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Spring Books

Nature 404, 932-933 (27 April 2000) | doi:10.1038/35010175

The sequence of words

Patrick V. Kirch1

BOOK REVIEWEDGenes, Peoples, and Languages

by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza


Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2000. 216 pp. $24

In the early twentieth century, a uniquely American version of anthropology emerged under the direction of prominent scholars such as Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir. What set this school apart from its European counterparts was its efforts to construct a scientific approach to deep-time human history, and the catholic inclusion of evidence from ethnography, archaeology, linguistics and human biology (then called physical anthropology).