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The study of human genetic variation has evolutionary significance and medical applications. It can help scientists reconstruct and understand patterns of past human migration. In medicine, study of human genetic variation may be important because some disease-causing alleles occur more often in certain population groups.
Examples of human phenotypic variability: people with different levels of skin colors, a normal distribution of IQ scores, the tallest recorded man in history - Robert Wadlow - with his father. Human variability, or human variation, is the range of possible values for any characteristic, physical or mental, of human beings.
Four different forces can influence the frequencies: natural selection, mutation, gene flow (migration), and genetic drift. A population can be defined as a group of interbreeding individuals and their offspring. For human genetics the populations will consist only of the human species.
Human evolutionary genetics studies how one human genome differs from another human genome, the evolutionary past that gave rise to the human genome, and its current effects. Differences between genomes have anthropological, medical, historical and forensic implications and applications. Genetic data can provide important insights into human ...
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [40] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
[82] [83] [84] Multiregionalists however have discussed the fact that the average difference between the Feldhofer sequence and living humans is less than that found between chimpanzee subspecies, [85] [86] and therefore that while Neanderthals were different subspecies, they were still human and part of the same lineage.
Furthermore, although human populations show some genetic clustering across geographic space, human genetic variation is "clinal", or continuous. [12] [10] This, in addition to the fact that different traits vary on different clines, makes it impossible to draw discrete genetic boundaries around human groups. Finally, insights from ancient DNA ...
Genetic data can provide important insight into human evolution. In May 2023, scientists reported a more complicated pathway of human evolution than previously understood. According to the studies, humans evolved from different places and times in Africa, instead of from a single location and period of time. [276] [277]