White Americans are both genetically weaker and less diverse than their black compatriots, a Cornell University-led study finds.
Analyzing the genetic makeup of 20 Americans of European ancestry and 15 African-Americans, researchers found that the former showed much less variation among 10,000 tested genes than did the latter, which was expected.
They also found that Europeans had many more possibly harmful mutations than did African, which was a surprise.
"Since we tend to think of European populations as quite large, we did not expect to see a significant difference in the distribution of neutral and deleterious variation between the two populations," said senior co-author Carlos Bustamante, an assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology at Cornell.
It's been known for years that all non-Africans are descended from a small group, perhaps only a few dozen individuals, who left the continent between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.
But the Cornell study, published in the journal Nature Thursday, indicates that Europeans went through a second "population bottleneck," probably about 30,000 years ago, when the ancestral population was again reduced to relatively few in number.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/whites-genetically-weaker-than-blacks-study-findshttps://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5866/1100.abstracthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022102739_2.html 