the lower genetic diversity of non-Africans compared to Africans reflects the reduced diversity of the modern human population that expanded out of Africa and the Near East after around fifty thousand years ago. But the present-day structure of human populations cannot recover the fine details of ancient events. The problem is not just that people have mixed with their neighbors, blurring the genetic signatures of past events. It is actually far more difficult, in that we now know, from ancient DNA, that the people who live in a particular place today almost never exclusively descend from the
...more
