Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich

Surprisingly, the ancient DNA revolution, through its discovery of the pervasiveness of ghost populations and their mixture, is fueling a critique of race that has been raised by scholars in the past, but was never prominent because of a lack of support from hard scientific facts.37 By demonstrating that the genetic fault lines in West Eurasia between ten thousand and four thousand years ago were entirely different from today’s, the ancient DNA revolution has shown that today’s classifications do not reflect fundamental “pure” units of biology. Instead, today’s divisions are recent phenomena, with their origin in repeating mixtures and migrations. The findings of the ancient DNA revolution suggest that the mixtures will continue. Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.