ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to recount the history of the race concept as applied to human subgroups and explains the difference between biological race, racialism, and racism. It provides the genetic argument against race, with reference to genetic variation within and between diverse groups. Importantly, non-Africans have been non-African only for a short amount of time relative to the time-depth of humanity’s existence in Africa; and those who branched off represented only a small part of the total African gene pool. Therefore, the degree of genetic variation in non-African populations is much lower than the degree of variation found on the African continent. Evidence supporting the idea of a human metapopulation comes from Africa, suggesting that even the emergence of Homo as a genus was multiregional. Genetic evidence does show that modern human and Neanderthal peoples interbred, and to do so they would have had to run into one another.
