Chapter 12: - Human Variation

Summary

No review of human evolution can afford to ignore the ‘race’ issue, as it has played a central role in history and politics, especially in the United States. Although most people equate ‘race’ with skin color, this chapter explains the fact that skin color is an adaptive cline. It also reviews other elements of anatomical variation, demonstrating the clearly adaptive nature of traits such as skin tone, lung capacity, and body size and shape. One important observation in this context is the fact that modern human diversity is very low compared to the ape species: a result of our relatively recent common origins in Africa between only 100,000 to 50,000 years ago and the patterns of gene flow between populations. However, as the latter half of this book deals with history, this chapter also reviews the history of eugenics and the application of racial typology, starting with the Egyptian Book of Gates, through Blumenbach, and into the Victorian era. Finally, it emphasizes the political purposes to which racial typology has been employed, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of European colonialism.