Ancestors

Ancestors is a work of world history by An Senyao, compiled from his Zhihu column of the same name and the first volume in the "Ancestors" series. The book attempts to break away from narratives centered on a single ethnicity or nation, approaching instead from two threads—geography and human population genetics—to discuss how human civilizations grew, diverged, and collided under different natural conditions. The narrative begins around 11,700 years ago in the Holocene: as the ice age ended and the climate warmed, late Homo sapiens across the world began to settle and farm, and villages, cities, and states emerged. The book follows a chronological axis while laying out two main threads: one is East Asian civilization centered on China; the other is Western civilization represented by ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, ancient India, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome. The author interweaves and compares events occurring in East and West during the same periods, accompanied by numerous maps and illustrations to help readers locate the direction of civilizations in geographic space and understand how mountains, climate, rivers, and passages shaped the choices of different peoples. In style, the book is accessible and briskly paced, with a lecture-like sense of fun and deduction; its aim is to provide a global overview rather than meticulous historiographical research. For general readers familiar with textbook history but unclear about what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time, the book offers a perspective that places Chinese history back into a world context, and it is also the starting point for subsequent volumes such as Ancestors II and Ancestors III.