How the Snake Lost Its Legs the leopard/elephant/camel got its spots/trunk/hump". Held's ability to captivate the reader's imagination compares to the mischievousness of Kipling's pourquoi stories," but the reader, "is also encouraged to extrapolate from general principles by the constant reminder that animals use a conserved set of developmental genes to construct their bodies." Martin finds evo-devo fascinating, "inherently colorful and well placed to fulfill the dual goal of etiological myths: explaining origins and causes while also stirring imagination and awe. Overall, the latest opus by Lewis Held Jr. fits that niche nicely, and shines by its ability to span essential concepts and empirical work with
Who We Are and How We Got Here criticised for its writing style and its handling of race, though other reviewers observe that nothing it says should give racists any comfort. David Reich is a geneticist who has studied ancient human genomes, comparing their patterns of mutations to discover which populations migrated and mixed throughout prehistory. He was mentored by the population geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who from 1960 pioneered the attempt to match the study of human prehistory by archaeology and linguistics, using the limited genetic data available at that time. "Who We Are and How We Got Here" was published by Oxford University Press in 2018, .