Since PZ has quite a storm going on in his blog about human “races” and intelligence, I think I’ll repost this great two-year-old post that just show how homogenous humans really are: Chimps are Laughing at You.
Given Nature’s publication of the chimp genome, I figured that I’d share one of my all time favorite figures from a scientific paper. It is from Gagneux et al. (1999) Mitochondrial sequences show diverse evolutionary histories of African hominoids. PNAS 96 (9): 5077.
Fig. 1. Unrooted phylogram of the neighbor-joining tree of 1,158 different CRI sequences before (A) and after (B) after topiary pruning to level PL = 8 to remove homoplasies. Bootstrap values >= 50% for the primary internodes are shown. Position of the midpoint root is indicated by arrow. Different colors indicate species (humans, bonobos, and gorillas) and subspecies (chimpanzees). Symbols indicate individuals belonging to the same social group.…
What is very obvious from this paper figure is how genetically homogenous we are compared to our closest relatives. I’ve heard it stated that a single chimpanzee tribe has as much genetic diversity as is found in the entire human species. So next time you feel fit to make fun of us southerners for kissin’ cousins remember that chimps are laughing at you.
One of the obvious differences between chimps and humans is our great potential for dispersal- which has a homogenizing effect on diversity.
I wonder it samples say 100 years ago- would distinct clades have been recovered.
Question: Did the Human sample include appropriate sampling of potentially isolated populations?
Adding isolated populations would only make a difference if they’ve been isolated from the rest of humanity for say 200,000 years, i.e. back before Homo sapiens took the world by storm. It is very unlikely that any human sequences in the last 10,000 years would have attached itself to the tree like the Neanderthal and NUMT sequences do.
Update