What modern genetics has taught us about human history
Through Lluís Quintana-Murci’s window, fog obscures the Eiffel Tower. The Mallorcan geneticist, long a fixture of the Institut Pasteur, still hasn’t adapted to Paris’s greyness. He is a migrant, appropriately. His book Human Peoples, about this century’s breakthroughs in genetics, explains that humans have always been migrants. “This is not champagne socialism,” he says. “It’s science.” And migrant humans mated with other groups they encountered.
Humans adapted to different climates through natural selection. Darker skin helped protect against the hot African sun. In cold climates, where the ultraviolet rays that maintain production of vitamin D are scarce, lighter skin helped absorb them. But these differences are largely skin-deep. White and black people aren’t separate “races”. “There are no ‘pure’ populations,” says Quintana-Murci. “What are we? We are admixed, nothing but admixed, all of us.
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