How population phenotypes change over time
is no great mystery
The slightly more wide-bodied of the ancestral leptosomic types were more adapted to the new environment, so genes for progressively wider and wider bodies were propagated.
Now, if it’s indeed true that humans originated in Africa and that non-Africans descend from a small group that crossed the Red Sea some 80-90 thousand years ago, we should expect a clear trail demonstrating this, and the clearest trail can be found in DNA. If you look at all the Y-DNA of humans, for example, you’ll see that you can join every single haplogroup into a phylogenetic tree (you can do something similar to look at the phylogeny of species too), where each mutation can be traced back to an ancestral haplogroup until every single one converges. Let’s say you have some hypothetical current and ancestral haplotypes that look like this:
...and you want to give the most parsimonious tree to explain it, it’s this:
You can do something like this with the Y-DNA and mtDNA of humans. For example, my Y-DNA is R1a. I can trace this all of the way back to Africa by looking at the mutation tree. A lot of the geographical specifics are still very much debated, but with our current knowledge it would probably be roughly:
My subclade of R1a (somewhere in Europe) -> R1a (South Asia) -> R (Central Asia or Middle East) -> P (Central Asia/Siberia) -> K(xLT) (South Asia/Central Asia) -> K (South or West Asia) -> IJK (Southwest Asia) -> F (South or Southwest Asia) -> CF (Southwest Asia) -> CT (East Africa) -> BT (Africa) -> “Y-chromosmal Adam” (Africa)
It’s funny how you
dogmatically come to such a conclusion before I even respond.
Bookmarks