I learned that if animals are separated by a geographic barrier and if over time they inbreed, it introduces a new species. Why does this not occur with humans which are separated by continents and have been around for such a long time.
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It did, to a degree. There are quite obvious genetic differences between humans that live in different parts of the globe, precisely because the evolutionary pressures in those different areas rewarded different traits. Humans that remained in Africa have different traits than humans that migrated north vs. migrated east.
The reason we are still the same species is that not enough time has really passed for the genetic differences to get _so_ pronounced that we would say we are a different species. Humans only really started migrating around the globe 60-90k years ago; combined with our very long lifespans, there just haven’t been all that many generations of people. **If** we kept those geographic boundaries in place then likely we would have separated into multiple species at some point, but modern technology has made travel fairly routine.
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