Quote

A question which has obsessed journalists and film-makers ever since Newsweek's 1988 Mitochondrial Eve story is what she and her companions looked like. It is likely that they all looked very different from one another, more varied than any random selection of people from any non-African country might look today. They were, after all, the stock from which all non-Africans developed, and all the evidence suggests that the variation within individual groups decreases the farther away from Africa one goes, even today. Yet, it is also the case that differences between one group and another, say, Chinese, Native Americans, Polynesians, Melanesians, and Australians, increase the farther we move from Africa; so the total diversity between the so-called races might seem to increase with distance from Africa. Let me put this another way. My late and very dear mother-in-law, who was Chinese, once told me - and wasn't joking - that all Europeans looked the same to her. Europeans have said the same about the Chinese. There is a paradox here, which we need to resolve before we can continue to chart the genetic diaspora out of Africa.

It is all a question of how the diversity is split up. What appears to be a paradox is actually the result of multiple unequal group splits followed by genetic drift in action. It can be explained thus: as the explorers split into more and more branches, the original genetic variation was parcelled into different groups which today live scattered around Eurasia and America. Over the past 50,000 years or so, members of these individual splinter groups in the ex-African diaspora have become more like another than like members of other groups. The splinter groups have diverged from one another. While I shall argue that many of these changes were true evolutionary adaptations to new environments, some of them were just down to the random and unequal way the cake was cut.

Quote

A by-product of the fight agains racism has been to render discussion of race taboo. Even the word 'race' itself, tainted forever by the Nazi era, is outlawed by many anthropologists as unscientific, derogatory, meaningless, and giving the misleading impression that races are discrete entities when in fact variation, gradation, and admixture occur everywhere. This is all very worthy, but the fact remains - as children are quick to notice - that people from different regions can look dramatically different from one another. In the end, prosciption and regularly changing euphemisms do not help; most alternative terms for race such as 'population' or 'ethnic group' are so vague as to be just as misleading.