ELI5- Why are people on Earth so drastically different looking from one another?

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Earth isn’t really that big, if you think about it. Biodiversity on Earth is really a wide span.

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

While it doesn’t seem that big we actually have a very wide range in terms of habitable territory, all the way from above the Arctic Circle through to the Sahara Desert, the Amazon rainforest, and all sorts of habitats in between. When we were less technologically adept than we are in modern day, evolution had a greater role in selecting beneficial traits: ability to block solar radiation, conserve/shed body heat, handle higher or lower altitudes, etc.

On top of this, we are learning that the legacies of at least (and possibly more) *three* humanities that contribute to what we now know as humanity: the “standard” Homo sapiens model that came out of Africa last, which comprises the majority of our DNA, Homo neanderthalensis, which was found in Eurasia, and Homo denisova. There could be even more humanities that contributed to our current gene pool and heritage. This to me is incredibly fascinating and exciting news!

That said…and this might address some of the context of your question…we are now driving our own evolution and acting on our environment to shape it for our purposes, more than it acts upon us. We are also becoming more cosmopolitan with ever-accelerating technological, cultural, and genetic interchange. Based on this, barring divergences that could be triggered in the future by deliberate genetic engineering, or long-term genetic drift as a result of a population leaving Earth, there is really not so much of an evolutionary “need” for us to continue diverging from each other…and indeed, as technology and medicine make our environments more and more comparable to each other over time, some of those differences could come to moderate/lessen over time.

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