we find the highest genetic diversity among human populations in oceania.
we find the highest genetic diversity among human populations in oceania.
where do we find the highest genetic diversity among human populations?
oceania
jeffrey long and rick kittles give a long critique of the application of "f" to human populations in their 2003 paper "human genetic diversity and the nonexistence of biological races". they find that the figure of 85% is misleading because it implies that all human populations contain on average 85% of all genetic diversity. they argue the underlying statistical model incorrectly assumes equal and independent histories of variation for each large human population. a more realistic approach is to understand that some human groups are parental to other groups and that these groups represent paraphyletic groups to their descent groups. for example, under the recent african origin theory the human population in africa is paraphyletic to all other human groups because it represents the ancestral group from which all non-african populations derive, but more than that, non-african groups only derive from a small non-representative sample of this african population. this means that all non-african groups are more closely related to each other and to some african groups (probably east africans) than they are to others, and further that the migration out of africa represented a genetic bottleneck, with much of the diversity that existed in africa not being carried out of africa by the emigrating groups. under this scenario, human populations do not have equal amounts of local variability, but rather diminished amounts of diversity the further from africa any population lives. long and kittles find that rather than 85% of human genetic diversity existing in all human populations, about 100% of human diversity exists in a single african population, whereas only about 70% of human genetic diversity exists in a population derived from new guinea. long and kittles argued that this still produces a global human population that is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammalian populations.
human genetic variation
it is well established that the genetic diversity among human populations is low, although the distribution of the genetic diversity was only roughly estimated. early studies argued that 85–90% of the genetic variation is found within individuals residing in the same populations within continents (intra-continental populations) and only an additional 10–15% is found between populations of different continents (continental populations). later studies based on hundreds of thousands single-nucleotide polymorphism (snps) suggested that the genetic diversity between continental populations is even smaller and accounts for 3 to 7% a later study based on three million snps found that 12% of the genetic variation is found between continental populations and only 1% within them. most of these studies have used the "f" statistics or closely related statistics.
f-statistics