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(S.O.Y Keita and Rick A. Kittles, "The Persistence of Racial Thiking and the Myth of Racial Divergence," _American Anthropologist_ 99 (3): 523-544, 1997)
[...] An example of ambiguity is to be foud in the work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues (1988), who studied select world populations, using cluster analysis in an effort to explore the issue of possible congruence between dendograms based on genetics and those based on language. (p.548] [...] After explaining inconsistency in the clustering of Berber and Dravidian populations, the authors write: [...] The Berber and Dravidian examples show shifts between the major *racial* groups as traditionally and currently defined by some scholars...Cavalli- Sfroza and his colleagues(1988) do not accurately represent the Afro-Asiatic family because they exclude Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic speakers, thereby giving the illusion that Ethiopians are an anomaly, being genetically Africans (but mixed) who also speak the languages of Caucasians (Afro- Asiatic!?) (Armstrong 1990). An evolutionary model explains the geographical range of Afro-Asiatic speakers as one of overlaying gradients of genetic differentiation, which a racial model breaks into discrete units that cannot be shown to have ever existed. (pp. 548-9) [...] Keita and Kittles criticize the use, by Cavalli-Sfroza et al., and Horai et al., of "core" populations (supposedly less- admixed) to reconstruct "racial" history: [...] Their study consisted of mtDNA derived from an African individual from Uganda (who was used to represent all Africans), ten Japanese individuals whose sequences where amalgamated into one consensus sequence (to represent Asians), and the Cambridge sequence (used to represent Europeans). Here a single mtDNA sequence in two of three cases were deemed by the investigators to be representative of entire geographical regions conceptualized as being authentic. (p.542) [...] The authors comment on the differences in dates of racial divergence given by a number of modern studies: [...] The inconsistencies are difficult to reconcile, although blood substances are stated to be nonneutral and therefore not as reliable for this kind of enterprise; this means that results based on certain kinds of data could be theorectically eliminated...The use of genetic systems not responsible for morphology in order to study groups that are defined by morphophenotype is theoretically unsound, especially when divergence times are subject. (p.537) [...] Here is a list of divergence times given on p. 537. --- Published estimates of "racial" divergence times.