The Maritime Archaic mtDNA genomes available from the NIH Database are a 99% match (i.e., 99% of the bases match) for several European, African, and Asian people. Note these are complete genomes, and so it is impossible to deny common ancestry.

This is astonishing, because the strongest match is the Spanish, and this provides irrefutable evidence that people of European descent reached the Americas thousands of years before Columbus, as the Maritime Archaic people are dated somewhere between 7,500 and 3,500 years before present. You’ll also note that the Maritime Archaic samples are a 95% match to Homo Heidelbergensis, which is consistent with the hypothesis that Heidelbergensis is an ancestor common to all of humanity. Each chart shows the number of people in a given population that had a 99% match with the population in question. So the first chart shows the number of people from each population that had a 99% match to at least one Maritime Archaic genome. There are 10 rows in each population, over 17 populations, except for Heidelbergensis, for which only one complete genome is available.

The raw data together with the code and files providing provenance (i.e., direct links to the NIH Database for each row) are all available in two separate zip files:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e0zf5eokcfdmi7s/MATLAB%20CODE.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lxq8gfb4h0p8edw/mtDNA.zip?dl=0

I suppose mtDNA doesn’t control much for superficial appearance, given these results, and the others I’ve been sharing lately, certainly not the factors we typically associate with race, but more remarkably, because it doesn’t change much over generations, it forces us to recognize the brevity of our considerations, that they’re informed by a few centuries or millennia, when the real history of humanity spans hundreds of thousands of years, possibly longer.

Using a simple measure of information, specifically , where is the size of a distribution, and is the entropy of the distribution, the Danes are the most diverse people in the world, with a 99% match to a simply astonishing variety of nationalities. Even more astonishing, if you lower the match threshold to about 95%, you’ll see that many modern populations are a match for Homo Heidelbergensis, an archaic human that was thought to have gone extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago, though it’s quite clear many modern humans are basically indistinguishable on their maternal line from this otherwise archaic species.

I suppose mtDNA doesn’t control much in the way of superficial appearance, given these results, and the others I’ve been sharing lately, certainly not the factors we typically associate with race, but more remarkably, because it doesn’t change much over generations, it forces us to recognize the brevity of our considerations, that they’re informed by a few centuries or millennia, when the real history of humanity spans hundreds of thousands of years, possibly longer. It’s not that this line of study doesn’t divide humanity, as it certainly does, but not along any political or racial basis I’ve seen before. Instead, more than anything else, it shows that our ideas of race are totally unscientific, and basically a myth.