The wider cultural landscape within which Adam’s Ancestors is located has a number of landmarks on its horizon. First, I see it as a contribution to the study of the relationship between science and religion. When we think of science and religion, I suspect that two or three critical moments – icons perhaps – spring to mind: the condemnation of Galileo by the Catholic Church in 1633, the legendary tussle between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley on Darwin’s idea of evolution in 1860, the Scopes monkey trial’ in 1925, and more recently the controversies over creationism and intelligent design. I want to widen the debate by advertising the persistent dialogue between science and religion over human beginnings and human identity.Secondly, I hope the book reveals that there are critical social and political issues at stake in the project of elucidating human origins. I think this is the case just as much for modern scientific inquiry as for theological endeavour. The ways in which authoritative texts – particularly the Bible – were deployed for social and political purposes comes through fairly dramatically, I think, in the book. Sometimes these were benign, often they were malevolent; sometimes they gathered all humanity within a single embrace, at other times they excommunicated whole branches of the human species from the human family. Either way, genesis sagas are political declarations. And this is no less true of modern genetics. Time and again, in recent years, the findings of human geneticists hunting for humanity’s point of origin, and of palaeo-anthropologists with the same quarry, have been catapulted into the political arena. Their findings have been used to underwrite, or undermine, the idea of human unity – and thus, apparently – human equality.Thirdly, I hope that Adam’s Ancestors brings to the fore what I’d call the contingency of labeling. It’s interesting to me that an idea born in skepticism, nurtured in infidelity, and castigated as rank heresy, later resurfaced among the most conservative religious believers in their ongoing project to find rapprochement between religion and science. Condemnation in one generation; benediction in another. It’s the same with what passes as science’ and religion.’ That boundary is differently marked in different settings. There simply is no hard and fast definition that is going to segregate one domain from the other. Numerous candidates have been offered of course. But once you begin to look at the historical record they simply do no real work. Intellectual boundaries, like national frontiers, are cultural constructions. So overall I hope the book will show the power of ideas and their persistence over centuries. But I hope it no less reveals how ideas are always located in particular settings, and that they are resources for cultural and political projects of many kinds.