How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

by Adam Rutherford

That historical monogenist view is now known to be correct in principle, but wrong in every detail. Homo sapiens is a creature whose origins are in Africa. There were dispersals out of Africa and into Eurasia in the last 210,000 years that petered out, and those people leave no genetic legacy in living humans, as far as we can tell.* The main emigration from the true motherland occurred around 70,000 years ago, and these people, maybe numbering only a few thousand, would form the population from which the rest of the world would primarily be drawn. This is evident in the bones of our ancestors, and in our living genomes. But let’s be clear on the messiness and timescales we are talking about here. Out of Africa was not an ‘event’ as we think of it, nor was it a migration in modern terms either. The rate of passage is over thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, and indeed we have genetic evidence of back migration within the last few thousand years too. So while a population was established in a previously uninhabited location, that is not to say the gate closed behind them. They were not setting out to conquer a promised land, just meandering over generations, on average, away from the continent of Africa.