ABSTRACT
Genetic diversity of living humans is more like a palimpsest than a complete erasure; it reflects a mixture of past events, both recent and distant in time. This chapter shows that the patterns of genetic variation that we see in the world today were not caused by any single event, but instead reflect a palimpsest, a mosaic of events that occurred at different times and in different places. It looks at human genetic diversity from the perspective of global geographic patterns and the influence of history. The chapter focuses on interpreting genetic distances on a global level, looking for patterns of relationship between human populations across the entire planet. Everyone in the first regional population is a clone of a given person; that is, everyone is genetically identical. Each regional population is composed of genetically different people, but the proportion of different traits is the same in both populations.
