Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive Question:
How probably were Mongoloids(indigenous population) originally more genetically diverse than Caucasoids ( native population) but then somehow the Mongoloids(indigenous population)’ genetic diversity decreased even following separating from Caucasoids( indigenous population)? Why? How?
My answer: Highly probable because that explanation(Mongoloids somehow decreased in genetic diversity even after their separation from Caucasoids) has the most evidence and the least assumptions, and thus is the most parsimonious. To elaborate, why else would the parent population(Mongoloids) be genetically less diverse than their child population, the Caucasoids).
Sources and Quotes
Fox News . “Whites Genetically Weaker than Blacks, Study Finds.” Foxnews.com , Fox News , 13 Jan. 2015, www.foxnews.com/story/whites-genetically-weaker-than-blacks-study-finds.amp. Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. “As would be expected with the ‘out of Africa’ theory, the researchers found Africans had the greatest amount of genetic diversity, followed in turn by Middle Easterners, then Europeans and South Asians at about equal levels, then East Asians. Native Americans had the least genetic diversity of all, indicating that part of the world was settled last..”(Fox News 2015).
Fox News . “Whites Genetically Weaker than Blacks, Study Finds.” Foxnews.com , Fox News , 13 Jan. 2015, www.foxnews.com/story/whites-genetically-weaker-than-blacks-study-finds.amp. Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. “It's been known for years that all non-Africans are descended from a small group, perhaps only a few dozen individuals, who left the continent between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.
But the Cornell study, published in the journal Nature Thursday, indicates that Europeans went through a second ’population bottleneck,’ probably about 30,000 years ago, when the ancestral population was again reduced to relatively few in number”(Fox News 2015)
Nei, M. “Evolution of human races at the gene level.” Progress in clinical and biological research vol. 103 Pt A (1982): 167-81.
Article Evolution of human races at the gene level
“It seems that the Negroid and the Caucasoid-Mongoloid groups diverged about 110,000 +/- 34,000 years ago, whereas Caucasoid and Mongoloid diverged about 41,000 +/- 15,000 years ago”(Nei 1982).
Tateno, Yoshio et al. “Divergence of East Asians and Europeans estimated using male- and female-specific genetic markers.” Genome biology and evolutionvol. 6,3 (2014): 466-73. doi:10.1093/gbe/evu027 “Surprisingly, the European individuals did not form an independent clade, but branched within in the East Asians. We then estimated the divergence time of the root of the European clade as ∼ 41,000 years ago”(Tateno 2014).
Cavalli-Sforza, L., Feldman, M. The application of molecular genetic approaches to the study of human evolution. Nat Genet 33 (Suppl 3), 266–275 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1113
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Lohmueller, K., Indap, A., Schmidt, S. et al.Proportionally more deleterious genetic variation in European than in African populations. Nature451, 994–997 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06611
I am unsure what is the broad intellectual reason for this inquiry? This kind of comparison of alleged separation of ethnic groups is belied by both the past bottleneck in hominin population sometime between ~800k-900k years ago and the apparent recent interbreeding among all extant human lineages so that we are all very closely related and there are only 5-15% of differences between any two individuals on earth. Those minor differences do not support the old 20th century concept of "race" as purported meaningful geographic separation of human populations. Instead, it underscores the how similar all living humans are to each other, and those minor variations are literally only skin deep differences between lineages exposed to different UV, temperature, and humidity regimes, etc. All of us, regardless of our ethnicity, are more related to every other human on earth than chimpanzees are related to all the other chimpanzees, despite their smaller population size and geographic distribution. What is the importance of your research question? Are these assumptions of more discrete past ethnic groups not reiterating some of the baggage from the old, and fortunately outdated, concept of "race" that alleged discreteness of breeding interactions within nd between particular geographic regions? Whatever past separations did exist between populations, clearly it was no barrier to significant interbreeding that makes all living humans essentially the same.
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