A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

I am not a big reader but this is one of my favorite books.

I absolutely loved this book because it consolidated a lot of information that I had already known but updated it and in some odd cases was dated. The article published just recently "Non-Africans Are Part Neanderthal, Genetic Research" published July 18, 2011 which can be read at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110718085329.htm demonstrates how quickly the scientific community is moving these day.
Dr. Labuda and his team almost a decade ago had identified a piece of DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome that seemed different and whose origins they questioned. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, they quickly compared 6000 chromosomes from all parts of the world to the Neanderthal haplotype. The Neanderthal sequence was present in peoples across all continents, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and including Australia.
"There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals. This is a very nice result, and further analysis may help determine more details," says Dr. Nick Patterson, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, a major researcher in human ancestry who was not involved in this study.
The only angst I experienced reading this book came in the last two pages where Bill Bryson was willing to cede to humanity the job of stewarding the earth. The rest of the book happily presented the earth and it's inhabitants as a cosmic role of the dice where time and probabilities with a lot of luck created everything. I the very end of the book he wanted to hang onto what we have believing that we, humans, are an exogenous species effecting the world around us in a completely unique way.
I for one believe that we are a part of the environment and that what will come through our ability to steward or inability to steward is part of the natural selection process.