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Comment by hx87 | Hacker News Reader

Biological populations certainly do exist, it's just that they don't correlate well with prevailing concepts of "race". The average western African is more similar to the average European than to the average southern African.

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Populations in Africa are also genetically more diverse than the rest of the world combined.

But people are ignorant of Africa in general. When they talk about an African race they're ignoring Ethiopians or khoisans or pygmies - they mean Bantu people.

I don't think there's more genetic diversity among Bantus than the rest of the world combined.

> But people are ignorant of Africa in general.

Not population geneticists. Africa in those cases == sub-Saharan African people, not just Bantu.

Source? By southern African do you mean Khoisan?

Here's one paper. By southern African I do mean Khoisan as well as related peoples.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2953791/

Would the layman consider Khoisan and Bantu people to be of the same race? I mean after learning about the existence and names of both of them.

I am a layman who knows next to nothing about genetics, but a bit about Africa, and I would not consider the two peoples to be in the same race. They look completely different - which is what most laymen use to determine race, isn't it?

I think a layman, at least in the US and countries that define race in similar ways as it is defined in America, would consider Khoisan and Bantu people the same race (black), even if they knew they were different groups. African Americans in the US often look different but are all considered "black".

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