>It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
Here in Belgium my grandma was first to go work 2 municipalities away. Her parents were farmers.
She cried when she came back and swore she would not go back the next day. Such a distant place was traveling to the end of the world to her i guess.
Later they traveled to the south of france by bus and such but they never went beyond a neighbouring country. Still it's a thing her parents could only have dreamed of.
I think people have a bias by which they forget the massive technological advancements of recent years on one hand.
And see the stories of travelers of the distant past on the norm on the other hand rather than things written about because they were so rare and interesting.
Most people stayed put untill you could pinpoint their location based on their genome and it influenced who you can get donor organs from. They repeatedly developed local cultures, languages and dialects in doing so.
>But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Those are not ethnic groups. The Flemish, the Vilamovians, the Germans, the Basques, the irish are examples of ethnic groups.
Idk if it's intentional but there seems to be this progressive shift/push that pushed nation to mean state and now makes it so some start using ethnicity instead of racial categorisation (which is a vague often even more arbitrary thing)