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

by David Reich

I also highlight some of the great themes that are emerging, especially the finding that mixture between highly differentiated populations is a recurrent process in the human past. Today, many people assume that humans can be grouped biologically into “primeval” groups, corresponding to our notion of “races,” whose origins are populations that separated tens of thousands of years ago. But this long-held view about “race” has just in the last few years been proven wrong—and the critique of concepts of race that the new data provide is very different from the classic one that has been developed by anthropologists over the last hundred years. A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today.