How is 'genetic characteristics common to humans with a shared geographic origin' a concept? Did you read the article?
> Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology...enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
Allow me to emphasise: "differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real".
Wow, what a coincidence given the fact that "differences in genetic ancestry" is exactly what race is.
Maybe you have another definition of race that might be a social construct but "differences in genetic ancestry" is what most people mean when they say 'race'.
It is a concept (pretty much anything that you can refer to in language is a concept), but more to the point it's not the basis of actual racial categories in the real world.
> Maybe you have another definition of race that might be a social construct
Yes, the categories socially ascribed (including legally assigned) and self-identified (which are usually similar, but not always aligned), largely based on trivially observable lphenotype, into which people are sorted as “races”. Which, demonstrably, have a drifting relationship over time and space, driven by social factors, to any genetic-based assignment system you might care to establish, though they obviously have a correlation to genetics (both because geneticd play a role in determining phenotype and because those social categories are often socially enforced, or at least incentivized, boundaries on acceptable mate selection, making them semi-isolated breeding pools.)
The idea that it is not a social construct is both dumb and ahistorical. (OTOH, readily apparent phenotype obviously has some correlation to genotype, so there is going to be a degree of correlation between he social construct and genetics, especially when the social construct includes socially-enforced rules discouraging reproduction outside of the socially-ascribed category.)
> If our collective memory was wiped today, tomorrow we would distinguish humans by what we call 'races'.
We'd probably adopt a somewhat similar concept with different dividing lines based on loose association of readily apparent phenotypic traits with the social affinities, power dynamics, and other conflicts and commonalities that formed after the mass forgetting event. This is easily predictable because studies of concepts of race across time and space in history without such mass forgetting events show differences driven by such affinities, shifting (mostly slowly) as those affinities change over time.
> Why is this controversial?
Because it aligns with what some people want very much to believe (hence support for it) but is inconsistent with historical evidence (hence, opposition to it), producing controversy.