Overview
This book is based on a long-term research project that examined over 5,000 Australian Aborigines. As a result of this research, the evolutionary population structure of these hunter-gatherers has been defined more completely than that of any other populations at any economic level. The most important results from the research concern the shifting-balance theory of evolution proposed by Sewall Wright in 1931. That theory suggested that in properly structured populations, random and unpredictable changes in the gene pools would produce indeterminate results, triggering new directions in adaptive changes and often leading to evolutionary progress. The data from this project confirm, for the first time in natural populations, that wright's theory was correct and that it can be projected backward deep in time in human societies. Because the Aborigines are now approaching extinction in much of Australia, the results of this study cannot be duplicated there or among other hunter-gatherer groups. This unique study will interest all human and population geneticists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists.