re: #163 engineer cat

the separation of europeans from africans and middle easterners happened about 45 thousand years ago, in the ice age. asian settlers had already started to leave africa about 60 thousand years ago. ten thousand years ago is about when the ice finished up melting

Well, yes and no.

Note for instance that “europeans” and “middle easterners” are essentially the same population, compared to those in sub-saharan Africa.

Then, those we currently label as “European”, and from whom many of us here descend, are turning out to be late-coming farmers who moved into the NW part of the Eurasian continent after the invention of agriculture in the levant, so many “Europeans” are descended primarily from migrants heading from the Black Sea area towards the west/north only 5 to 6 thousand years ago. These farmers, it appears from the latest research, did interbreed somewhat with the older hunter-gatherer populations who had roamed the area since earlier migrations.

The great complexity in human sub-populations comes in areas like Southern Asia where it is not clear how many groups stayed or migrated the past 40,000 years. Likewise for Southern Africa, where some populations are recent but some are very old indeed.

Anyway, mutations continue piling up as our exponential population growth (now ending and which must end this century for a sustainable society over the next millenium) progresses. I wonder if any of these mutations will be selected against, or if some might find a favorable future.