Origins: An End to Racism

Strangely enough, Svante Paabo’s recent Nobel Prize in Medicine for sequencing the genomes of Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Denisovan, two predecessors of “modern man” Homo Sapiens, firmly ends any consideration of racism. Factually, both these variants of humanity originated in Africa, and were the survivors of our global diaspora. Both existed in successful subsistence cultures in very different environments for a very long time, overlapping each other in time but apparently not in space. They still exist today within us all, as 1-4% of the genome of European peoples are Neanderthal in origin, and 1-6% of Asian peoples’ genome is Denisovan. Thus, we know that although Homo Sapiens outcompeted both populations (or perhaps disease played a role), coexistence in time and space and culture occurred with sexual exchange by mating or conquest. The key to humanity’s commonality is in the timing of the arrival of modern humans everywhere in the world. 

The work of many geneticists and anthr…