From the Editor - May 2009

When the historian Eric Hobsbawm looked back on his long career at the turn of the new millennium, he pondered the question of what he would specialise in if he were starting out again as a history undergraduate. The man who has done more than most to assure the ubiquity of modern history declared that he would wish to investigate the opportunities to explore mankind’s distant past made possible by advances in genetics. There are a small number of historians now exploring those possibilities, of whom Harvard University’s Daniel Lord Smail is one.