Yes. Where to Austrailian Aboriginies fall into your classification? Or Indians (from India) that are darker than most blacks in the US? The problem with defining races like this is not everyone fits into little groups. Humans are an array form of looks, not a clump form. Plus it completely ignores mixed people. And there are plenty of those. No specific rules fit for everyone of a particular race, exceptions abound, so rules governing that “all blacks are good athletes and all asians are short” get thrown out the window all the time. There are genetic differences that occur more frequently in people from one area of the globe than another, but nothing exculusively for blacks, or exclusiely for whites. People should spend less time worrying about that crap anyway. My job curtails looking at genetic differnces between people in different populations. we have groups of 42 people, and places where one group is exclusive for one basepair and the other groups are exclusive for the other i can count on both hands out of 30,000 sites identified by myself alone. I’m sure many of them would disappear if we expanded beyond 42 indeviduals.
The problem with racial classification schemes is that almost no groups are fully isolated. Sure, your average Beijing resident looks very different from his counterpart in Berlin, but what about the guy who lives half-way between? The races blend into each other on a continuous scale, and racial classification schemes just can’t deal with this.
As fo Jiang’s statement that caucasions descended from albinos, that is one of the most ridiculous statements I’ve heard about race in a long time. I’d like to see a cite from a reputable anthropoligist supporting that claim. Anyone who knows the least bit about genetics would realize it is nonsense.
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Aren’t certain southern Indians (from India, not native American “indians”) Australoid? Many superficially look that way, and there were Australoid people living there once. I don’t know if they died out totally, or if their descendants are there to this day, like those people on that island south of Chile (saw a doco on it that looked at skulls and stuff).
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I don’t think it is helpful to continually deny broad and obvious differences between groups of people that are legitimately used by archaeologists to this day. I realise “race” is a loaded term, but there are skeletal/skull differences between mongoloid/caucasion/australoid peoples, and those are used by legitimate anthropologists and researchers to this day. It may be that races are mixing, and it may be that the delineations are blurred, but still when they dig up a skull, they give it a classification: negroid/caucasoid/mongoloid/australoid.
Actually, I have seen a documentary where they gave this theory some serious analysis. IIRC it was pretty much rejected by the majority of experts, but they still put it to discussion. It wasn’t quite as Jiang puts it, it was more to do with lighter skinned people - and especially albinos - being outcast socially and driven north out of Africa, etc etc. But as you say, it’s pretty far fetched.
Well, Mr Tarka has indicated that genetic differences are few and far between ,and I view anthropologists classifications of racial types with scepticism.
On the other hand, I doubt that it is helpful to insist on a nomencalture that confuses more than it aids. Given that we cannot figure out whether there are three or five or sixty races, what are these archaeologists actually doing with the terminology? Do you have an example of a case where a fossil or other human remain was actually classified into some race where that classification actually advanced the knowledge of human history by applying that label? (And which category set was used from which to select the racial label?)
If we wish to discover human migrations, some skulls will give us a very rough notion of origin. However, the more accurate method will be to use DNA to establish both origins and possible side trips and stopovers (along with interbreeding among other groups). We are not to the point of being able to establish that information, today, but it will become increasingly available in future years.
[ sidebar ] Let us also remember that there are certainly genetic populations within the totality of humanity, some of which have been sufficiently isolated as to be identifiable through DNA tests. While we might use the word “race” to label these populations, it would tend to cause more confusion than clarity, as the typical watcher of TV news would misconstrue what was meant by the word “race” in relation to a smaller, carefully circumscribed genetic population.
[ /sidebar ]
No races were “lost”, I believe Blumembach’s “Malay” and “American” races were simply attatched to the “Mongoloid” group, as anthropologists abandoned ideas that Native Americans perhaps had been the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” and more likely came by foot during the Ice Age from Northeastern Asia.
As far as there being up to 60 races, in the early to middle 20th Century people like Carleton Coon became obsessed with identifying as many subraces and local races within the three “macroraces” as possible (i.e. race Caucasian: Subrace Nordic: local races of Nordics: Faelish, Borreby, Trondheim, and so on). Of course when you get to that level, you could easily have 4 siblings of different “local races”, and I don’t think many people adhere to those ideas any more.
All that distracts from the fact that there seem to be three basic divisions which, as Istara pointed out, are useful to a forensic anthopologist or to any general description of a given population.
Except that Blumnebach established his five categories on emprical observation, without any appeals to sillt stories of Lost Tribes, so we now find ourselves arbitrarily discarding categories established through attempts as science for reasons that are based on mythology.
And I have still seen no evidence that there is actually any useful information to be gleaned from shoehorning every human into three arbitrary categories. (And when this subject came up before, the evidence presented was not that anthroplogists actually used the “three races” classifications, but that forensic pathologists working in the U.S. (with a known and limited population) used them as shorthand for rough descriptions.
Where are these three groups actually used in genuine anthropological studies? What scientific evidence or conclusion is provided by this arbitrary division?