One Big Happy Family
Do you believe on racial profiling? You know, one race this this this, one race tends to that that that, bla bla bla, whatever. Well I’m not buying the idea. I firmly believe that people can not judge other people by their race, or skin color or whatever. Well now you can ask what should people being judge to. Well I don’t know. It’s different topic, but not their race for sure.
And some people said that, “I’m not a racist, for sure. But I do believe that we should maintain the purity of our race” I respect their view, but I disagree. Read the article my friends. It turns out that we’re one big happy family walking on the face of earth.
Peace...
And some people said that, “I’m not a racist, for sure. But I do believe that we should maintain the purity of our race” I respect their view, but I disagree. Read the article my friends. It turns out that we’re one big happy family walking on the face of earth.
Peace...
An article by Mike Salovesh, Anthropology Department, Northern Illinois University.
As far as I know, there just aren't ANY human populations separated by as much as 40,000 years.
Let's see now: European and African populations have been interbreeding directly for a VERY long time. Hannibal's army, of course, came from Africa, and those Africans left more descendants in Europe than Hannibal's animals left elephant flops. Yes, I know, Hannibal's Carthage was in NORTH Africa; so? There's a long, almost continuous record of North African populations interbreeding with those of central Africa. (There are also reasonable records of people in classical Egypt interbreeding with dark-skinned peoples whose origins were much farther south than the farthest reaches of pharaonic rule.)
Whatever the populations of Europe may be, they surely haven't been genetically isolated from people of central and even southern Africa for millenia. Hannibal's armies are just a passing example of the long history of breeding contacts. You don't even have to buy the "out of Africa" hypothesis of the origins of anatomically modern humans to conclude that Europe and Africa have NEVER been the homelands of totally separate breeding populations.
All right, let's look to the east. I usually mention Ghengis Khan in this connection: thousands of very fierce warriors emerging from Central Asia and invading to the heart of Europe. They left direct linguistic evidence of their presence in the languages of Finland, Hungary, and Turkey. How likely is it that they did not impregnate one helluva lot of local women as one of the rewards they gave themselves for their conquest? That, of course, was only one of many waves of European invasion from the east over several centuries.
My examples deliberately take off from that comment about "predating the European expansion": they are examples of non-Europeans expanding into Europe. I may have rushed to some kind of prejudgment of what you're saying, however -- I just sort of assumed that the European expansion you were talking about began, more or less, in the fifteenth century with, say, the Portugese under Phillip the Navigator.
Perhaps you meant the expansion of Rome. In that case, try looking at an old, old popular book about classical archaeology: "Rome beyond the imperial frontiers". (I don't feel like looking up author and publisher; I think it was by Mallory and the edition I read many years ago was a Penguin paperback.) It certainly is clear that Rome was engaged in direct trade with China. Well, you may have heard the old saw, "the flag follows trade"; in this case, it also is clear that interbreeding did, too. All right, drop back a little farther in history and you'll come across Alexander the Great and his "Drang nach Osten". His armies actually made it to the Indian subcontinent. Of course, his father's old enemies, the Persians, did a lot of interbreeding with Greeks at one end of their empire and with peoples of Afghanistan and Inner Asia at the other.
Once more, whatever the populations of Europe may be, they surely haven't been genetically isolated from people of central, southern, or even southeast Asia for a very long time. Asia and Europe probably never have been the homelands of human breeding isolates of any more than local and short-term significance; they certainly haven't been for the last three millenia or so.
The two populations we think of as most separated from the rest of Homo sapiens once were the sole occupants of Australia and the Americas. But the inhabitants of Australia never were completely cut off from breeding with the rest of humanity. Recent archaeology in Australia turns up more and more evidence every year that there was lots more contact with the rest of the world than we used to think. The evidence now goes back 50,000 or more years. That's close enough to the date we used to accept for the origins of modern H. sapiens sapiens for me to say that, effectively, the Australians have ALWAYS had significant reproductive interaction with the rest of humanity.
Gosh, that only leaves one group that might fit your comment about a human population that has been separate for 40,000 years. Well, I don't want to get into a side argument about when humans first entered what Eurocentric geography calls "the New World". I don't think that kind of date matters much in this discussion. What counts is the other end of the entry of humans to the Americas. As far as I can see, whenever that movement started, serious scholars all agree that there was substantial migration from Asia into the Americas via some kind of Bering Straits land bridge something on the order of ten to fifteen thousand years ago. (I'm deliberately sloppy about my dates to avoid getting sidetracked into discussing exactly when that major population movement ended or exactly how long it lasted. That's irrelevant here.) Thus the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere were doing close interbreeding with Asian populations at least as recently as 15,000 B.P.: their ancestors were parts of those Asian populations. There's no room for 40,000 years of separation there.
Personally, I would argue that the Americas and Asia have never been reproductively isolated from each other. The breeding links are most clear with the Inuit and various Alaskan groups; it is at least arguable that the Athabaskans provided their own links back to Asia. Then there's the peculiar anomalies of such plants as sweet potatoes moving west from South America to the southwest Pacific area. If cultigens were being moved by ocean-crossing humans, I'd bet the farm that when those travelers got to their destinations they had some pretty good celebrations that MUST have left some biological descendants.
There's no sense in looking for the biological or genetic results of 40,000 years of separate development of isolated human groups before European expansion. That separation simply did not happen.
We are a single interbreeding species, and we have been at least as long as our ancestors have been fully anatomically modern humans.
That doesn't deny that specific hereditary human traits show distributions along geographic clines. Of course they do. Those traits, however, still are subject to independent assortment. The clines exhibited by two independent traits cannot be expected to be exactly the same.
The facts of variation in human herditary traits are interesting, and they can have important consequences. I'm all for studying them. But I don't expect that we'll get very far if we assume a priori that the distribution of those traits must coincide with the breeding boundaries of isolated populations.
Once more, the clines overlap, but they do not duplicate each other. No human population -- NONE !!! -- known to the archaeological and historical record has ever maintained itself in reproductive isolation from its neighbors for more than a few centuries.
In biological terms, it's a fair conclusion that there are no "pure races" in Homo sapiens AND THERE NEVER HAVE BEEN.
1 Comments:
:) hope the strike is over now... and i totally agree with you, judging a person as per his race makes one silly
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