Human Migrations

My 100th artwork!

This map shows a reconstruction of the migrations that brough Homo sapiens from its homeland in Subsaharian Africa into all of Earth. I used Fuller's Dymaxion projection, in which Earth is projected on an unfolded icosahedron, with ocean filling the gaps between the icosahedron's faces. The star in West Africa shows the location where the last common ancestor of all living human populations lived something like 200,000 years ago. The color of the paths shows when they were followed (you might be surprised to find that New Zealand was still uninhabited only a thousand years ago).
The paths were reconstructed from two sources. One is haplogroups, special groups of genes whose inheritance can be traced to common ancestors by comparing the patterns of mutations. Useful haplogroups are extracted from mitochondrial DNA (which is transmitted only by the mother, since all mitochondria are in the egg cell) and from the Y chromosome (which is transmitted only by the father). The other source is linguistic families, the groups of languages that can by shown by systematic comparation to share a common ancestral language. Genetic and phonological diversity both decrease as one gets farther from Africa.

I think maps like this show how unrealistic it is to shoehorn human diversity in racial categories like "white", "black" or "asian": dark-skinned Indo-Aryans are more closely related to Europeans than to the Dravidians that live next to them; traditionally black Australian Aborigines are closer to Chinese people than to Africans; Native Americans were created by at least two independent migrations, so that each is a closer relative to some eurasian people than to the other american group; Jews are regularly genetically closer to the people among which they live than to other Jews elsewhere; and there are more genetic differences among two southern-african Khoisan of the same tribe than among a Maori and a Norwegian.
They also show the foolishness of anybody claiming birthright to any land: if you go back far enough in history, everyone is an immigrant.

Sources:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil… (mitochondrial haplogroups; this map also uses a Dymaxion projection, but populations are unlabeled)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil… (Y-chromosomial haplogroups)
Homo sapiens: la grande storia della diversità umana (T. Pievani and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, 2011)