The general idea of the Jermyn Program is that existing races recapitulate the hominid subspecies circa 100 thousand years ago. Back then, we had anatomically modern humans (AMH) in some fraction of subSaharan Africa and the Levant, another unknown but highly divergent hominid population in central Africa (call them Mangani), Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia, and Denisovans in eastern Asia, especially in Sundaland. While today we have Negroids, Bushmen and Pygmies (Capoid), Caucasoids, Mongoloids & Amerindians, and Australoids. I see three reasons why the modern races split along the same lines as those older , much more divergent groups. First, the geographical and ecological factors that drove isolation before the expansion of AMH did so again after mostly-modern humans spread over the world. Second, those mostly-AMH populations were exposed to many of the same selective pressures as their predecessors, so you expect a certain amount of convergent evolution. Third, there is reason to believe that those moderns picked up adaptive alleles from the archaic populations they displaced – so, to a limited extent, they are the the old subspecies.
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Wolves look much the same the world over, dog breeds are very different. Wolves are selected for function. Dog breeds for appearance (though sometimes for ‘functional’ appearance as with ‘German Shepherds”).
Aleutian Islands rats have evolved complex novel behaviours like snacking on the brain and eyes of auklets and stockpiling the rest in a den for winter. These rats’ adaptation to their peculiar environment makes them not noticeably different in appearance to other rats.
Why are humans so similar to rats and wolves in their adaptability but so similar to dog breeds in their radically different appearance ?