A comment below:
Razib, I don’t know much about genetics but is it true that these people of Melanesia are among the least related people (even more so than Europeans) to sub-saharan Africans genetically??
This is a common question. The typical scientifically curious intelligent person is generally aware that on the order of 100,000 years ago there was a movement of anatomically modern humans from Africa. They know that Africans have the most genetic variation of any human population, and that in fact Africa has more genetic variation than the rest of the world combined. It would stand to reason then that the further you are from Africa, the more genetically distant you are. Simply because of recent admixture of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in much of the Middle East there is some truth to this, but I think it misses the “big picture.”
To the best of my knowledge the ...
