Modern populations

H. sapiens is now crammed into virtually every habitable region of Earth, yet it still bears the hallmarks of its origin as a tiny population inhabiting one small corner of the world. The variation in DNA among all the widespread human populations of today is less than what is found in any population of living apes. This is very surprising, given that there are so few apes in such small geographic areas—conditions that one might expect to produce a more homogeneous gene pool. One possible explanation is that ancestral H. sapiens quite recently passed through a “bottleneck” in which the entire human population was reduced to a few hundred or perhaps a couple of thousand individuals, perhaps approximately 150 kya; however, this explanation is not universally accepted. Nevertheless, such a population size would be sufficiently small for a set of unique traits to become established, making it plausible that one small group would be the population from which H. sapiens emerged as a new isolated reproductive entity. Still, other events that may have caused severe population declines have been suggested—including the super-eruption of volcanic Mount Toba in northern Sumatra between 74 kya and 71 kya (which resulted in a substantial climatic shift that was most severe in a region stretching from the Indian Ocean through southern Asia and the South China Sea) and the East African megadroughts that occurred between 135 and 75 kya. A study of the remains of a human settlement in southern Africa dated to the time of the Mount Toba eruption suggests that some areas of Earth with plentiful food supplies may have served as refuges for surviving human beings in the years following the eruption.

The past few hundred thousand years have been a period during which climates have oscillated constantly between warmer and colder and also between wetter and drier. During these times, sea levels have repeatedly risen and fallen, creating islands and expanding landmasses. These are precisely the conditions in which small populations could become isolated and then expand to recolonize territories as conditions changed. In other words, conditions were most propitious for evolutionary innovation. H. sapiens appears to be a typical product of such a process.

From a tiny population that most likely lived in Africa, H. sapiens spread, directed in its wanderings by the vagaries of climate, environment, and competition with species both human and nonhuman. This population spread first out of Africa, then throughout the Eurasian landmass and into Australasia, and finally into the New World and the Pacific Islands. The initial expansion may have been the result of population increase as opposed to nomadic travels, or it may have been driven by shifts in climate that forced some individuals to search for more-hospitable places to live. This spread was assuredly not uniform but episodic and opportunistic, with frequent false starts, mini-isolations, and recoalescences. The physical variety of humankind today, while striking, is actually superficial, and it reflects this checkered history.

During the history of H. sapiens, local populations have developed various physical as well as cultural and linguistic differences. Some of these physical variations must have been controlled by the environment, others by purely random factors. It is clear, for example, that variations in skin colour are responses to variations in the intensity of sunlight in different climates. The dark pigment melanin protects against the highly damaging effects of the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation, and the darkest skins occur in the tropics, where such radiation is highest. In contrast, skins at higher latitudes tend to be pale, which allows the less-intense UV radiation to penetrate the skin and promote the synthesis of essential factors such as vitamin D. Similarly, populations living in hot, dry areas tend to be taller and more slender than those living in very cold climates, because they need to lose heat rather than retain it as a rounder body does. On the other hand, it is unknown why some populations have thinner lips than others or why many Asians have an additional fold of skin above their upper eyelids. These and other variations may be inconsequential to fitness and could be the mere results of random chance.

Scientists have always had difficulty classifying people into groups on the basis of variation, and the reason is simple. Genetically, only two processes can take place within a species. One of these processes is the diversification of local populations—a routine and unremarkable event that requires some degree of isolation of local groups. The other is the reintegration of populations and the consequent blending of characteristics via interbreeding when contact is reestablished. Human populations show the results of both processes as driven by the climatic shifts of ice ages. Today, although it is generally possible to tell an Asian from a European from an African, many individuals defy such categorization, and boundaries are impossible to draw. This is why, from a biologist’s point of view, trying to define “races” is impossible if not pointless. Race is instead a social construct addressed by cultural anthropology.

Still, tracing the history of the spread of H. sapiens and its diversification is undeniably fascinating, and several genetic approaches have been used to try to unravel it. In addition to mtDNA and its male counterpart, the Y chromosome (see sex chromosome), DNA from the Human Genome Project has also helped clarify humanity’s relatively short but astonishingly complex history. The interpretation of mtDNA divergence shows the H. sapiens branch of the family tree to be rooted in Africa. It identifies four descendant mtDNA lineages (A, B, C, and D) among Native Americans. These four lineages are also present in continental Asians, as are lineages designated E, F, G, and M. Europeans show a different set of lineages, called H, I, J, and K as well as T through X. Africans present one principal lineage called L, with three major variants. One of these, L3, seems to have been the founder of both the Asian and the European groupings. Using the differences (genetic substitutions) observed among the lineages, the L3 emigrants are calculated to have reached Europe between about 51 and 39 kya, a date that is in good agreement with the archaeological record. But there are some apparent anomalies in these data. For example, the rare European X lineage has been identified in some northern Native Americans. This cannot be explained by recent intermarriage, since this lineage appears to have originated in America in pre-Columbian times. As the genes of more populations are studied, a more-detailed picture of past human population movements and integrations around the world will emerge.