There’s a rather quirky moment in the book which I hope might attract a casual reader’s eye. It’s important because I think it shows how powerful a perfectly absurd idea can be in the wrong hands. But it also shows the sinister depths to which a culture can descend in self-justification. The episode congregates around a number of efforts to identify what was the nature of Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, the sin that supposedly set humankind off in the wrong direction. In 1875, one character set out to answer the question, 'Who Tempted Eve?’ His bizarre account is recorded in the section of the book called 'Eve’s seduction.’ Through a series of weird interpretative contortions, A. Hoyle Lester came to the conclusion that the 'serpent’ recorded in the Genesis account was actually a beast in human form – a black man – and that Eve’s downfall was in fact a sexual transgression, a gross inter-racial liaison from which was spawned a race of inferior beings. What’s amazing is that this idea actually caught on among those intent on bestializing whole sections of the human family.How is this all part of my story? Well first it’s a further inflection on the idea that humanity composes different original human stocks which could give succour to those of a supremacist mindset. What’s interesting here too is the way that in later generations supremacists revisiting these nineteenth century absurdities fancify them with snatches of modern genetics so as to scientize their racist pamphleteering. Secondly, the episode reveals the power of origins stories – whether scientific or religious – to do ideological work. Genesis myths and genetics myths alike are not just accounts of beginnings, they are weapons in the arsenal of racial politics. Thirdly, it shows the remarkable persistence of a basic idea which can be mobilized for radically different purposes in different settings. When the idea of pre-Adamic humanity was originally put forward in the mid seventeenth century, the idea was that the Hebrew scriptures were exclusively an account of the Jews, and that all other people were of a different origin. But since, it was claimed, all humanity benefited from Israel’s Messiah, it was essentially humanitarian in impulse. By the later nineteenth century, the idea of non-Adamic humanity was being mobilized for the grossest forms of racial propaganda.In a sense I think of Adam’s Ancestors as a history of the underside of a number of modern concerns – anthropology, race relations, evolution, science and religion. The book excavates the genealogy of a tradition of thinking that the West now routinely ignores – or suppresses. In that sense it is a contribution to the understanding of the Enlightenment’s alter ego. But seeing it solely in that context would be a mistake. Some of the ideas whose archaeology I am unearthing may seem ludicrous or preposterous to modern eyes. But they were central to earlier ways of thinking about our origins and our identity and our destiny, and elucidating them is thus a history of the present. Indeed there are more or less distant echoes of many of the themes that circulate through these earlier debates in recent research on hominid pathways and the use of DNA to construct human genealogies. For these enterprises too are cultural projects serving political interests of one sort or another.In a review of Adam’s Ancestors, the well-known historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse judged that the book “informs and leaves you with more questions than when you started.” It would be a great source of satisfaction to me if that were to be the final judgment of every reader.