The true human story, then, appears to be not of pure races rooted in one place for tens of thousands of years, but of constant mixing, with migration both one way and another. The cherished belief that people in certain places have looked the same way for millennia has to give way to the understanding that migration made the world a melting pot long before the last few centuries, long before the multicultural societies we have today. Our roots are not an orderly family tree but instead are tangled, according to Reich, more like a climbing plant on a trellis. Our ancestors branched out but
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