Has there ever been any other race or races of humans at any time in the history of modern Homo Sapiens outside of the current phenotypes (Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid, etc.)? Is that proto-race extinct, or just evolved and assimilated?
Do new races evolve and old races die away?
What did an old race look like?
What will a new race look like?
Well, there were four races when Linnaeus borrowed the term for a people with a traditional (whether real or legendary) founder and applied the word to groups he perceived in the world in the 1750s. Then Blumenbach discovered that there were five races when he re-analyzed the data in the early 19th century. Following which the lumpers and splitters began to get enmeshed in the debate and, for some people, the number shrank back down to three races while other people were able to identify up to 60 races. So, in just over 250 years, we have both expanded and contracted the number of races by a factor of 15 or a reduction of 25%.
My point is that races are arbitrary creations based on social or cultural ideas, not actual biological categories, so trying to identify the number of “races” from some earlier period is an effort in futility.
Clearly, there are populations of people with varying degrees of shared traits that have existed for many thouands of years. How many are the rsult of splitting from larger groups and how many are the result of smaller (or larger) groups mixing is a matter for which we do not have sufficient information to seriously guess.
We cannot identify what an “old race” looked like until we (arbitrarily) pick some group of people from the past, name them a “race” and attempt to discover how they appeared.
We cannot know what new groups will look like, since we do not know what sort of features will evolve (since evolution is not a directed process).
Sorry, but your question makes no sense. You seem to be working under an assumption that races have some meaning beyond what people try to give to them.
To to demonstrate what I mean, what you describe as “current phenotypes” are only one of several current ‘European’ classification phenotypes. Only Europeans and their cultural descendants classify people in that manner. If you ask a Malaysian “Mongoloid” and he will tell you that he is most definitely not the same race as a Chinese, and that he is the same race as a Malaysian Australoid. Yet according to the scheme you describe the two Malays are different races and the Malay and the Chinese are the same race.
In other words what you consider to be a race only exists inside your head. Other people group races by different criteria that are neither more nor less valid than your own. So with that in mind let’s look at the questions you are asking.
If you are asking if prehistoric skeletons throw up people that don’t fit into the current European classification system you list then the answer is, sure. What you need to realise though is that there are hundreds of millions of living people that don’t fit into the current European classification system. For example almost the entire population of Ethiopia doesn’t fit into the classification system you describe. They aren’t Negro, yet they aren’t Caucasian or Mongoloid either. So what are they? And just as modern Ethiopians don’t fit neatly into the classification scheme you describe neither do a lot of prehistoric people.
If you are asking whether the scheme fits modern people better prehistoric people, I really don’t know. Since we know the scheme was made up from looking at living people it should fit modern people better. But the fact is that it doesn’t fit modern people very well so the fact that it fits prehistoric people even less well wouldn’t be very surprising.
Neither. Races can’t become extinct because races only exist inside the human mind. They have no objective reality. They are entirely social constructs. A race can no evolve, assimilate or become extinct than any other social construct.
Do you see how the question is meaningless? You might just as well ask whether Prussians are extinct, just evolved or assimilated. The question has no biological meaning because ‘Prussian’ has no biological meaning. Prussians are no longer with us because we no longer categorise people using the same arbitrary boundaries. That doesn’t mean the actual people are extinct, or that you can’t find large clusters of people today who are physically and genetically identical to the Prussians. All it means is that we redrew the boundaries inside our heads and the Prussians are now considered Austrian or Polish or whatever.
In exactly the same way asking whether a race has evolved or become extinct or evolve is meaningless. And for exactly the same reasons. If a race is no longer recognised it isn’t because anything has changed biologically. It is simply because we have changed the boundaries inside our head. Large groups of people with exactly the same physical and genetic characterics still exists.
Yes, but only in the same way that new nations evolve and old nations die away. It isn’t a biological process, it is purely social convention.
Like a mixture of, or subsection of, any race or races that exist in any current classification scheme.
Like a mixture of, or subsection of, any race or races that exist in any current classification scheme.
Ok. Then are we speciated? How else do I refer to people of different visual characteristic… phenological descriptions are not acceptable?
Excuse me. That should read Phenotypical not Phenological.
You mean are all living people members of the same species? Absolutely.
Probably the best term that you are lookig for is “ethinc group”, but even that can be confusing. The term you would use depends on what you were trying to do. So, what are your trying to do? Give us some context for the question. Are you just chatting with your friends, trying to draft legislation for Aiffirmative Action, or publish an article in a peer review scientific journal?
No politics. Just mythological and archetypical inquiry. I wonder if Beowulf was a typical tribal screed of “differentness”. I theorize that the Grendels were perhaps another race, that might exist, or perhaps, is extinct.
Depending on context, you can refer to different people in a lot of different ways–including using the classification of “race.” The point we are making is that you should understand that whatever group you identify will be an arbitrary one derived from social or cultural expectations. For example, using the limits of the “three races” selection from which you started, we place dark skinned people into the category of Negro and light skinned people into the category Caucasian, yet there are “Caucasian” people in Southern India whose skin is substantially darker than the San in Southern Africa. Pygmies get lumped in with “Negro” even though there are substantial differences in appearance between those people and the non-pygmy peoples living near them.
When it comes to species, biology (Life!) does not provide nice, neat boxes into which we can place living things. The feuds between lumpers and splitters goes on among biologists, all the time, with splitters “creating” species, subspecies, and races from looking at exactly the same creatures as lumpers who are trying to merge genera.
Categories are human constructs and at some level our attempts to places living beings into categories simply fails. Linnaeus tried to create such categories for humans and he has been followed by dozens of biologists who could not agree on either his categories or those of other biologists. Most of us grew up hearing about racial categories and came to believe that they were objective calssifications of reality. More recently, we have come to realize that such broad categories as “race” simply do not have clearly defined biological boundaries.
Been reading Crichton’s The Thirteenth Warrior?
While Crichton did borrow plot points from both Beowulf and an actual Muslim traveller’s journal, his story is fiction. Beowulf was described fighting inhuman monsters, not real people with different appearance.
The closest that you might come to your question would have been the contact between Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalis around 30,000 years ago–but we have a good idea what they looked like.
That’s an interesting proposition.
If Grendel was a Neanderthal, you can say he was a different species or a different race, depending on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter. Most anthropologist say “different species”, but there is a substantial minority that would say “subspecies” which is just a fancy term for race.
*
Homo sapiens* evolved in Africa about 150 - 200k years ago. There probably weren’t a whole lot of us back then, so using “race” for different populations probably wouldn’t make sense. The modern “races” (caucasian, negroid, etc.) are all pretty recent developments-- probably with the last 50k years.
I guess I’m trying to understand Atlantean myth, really.
Also, what about Melungeon geneology. Is that a new “race”.
neanderthalensis., whether the species or sub-species name.
Yes, I read it. But a long time ago. And a long time before that, the original Beowulf and its translation. I used it, ironically as a phenotype for an amateur construction of my science fair construction of an artificial language called Anglo-Dütsch.
I am constructing too much…sorry about that. :.)
You might be interested in reading Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age by Bjorn Kurten. He addresses a very similar question.
You certainly aren’t the first person to suggest that. The idea that the Sidhe or other mythological races were based on contacts with now-vanished people is widespread. This has been variously attributed to contact with separate species such as Neanderthals or with vanished cultures such as the Picts. I’ve even seen people trying to attribute various SE Asian myths to contact with Homo floresiensis. This is particularly interesting since of course the same people were presumably quite willing to accept they were simply flights of fancy before floresiensis was discovered.
The trouble is that this sort of speculation is ultimately untestable. We could test it by looking at areas like Australia or the Americas that had pre-existing non-human cultures, but in those cases it the argument is simply redirected towards inter-group warfare. And since all people have always engaged in warfare it becomes impossible to falsify.
All we can say is that people in Africa where humans have lived the longest are no more or less inclined to have myths of giants, ogres and little people than people in Polynesia, who have lived there for only a few thousand years with no inter-racial warfare. As such the idea of ascribing such myths to interracial or interspecies contact seems baseless at best.
did you mean “no pre-existing non-human cultures”?
I did indeed.
Fortunately I can rely on pre-existing posters to pick up these errors.