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Social Sci LibreTexts

13: Race and Human Variation

  • Keith Chan

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Learning Objectives

  • Illustrate the troubling history of “race” concepts.
  • Explain human variation and evolution as the thematic roots of biological anthropology as a discipline.
  • Critique earlier “race” concepts based on a contemporary understanding of the apportionment of human genetic variation.
  • Explain how biological variation in humans is distributed clinally and in accordance with both isolation-by-distance and Out-of-Africa models.
  • Identify phenotypic traits that reflect selective and neutral evolution.
  • Extend this more-nuanced view of human variation to today’s research, the implications for biomedical studies, applications in forensic anthropology, and other social/cultural/political concerns.

This chapter is a revision from Chapter 13: Race and Human Variation ” by Michael B. C. Rivera. In Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology, first edition , edited by Beth Shook, Katie Nelson, Kelsie Aguilera, and Lara Braff, which is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 .


This page titled 13: Race and Human Variation is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Keith Chan (Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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