The Arday-Cofnas whoop-tee-doo has revived old time disputes over race, with elites asserting their talking point that Race Does Not Exist because genetic differences are purely clinal. For example, the northern European plain is close to dead flat and well-watered from the English Channel to the Ural Mountains, so you can easily walk from Calais to the Urals, assuming you are a persuasive guy. And if you bother to cross the Urals, you are just in Siberia, so what’s the point?
Not surprisingly, the Dutch and Russians look different, but not too different.
Of course, 21st Century DNA data demonstrates that geographic barriers to gene interchange very much do exist, such as the Sahara desert, the Himalayas and other central Asian mountain ranges, the Wallace Line in southeast Asia and so forth. For example, this map shows that migration between northern and southern Egypt along the Nile has been about 10,000 times greater than migration across the Sahara.
In particular, the Sudd swamp in Sudan had formed a barrier between brown and black peoples.
On the other hand, this map is just of the Old World and leaves out two vast barriers to gene flow, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
Before October 12, 1492, nobody had crossed the Atlantic between sub-Saharan Africa and South America in many tens of thousands of years, if ever.
Modern races are determined by where ancestors lived in 1492.
From Molecular Biology and Evolution:
Paywall here.
