ​​we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the first domesticated horses on the steppes of Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu."

[00:27:29]Your ancestors cultivated rice in China.

[00:27:32]Horses are domesticated in the Ukrainian steppes.

[00:27:34]Huge animals have been found in the forests of America. They worked to build the pyramids in Egypt. You are not just you, you are a culmination of the entire journey of humanity. My view of the world has changed after this book.

[00:27:51]When I see a stranger on the street, I now feel like I once had a common ancestor with this person.

[00:27:58]Maybe a few thousand years ago. This stranger is actually familiar.

[00:28:04]Rutherford's book wants to tell us this one thing.

[00:28:07]When science is truly understood, it does not separate us.

[00:28:13]He brings us a little closer. TS Eliot wrote, "We Shall Not Cease from Exploration and the End of All Our Exploring Will Be Where We Started and No Place for the First Time."

[00:28:29]The deeper we look, the more we realize that we were actually one from the beginning, and knowing that is the greatest gift of science. Such profound ideas, such books that not only provide information, but also change the way we see. This is what we are looking for in Better Life Bangla. If you want to be with me on this journey, know that every story here is told with a little more attention, a little more love.