Modern humans originated in Africa 300,000 years ago, and before leaving their continent of origin, they underwent a process of intense diversification involving complex demographic dynamics. Upon exiting Africa, different populations emerged on the four other existing continents, shaped by the interplay of various evolutionary processes, such as migrations, founder effects, and natural selection. Within each region, continental populations, in turn, diversified and evolved almost independently for millennia. As a backdrop to this diversification, introgressions from archaic species contributed to establishing different patterns of genetic diversity in different geographic regions, reshaping our understanding of our species’ variability. With the increasing availability of genomic data, it has become possible to delineate the subcontinental human population structure precisely. However, the bias towards the genomic research focused on populations from the global North has limited our understanding of the real diversity of our species and the processes and events that guided different human groups throughout their evolutionary history. This perspective is part of a series of articles celebrating 40 years since our journal, Molecular Biology and Evolution, was founded (Russo et al. 2024). The perspective is accompanied by virtual issues, a selection of papers on human diversification published by Genome Biology and Evolution and Molecular Biology and Evolution.

中文翻译：

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从生物地理学角度看我们物种的遗传多样性

现代人类起源于30万年前的非洲，在离开其起源大陆之前，他们经历了一个涉及复杂人口动态的高度多样化的过程。离开非洲后，不同的种群出现在其他四个现有大陆上，这是由各种进化过程（例如迁徙、创始人效应和自然选择）相互作用形成的。在每个地区内，大陆人口反过来又多样化并几乎独立进化了数千年。作为这种多样化的背景，来自古老物种的基因渗入有助于在不同地理区域建立不同的遗传多样性模式，重塑我们对物种变异性的理解。随着基因组数据的不断增加，精确描绘次大陆人口结构已成为可能。然而，对针对北半球人口的基因组研究的偏见限制了我们对物种真正多样性以及指导不同人类群体整个进化史的过程和事件的理解。这一观点是庆祝我们的期刊《分子生物学与进化》创刊 40 周年的一系列文章的一部分（Russo 等人，2024 年）。该观点还伴随着虚拟问题、基因组生物学与进化和分子生物学与进化发表的关于人类多样化的论文选集。