Existing theories of comparative development highlight a variety of proximate and ultimate factors underlying some of the vast inequities in living standards across the globe.The importance of geographical, cultural and institutional factors, human capital formation, ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization, colonialism, and globalization has been at the center of a debate regarding the origins of the di¤erential timing of transitions from stagnation to growth and the remarkable transformation of the world income distribution in the past two centuries. While theoretical and empirical research has typically focused on the contemporaneous e¤ects of such factors in giving rise to and sustaining the divergence in income per capita since the Industrial Revolution, attention has recently been drawn towards "deep-rooted" factors that have been argued to affect the course of comparative economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the modern era. The proposed research will advance a novel hypothesis that "deep-rooted" factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic development and thus on contemporary living standards across the globe. The research will empirically establish that migratory distance from the geographical origin of Homo sapiens in east Africa significantly affected the pattern of development across societies. In particular, it will demonstrates that in the course of the exodus of humans out of Africa, variation in migratory distance generated heterogeneity in the degree of genetic diversity across societies,which had a long-lasting effect on comparative development across countries. Moreover, genetic diversity will be shown to have a non-monotonic effect on development outcomes, reflecting the economic trade-off associated with diversity within a society. While an intermediate level of genetic diversity will be shown to be conducive for economic development, a high or a low degree of diversity is a detrimental force in the growth process. This interdisciplinary research is likely to foster interaction between researchers in the fields of economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and geography and to redirect research in these disciplines into important unexplored territories. Moreover, it will yield important, novel, policy implications by contributing to the understanding the role of diversity, broadly defined, in sustaining the growth process of advanced economies and in facilitating the economic take-off of less developed economies.
