Interpersonal diversity and socioeconomic disparities across populations : a reply to Rosenberg and Kang

The exploration of the impact of the prehistoric migration of anatomically modern humans from Africa on comparative economic development has been the focus of a vibrant research agenda in the past decade. This influential literature has attracted the attention of scholars from other disciplines, and in light of existing methodo-logical gaps across fields, it has perhaps unsurprisingly generated some significant misconceptions. In particular, Rosenberg and Kang (2015) suggest that the hump-shaped effect of interpersonal population diversity on population density in the year 1500 is statistically insignificant in an extended sample of genetic diversity that was released more recently. Unfortunately, this assertion is based on elementary statistical errors. In fact, the hump-shaped effect of diversity on population density is even more pronounced in this extended sample of Pemberton et al. (2013), and it is present not only in the year 1500 but over the entire pre-colonial period for which population data are available (i.e., the 10,000BCE to 1500CE timeframe).