Human migration and mobility—demographic, environmental, and evolutionary issues

The articles that follow in this issue of the AmericanJournal ofHumanBiologywereprepared from contributions to the 2003 Plenary Sessionof theHumanBiologyAssociation.The session was entitled ‘‘Human Migration and Mobility: Demographic, Environmental, and Evolutionary Issues.’’ The program was an interesting one that moved broadly over the landscape of migration research, and we wish to offer abundant thanks to each of the authors for agreeing to share their ideas with those attending this session and with readers of the journal. We also thank them for preparing their delivered papers within a very short time frame. This issue and collection of articles is dedicated in memoriam to Gabriel Ward Lasker who died in his 90th year in August, 2002. He would have enjoyed these articles because of a deep interest in migration that spanned more than the five decades of his professional life in human biology. Among Gabriel’s many accomplishments were early studies of migrants, including his dissertation work and publications between 1945 and 1947 on physical characteristics of Chinese in the U.S. and abroad. During the next decade, he conducted research on Mexican migrants and this was reported in articles between 1952 and 1954. Interests in migration and plasticity of human characteristics continued throughout his professional life, and some of this research was pursued in the United Kingdom up through the late 1990s. Movement of people has characterized our species and our ancestral species for more than two million years. Our African origins were followed by migration into Asia and Europe, then Australia, North and South America, and the Pacific. During the 2000 years of the Common Era, humans have increased numerically and repopulated vast areas of the Old World and New World through exploration, invasion, warfare, conquest, and involuntary resettlement by slavery. During the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, there has been movement from rural to urban areas, resettlement of refugees, and migration flows from economically less well-off to economically well-off nations. These patterns of the modern world continue unabated. Migration has been and is currently a highly politicized process. Migration laws have been employed to keep out undesirable peoples based on racist beliefs or to encourage immigration when cheap labor resources are needed for development. People who migrate carry with them cuisine, ideas, belief, values, and traditions—that is, culture. They bring DNA that becomes incorporated into the host population through gene flow and they also bring, inadvertently, disease, both genetically based and infectious. These attributes and processes of migration allow anthropologists from all subfields, and other scientists as well, a rich basis for scientific investigation associated with environmental, social, and biological changes and their complex outcomes. In a sense, migration is one opportunity to explore the effects of change in human populations by employing a natural experimental design (Garruto et al., 1999). This was recognized nearly a century ago by Maurice Fishberg (1905) and Franz Boas (1911), who studied European immigrants to the United States. Hence, as anthropologists, we are very close to the 100th anniversary of this tradition of employing a natural experimental model using migrants. The articles that follow are a good, but by no means comprehensive, representation of the research that has been conducted to explore these processes and problems. The topic of migration is vast! However, the articles do cover a broad spectrum of research from a history of the research to histories of population movements, from genes as markers in short-distance to genes in longdistance migration, and from health in migrants to adaptation to diverse environments. In the first article, Nicholas MascieTaylor and Michael Little provide a historical overview of migration studies in biological anthropology. It is somewhat selective because the scope of recent studies is great. This is followed by John Relethford’s discussion of Franz Boas’s early work on European immigrants in light of most recent reanalyses of these research data and disagreements in the literature (Gravlee et al., 2003; Sparks and Jantz, 2002). It is a tribute to Boas’s foresight and commitment to validation of research findings that he published the raw data from the early 20th century study.