/fa/ - Fashion

For about a half-century, a consensus among specialists--biological anthropologists and evolutionary biologists--that biological races do not exist in the human species. The scientific consensus stems from overwhelming and convergent evidence from genetics and archaeology documenting the actual history of the human species.

Anatomically modern humans originated in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, having diverged from earlier forms. Their initially small numbers grew over time, but were reduced to near extinction about 70,000 years ago, perhaps as the result of a global climatic catastrophe following the eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia. At that relatively recent date in human evolution, the great bulk of whatever genetic variability had developed by then was wiped out.

While new research is constantly revising the dates for the first human migrations out of Africa, it does appear that it was not until after that catastrophe that the first humans left for Eurasia, taking with them much less genetic variability than the reduced amount then extant in Africa. Thus, African populations contain 200,000 years of human genetic variability, while Eurasians, with less variability to start with, have had less than a third of that time for it to increase.