You probably know the story: Once upon a time, human beings evolved in Africa, looking much like the black people we know today, and then gradually spread out into the rest of the world over a few million years, evolving to look different in each place. This geographical spread created the different groupings we now know as races, each a branch off the human evolutionary tree: white people in Europe, people with similar facial features but brown skin in South Asia, people with narrower eyes in East Asia, and so on. Once each kind of people evolved in each place, they mostly stuck around there, mixing mainly with their own kind, over the millions of years – until the ages of sail and of transport innovations allowed them to move around the world, creating an era where the formerly separate races newly began to mix.

This story is entirely wrong.

In just a few decades, the study of ancient DNA has allowed us to learn a great deal about the movements of prehistoric human populations, in ways that have completely upended that older understanding of “race”. The Harvard geneticist David Reich makes a wonderful (if difficult) introduction to this new evidence in his Who We Are and How We Got Here, which I recommend highly (and is the source for most of my claims here). Thanks to the knowledge of human movements gained from ancient DNA, Reich claims, “the model of an evolutionary tree in which today’s populations have remained unchanged and separate since branching from a central trunk is dead… instead the truth has involved great cycles of population separation and mixture.” (225) That is:

The genome revolution has shown that we are not living in particularly special times when viewed from the perspective of the great sweep of the human past. Mixtures of highly divergent groups have happened time and again, homogenizing populations just as divergent from one another as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. (231)

The history of “racial” groups, in other words, is not a story of separate divergent populations that then mixed, but a story of mixture all the way down. Indeed, the “European” and “African” populations we know in the USA are themselves products of that mixing. There is no such thing as “pure white” or “pure black”.

I was particularly struck by this sentence of Reich’s: “Analysis of ancient DNA data shows that western European hunter-gatherers around eight thousand years ago had blue eyes but dark skin and dark hair, a combination that is rare today.” (96) The northern European “white” look was itself a mix of that group with in-migrating light-skinned but dark-eyed farmers – and a different, blonder group first found around Lake Baikal.

The point struck me since I have blue eyes but dark(ish) skin and naturally dark hair – an “exotic” combination, coming from my mixed Indian and British ancestry, that some might view as only possible in an era of global travel. Yet 8000 years ago in western Europe – a land now mainly occupied by the sort of people we now call “white” – my look was normal. And notice that 8000 years ago – circa 6000 BCE – is not at all long ago in the timescale of human evolution! 6000 BCE is the eve of recorded history – two or three thousand years after that, less than halfway between then on the present, people would start building pyramids. And on that eve, it was people who looked like me who mixed with other differently coloured people to produce the people we now think of as “white”. People who have light skin and hair and light eyes are that way because of mixing between different peoples, including ones that previously looked like me. People who look like that are the novel hybrids! My mixed look is a reversion to something older.

To put it another way: white people are new. And that’s not just referring to the social construction, the idea of calling people “white”. (The first usage of “white people” in English dates back only to 1613.) No, here I’m not even talking about the term but about the phenotype – the set of observable biological characteristics, of light skin together with the prevalence of light hair and eyes – that led us to classify people as “white”. Ten thousand years ago, there were no such people.

As for black people: biologically speaking, there is no such thing. The genetic research of Sarah Tishkoff showed that Africans are more genetically diverse than the rest of the world combined. Genetically, Nigerians, Khoisan people, and Barack Obama’s Kenyan Luo ancestors are at least as far from each other as they are from “white people” or “Asians”. Biologically, “black ancestry” is not a meaningful concept.

What does exist as a biological cluster is ADOS (American descendants of slavery, often misleadingly called “African-Americans”): the capital-B “Black” population of the United States who form their own recent genetic mix in the aftermath of slavery. This group’s mix of West African ancestries (which typically includes some Northern European ancestry as well) produces visible biological differences from those who have more European ancestry – though of course even this is a spectrum, nothing to do with the segregationist one-drop rule.

Thus it is often observed that this group, ADOS, is genetically more prone to sickle-cell anemia than are other populations, as they carry a mutation known as HBB-βS; that much is a biological reality. But it would be wrong to say that that sickle-cell anemia is more prevalent among black people. Because that mutation is not present among many other “black” African populations, from Ethiopia to the indigenous populations of southern Africa; ADOS are no closer genetically to those so-called “black” people than they are to South or East Asians. (Obama’s ancestry is no more predisposed to sickle-cell anemia than mine is.) Indeed, since so many of them do have some European ancestry, genetically ADOS are overall closer to “white” people than they are to East Africans!

The groups typically described as “white” and “black” in the US are biologically both new: the first is less than five thousand years old, the second less than one thousand years old. It’s not just that the conceiving of them as “races” is a social construction, it’s that even the biological reality they have is, well, temporary. 5000 years ago it’s not just that the concepts “white people” and “black people” didn’t exist in any language, it’s that their referents didn’t either. There were no people having the genotypes and phenotypes that Americans now refer to as “white” and “black”.

Thus the biggest problem with Gloria Anzaldúa’s claim “the future will belong to the mestiza” may be that it doesn’t go far enough: in many respects the past did and the present does too. Humans, including “white” and “black” ones, already have been all mixed all along. We just didn’t know it or acknowledge it. The point lends some further credence to B.R. Ambedkar’s desire to solve caste/race discrimination through intermarriage: mixing is the normal state of affairs throughout human prehistory and even history. The weird thing is the desire of segregationists and dharmaśāstra to arbitrarily wall off one group from another and make them discrete and separate. (It’s even weirder when so-called “progressives” try to do so, but that’s another story.) Race as we know it – not just its social construction but the biological groupings that that construction falsely attempts to treat as separate – is temporary. It had a beginning – a beginning now becoming clearer to us – and it should have an end. We are nowhere near that end yet. But that’s the direction we should be moving in.