ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the molecular methods were then applied to resolving the riddle of the origin of races. In the religious rendition, the major races are created separately in more or less the same form they appear today. In the evolutionary rendition, they evolve into anatomically modern Homo sapiens in parallel from nonmodern forms. The evolutionary rendition of the second scenario allows for enough peripheral gene flow between the races to maintain a single large gene pool but not enough to blur the regionality. The problem with that naive deduction is that races aren't species—they are not, among other things, reproductively isolated from one another. The basic problem in each case was that there was an enormous amount of what is technically termed "homoplasy" in her trees. The chapter looks at systems with minimal homoplasy—the noncontrol region to trace female lineages; the Y-chromosomes for male lineages.
