I really don’t see much of an issue here. Even if the OP is 100% correct (and I don’t think it is), so the hell what? Is it gonna keep white guys out of sports? Not if they’ve got the skills. If the Dodgers become an all black, am I gonna lose interest? Hardly.
Am I supposed to feel threatened in some way?
When I was in high school I knew several black boys who were very active athletically. They all enjoyed sports for their own sake, but many of them also mentioned their desire to win athletic scholarships. There was no way any of these boys could afford to go to college without a scholarship, and none of them had the sort of grades that would get them an academic scholarship (this could lead to a long rant on the thinly-veiled racism of the town and school district, but I’ll save that for another time). I have no doubt that this made them work that much harder when it came to sports. Is this enough to explain why blacks so often outperform whites in sports? I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s a factor.
I understand the concept of genetic variability among individuals of a species, leading to differing physical and mental capabilities and talents. If someone says that gene 97 on chromosome 8 codes for a protein that improves the aquisition of muscle mass, well that’s science. If someone then determines that people of African descent have a higher incidence of this gene, that’s science. Interesting in a passive intellectual way. However, I can’t really get worked up about it and I don’t see the makings of an actual controversy.
Athletics is an individual thing. If you like it, if you’re good at it, do it! It doesn’t matter what color your skin (or hair) is, where your ancestors came from, what language you speak. When I watch the Olympics, I watch to see the perfection and grace the human form, not the white or black or asian form, can achieve. Race, gender, nationality have nothing to do with my enjoyment.
I would point out that it would seem that the black advantage in sports is concentrated at the running/jumping end of it. Throwing is by contrast a more mixed field, with blacks being about proportionately represented. (This refers to pitching and quarterbacking).
Regarding the statement by London_Calling that
I would wonder if there’s evidence for how far back this disparity in survival goes. I suspect, not very.
Regarding the offensiveness of the topic, Al Campanis, General Manager of the LA Dodgers was sacked for comments about this topic. (IIRC, his theory was that slaves were “bred” to be better physical specimens).
I have observed that blacks seem to be athletically gifted to a degree disproportionate to their numbers in the population. Others have also noticed this. The only theory I’ve heard so far to explain it is that blacks simply “go
out for sports” more as a way to “escape their circumstances”, which I think is horseshit.**
I disagree with this.
You’re making a casual observation and then taking it as an observed and tested fact. Do you know for a fact that blacks make up a dis-proportionate part of athletics compared to other fields? Have you statistically compared them?
I agree, a casual glance at the field might confirm it, but I’d like see some figures to prove the observation.
I do wish the PC posse could just look beyond skin colour for a moment and address the OP. Fact is: A particular regional type of Homo sapiens, conveniently (for easy identification) distinguished by pigmentation consistently outperforms other types of the same species in some sports.
It isn’t the skin colour that makes approximately 25% of professional football (soccer) players in England (in a population where approximately 5% are Black) better players because skin doesn’t make you a better athlete. It has to be something related to African heritage.
I have no idea where this comes from. Do you think Kenya is the only country where “children running is a developed sport” ? Where did you go to school ?
To my mind, any understanding of why Kenyans (for example) perform so well in some running sports must include, in part, the idea that for generations many of them have lived at relatively high altitude. Over generations, their bodies have become better attuned to living with less oxygen and so they are able to better process oxygen than those born nearer sea level.
One might also add that Kenya is more advanced than some of its neighbours (and other countries where high altitude plains feature - as distinct from mountainous regions) in nurturing raw talent. Conversely, one feature of white societies is that they developed at, or close to sea level. I’m sure there are other reasons.
One might also include that a particular body shape (found in disproportionately greater numbers in that region - presumably because of wider environmental reasons) also aids better performance in longer distance running events.
Are you seriously saying it is “popular superstition” that Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including African Americans, hold more than 95 percent of the top times in sprinting ? or even more “superstition” that at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Kenya runners won the 800m, 1500m and 5,000 meters, plus the 3,000-meter steeplechase - from a population of 21 million at that time ? IzzyR - I tend to agree that there is a difference between aerobic / oxygen intense sports and others where the imbalance is less disproportionate.
Also, I suspect we’re talking as much pre-history as anything else. Haven’t come across any cave paintings offering up statistics as yet
These are all generalizations, which should not be applied to everyone based on their ethnicity.
From what I’ve seen, those of African descent seem to excel at sports that involve:
Running, endurance, speed, and power.
Those of caucasian descent seem to excel at:
Swimming, sports that require fine motor control.
It’s interesting to note the last part. Blacks tend to be more physically fit, and stronger, while whites seem to be better at fine motor control. Take football for instance: Most quarterbacks are white. Requires more precision and accuracy (fine motoer control). Blacks tend to be running backs and recievers. I don’t think this is by coincidence. Look at hockey: almost entirely white. Hockey requires very fine reflexes and control. Now, hockey’s hard to say difinitively, since it’s primarily played in the northern states, and could be viewed as a cultural thing, but I think that it’s available to enough people of all races in the US to have the NHL be THAT lopsided in white/black players.
Baseball: Evenly distributed among the fielders as far as black/other is concerned, but then you go into the pitching area, in which the vast majority are white or hispanic. Odd. Swimming is interesting. I doubt you will ever see blacks dominate swimming. Just as you will probably never see whites dominate running. The muscle tissue density varies between races, and it just happens that muscles of people of African descent have extremely dense muscles, making it very hard to float. That’s why there has never been a black gold medalist in swimming. This year the US had a medalist who had some African heritage…and that was huge.
There seems to be no advantage for any race when looking at sports that purely require a fast, concentrated effort of strength. People of all races seem to do extremely well in things like shot put, weightlifting, etc.
Socio-economic/enviromental factors must be considered.
What if I said:
“Where are all the black gymnasts, hockey players, swimmers, divers, equestrian athletes, race car drivers, skiers, decatheltes, tri-athletes, chess champions, Jeopardy contestants, Who Wants to be a Millionaire contestants, NFL quarterbacks, figure skaters, mountain climbers, bikers, motocross champs, skateboarders, surfers, cyclists, synchronized swimmers, Pentathletes, water polo players, rowing/crew men, kayakers, etc?”
…then I would certainly hear some response as to how socio-economic/enviromental issues prevented blacks from achieving success in hundreds of different arenas, wouldn’t I?
Then enviromental factors DO have an impact on who proliferates sports. These factors can help or hurt a group’s chances of success. In many ways, whites are living more diverse lives as a result of their higher economic standing. They specialize less. Whites are splitting time between many activities that blacks just don’t have the chance to. Many blacks are successful at sports, and those blacks who over-focused on athletics and didn’t get a shot at “big time” are woefully worse off than whites who didn’t make it into sports - blacks have no other skills developed. Black athletes are successful because they focus on athletics, little else, and the blacks left out are really paying the price for the success of black athletes everywhere.
As blacks become more successful, many of those would-be athletes of the future will be proving themselves in the board room, or behind a chess board, or elsehwere, like whites. The talent pool needs to be spread around a bit, and the next impoverished group will dominate.
I think a fundamental problem with this topic is that it assumes a conclusion based on casual observation to be fact.
My son was at a track meet this past summer, consisting of your typical track and field events for kids up to 14. We live in Chicago, so you can imagine the group was quite racially diverse, about 30% black, 30% Hispanic, 20% white and 10% Asian. And although the results initially appeared to be skewed in favor of the black kids (mainly because some of the events’ competitors were all black), I think they were pretty evenly divided amongst the races - maybe a slight difference in the black kids’ favor.
Side note: During one of the races, a black boy was running like HELL and just dusting the competition. I overheard his group’s coach yelling at him, “Run, Toby, run! Massa’s comin’ after you to cut your feets off!” Man, I almost pissed myself laughing. Before I get yelled at, yes, slavery was certainly no laughing matter.
I think the sociological aspect (a way to escape circumstances, pay for college, etc.) is being discarded too quickly. Natural talent for one sport or another exists in many children, but between the 6’6" white suburban kid with a dual-income family and the 6’6" black kid living in the projects, who do you think is more motivated to develop that talent?
I hate to play the middle ground, but I think if there is any thing to your postulation, it has many, many reasons, not just one.
Several posters have suggested that there may actually be no black edge in sports at all. I would just point out that not every black is going to be better than every white. And blacks are about 13% of the US population. What these facts mean is that the advantage of blacks is going to be exaggerated as one gets to the higher level. Thus, for example, if we concentrated on the top 20% of basketball players in this country it would obviously not be 75% black - there simply aren’t that many black people. But as you get higher and higher (in the ranks), the percentage of blacks will be higher and higher. And it is a fact (I have seen somewhere) that the percentage of blacks in the NBA is higher than the percentage in college teams.
What this boils down to is that you cannot extrapolate from what you may see by comparing the lower level of player, as the advantage will be less at that level.
Fact: There is no genetically identifiable ‘regional homo sapiens’ See the thread which I cited and read some of the literature which I cited therin. No private alleles have been identified for any regional population, and all tests of genetic variation have returned results indicating intragroup variation exceeds intergroup variation (where the group is a regional population).
There is no genetic basis for presuming a race upon which to hang the above.
Politics or culture is what is defining race, period.
Sociological limitations as noted above provide more than adequate explanation in the face of non-homogeniety of the supposed “race” – either in Africa or for the New World black populations whose heterogenous ancestry renders their treatment as a distinguishable population quite absurd.
Apologies, the statement is unclear and I left out the context. Running thirty or more Kilos to school and then back again. That is the standout. On the Kenyan highland this is apparently common. Excellent training on a sustained basis.
Possible, however the population of the highlands seems to have moved into the region in historical times, and is not homogenous. The time period is too short to presupposed fundamental genetic changes, and when combined with no breeding barriers, we have to fall back on environmental conditioning – a non-trivial factor certainly.
**
Quite right.
Again this is quite reasonable.
I am noting quite seriously the superstitious folk knowledge nature of racial discussions. African Americans, per research by Curtin et al can probably trace their ancestry, on the African side to West, Central and to a lesser extent South Africa. Real mongrels (like us all really) and this does not even touch upon their substantial non-African ancestry.
Ergo, to seek special biological explanations, especially given the non-support from what is known from population genetics to the very idea of race, is superstition.
**
No we are talking modern socio-economic structures (with the sole exception of some body type selection but this is by climate zone(*) rather than by race.)
(*: Saharan or Sahelian populations being vaguely distinguishable from Forest zone populations, tall and lanky etc. Very much like the vague transition from south to north in body type distribution.)
Final comment: there is a lot a ‘extrapolation’ and categorical statements (blacks will never be good swimmers, blacks do not excel in fine motor control sports – a crock of course) from very casual observation here. Frankly, its disappointing such sloppy thinking is on display here.
But, blacks do have darker skin than whites, no? There must be a gene that controls this. I don’t find it a huge leap of faith to think that if certain people have that gene in common, there might be other genes that they have in common.
Surely the fact that pygmies are shorter on average than other groups of people can not be purely due to environmental reasons. Blacks have some genetic code that ensures their hair is more curly than Asians. Are you saying it has been proven that this is false? If not, than what’s the difference between having curly hair and having larger or more efficient muscles?
These arguments from the PC peanut galley are getting absurd. First they casually dismiss the OP’s original theory by insisting that we look to every other possible discipline such as sociology before we are even allowed to look for such a horrid explanation as biology and genetics. I will never understand why people that are so logical and scientific minded in any other argument absolutely freeze up when anyone brings up racial or ethnic differences even though we know many exist. The line has apparently been drawn and not even open minded scientific exploration is allowed to cross.
Second, It is apparently racist, in some twisted way, to suggest that a particular group EXCELS at something and those of other groups recognize and admire them for it. I have not heard any jealousy coming from anyone here, simply admiration.
Third, it is ludicrous to simply brush off race as a useful scientific construct to measure differences. Sure the idea of race may have its problems such as too broad or narrow definition or interbreeding and gene dispersal but the basic idea certainly exists. Like PeeQueue says, what about skin color and what about curly hair. Hell, what about sickle cell anemia being a strictly genetic disease of those of African descent for god sakes. More to the point, what about all the freaking studies that very clearly outline different muscle fiber compositions necessary for athletes in a given sports and how these compositions very by RACE. I think those that advocate the strict sociological view should be the providing evidence for the mechanism for how all of this works statistically, and physically.
I see. Care to explain how this particular conservative Republican got put into “the PC peanut gallery” by pointing out that sociology posits a much better explanation for the situation than genetics does?
Let me reiterate my point, and shout it because people seem to have completely ignored it. If one looks at the historical record for sports, one will generally find stratification of ethnic background. During the late 19th century, the Irish dominated sports. During the first few decades of the 20th century, Jews dominated sports. During the early to middle 20th century, Italians dominated sports. Unless you are willing to state that each of these minorities was also genetically superior to other minorities when it came to sports, your argument does not work.
I am not arguing against the OP because of some ‘spectre of racism’. I am arguing against the OP because it does not account for the history of sport as well as the sociological argument does.
Because for the last four hundred years, racial and ethnic differences have been used to categorize certain groups of people as “less than human” and to justify their explotation. I think being a little gun-shy about “scientific differences between the races” is damned healthy given how often such studies were used in the past to support slavery and genocide.
Except that some people can take a illogical extension from the argument. “Blacks are good at sports.” leads to “Blacks are good at physical activities.” leads to “Blacks are good at physical labor.” leads to “Blacks are only good for physical labor.”
Let me shout again. READ MY GODDAMNED POST! THIRTEENTH FROM THE TOP! Thank you.
IzzyR - You wondered if there was evidence to support my view that surviving birth rates were historically lower for African mothers in Africa.
My response was brief i.e. cave paintings not offering up statistics.
To extrapolate a little. We know that early man (possibly the earliest man) inhabited the Rift Valley in the heart of the Kenyan highlands so when I said “pre-history” I really meant it. Also, the African tradition is more oral then documentary.
Until the European explorers ‘discovered’ this part of Africa in the Victorian era, there would not be any formal record on which to base analysis of surviving birth rates. I don’t know when the first meaningful analysis was undertaken but I would be greatly surprised if it was earlier than the early 20th century - not long ago enough to compare like with like over a long enough period.
** - Collounsbury**We agree on more than I imagined. Sorry but I think this is airy fairy:
Conventional wisdom tells us that populations moved away from coastal plains because of over population and / scarcity of food. That, of course, presuppose this part of Africa had a coastal plain way back when. However, when you say “historical times” and we need to fall back on “environmental issues” are you aware that the Rift Valley is in the middle of the central highlands ? Things don’t get much more “historic” than that region (in terms of human settlement).
IMHO, there is a distinction between “superstition” and piecing together the information we have. It’s not strict science but it is what, for example, historians are forced to do. In a region about which little is known historically, we are forced to make suppositions based on tentative information. Applying a purely scientific rationale must wait until the Genome is more clearly unravelled.
I do agree that to an important extent we are all mongrels. However, 95% of short distance running records are held by people of West African ancestry and Kenyans dramatically outperform other nations in distance running.
Please don’t tell me that’s because they run a long way to school.
mavpace - good points, IMHO.
John Corrado - aren’t you focusing on the parochial ? Championship boxing (to use your example) was the sole preserve of those cultures to whom the Queensbury Rules meant something i.e. the US, UK and bits and pieces of Europe and the Empire.
Also, when was it black athletes were first allowed to become professional in the US ?
We know ghetto kids have always outperformed others, and we know why: They are hungrier but that isn’t, IMHO, addressing the OP’s most contentious point i.e. that there is the possibility of some genetically based advantage. - 95% of short distance running records (not all African-Americans) and Kenyan superiority at longer distances can’t be put down to living in North American Projects.
I think it’s very obvious that certain ethnic groups have traits that make them well-suited or badly suited for various sports. East Africans, and people of East African descent, excel at long-dustance running, while virtually ALL the fastest sprinters in the world are either West African or descended from West Africans.
However, the “slavery”/Jimmy the Greek theory makes no sense. THink about it: if you owned slaves, would YOU breed them to be able to RUN fast???
One advantage people of African descent have is the hair. It is designed to radiate heat, while straight hair keeps it in. True, this doesn’t help with bald athletes, but in sports which require extended periods of exertion (like marathons) having a 'fro would be better than straight hair.
Skin color expression is controlled for through multiple sites, there is no one gene for this. In fact all humans have the same amount of melanin. However, how this melanin is expressed varies. There are no general commonalities based on private genes, private alleles in the human race. None, zero, nada, kein. Inter-group genetic variability in human populations is miniscule as compared to within group variation however you define the group.
There is quite simply no genetic reality to race.
Shortness depends on a variety of factors, including environmental and related contraints on expression of underlying genetic limits (you have genes which give you a range of heights you might achieve.) Of course some pygmy populations are discrete, so they are distinguishable. That does not make the idea of a black race valid in any sense, but rather points out that in order to characterize populations, one has to look at a fine resolution, not at the old fashioned races.
Regarding the canard on hair: I invite you to note that there are numerous Asian populations with curly hair (viz the Negrito populations of South East Asia). And again this is variable, not all African populations encode the same hair type, and various varients of the same are found in extra African populations.
The long and short of it is there are no, repeat no RACE genes, no private alleles for any population which we would call a “black race” or any other race. All that surface stuff you all obsess about is confined to some trivial differences in expression, and in fact is hidden in your own make up.
Those who cling to the idea of race are the “Politically Correct” for there is no biological justification to race. After that, think and feel whatever you want, but don’t pretend to science.
Genetics already tells us (I provided the relavant cites to some recent literature in the linked thread in a previous message) that race as posited by the original poster is fallacious notion without any objective validity from a bio-genetic point of view. Those who ramble on about “black” genes or a gene which controls skin color merely reveal their ignorance on the subject.
Science, if we can look to genetics and human population biology, has moved far beyond this foolishness. It is unsupported by the underlying genetics and begs the very question of the categories. We need to rigorously define our categories in order for them to have merit and utility
**
It is racist if one ascribes without proper evidence based on emotive political appeals the excellence to inherent biological characteristics.
**
Race has not been simply brushed off – for the better part of this century human population studies were bogged down in trying to define race objectively and scientifically. Rather, the accumulated evidence, above all from genetics, indicated the concept is useless as popularly understood (and evidenced here). I can only say that its poor understanding of genetics and simplistic ideas of how we are shaped by our genes which keep these ideas alive.
**
Here is a perfect example of misunderstandings and folk wisdom. There is of course no one gene for either of the two features above, and there is no underlying unity among ‘typical’ African populations (which are the most diverse in the world on a genetic level, giving lie to the unarticulated by necessary presumption of greater homogeniety among ‘black’ Africans vs non-Africans as an explanation for what supposed features of blackness are being described).
Then there is the sloppiness of folk wisdom. In fact sickle cell is not strictly African in occurance. Seperate sickle cell traits are found in the Mediterranean basin and in the Indian Sub-Continent, and not all ‘black’ African populations even have sickle cell. Rather, populations which historically (to great time depth) had high exposure to malaria (wet sub-tropical to tropical) are shown to express various sickle cell traits. (I believe there are foru types in all as memory serves.)
The problem is lots of people “know” facts like the “africans have sickle cell” are “true” because of sloppy reporting, a certain historical tendency to try to fit these things into ‘racial’ categories for convenience etc. Folk superstitions based on partial information, incomplete facts and whole cloth misunderstandings of genetics.
I would
(1) like to see cites for these studies
(2) like to know how race is defined
(a) how is a person of Say Tiger Wood’s heritage distinguishable from myself. Categories have to be coherent and objective.
(b) what biological mechanisms the poster posits for supposed variation of muscle fiber composition by race given no private alleles and lack of coherence of ‘racial’ groupings on a genetic level.
Try checking out, for a general discussion: Goodman, Allan. “The Problematics of “Race” in Contemporary Biological Anthropology.” in Biological Anthropology: The State of the Science 1995. Among some things other things to read are Cavalli-Sforza, L Luca; Menozzi, Paolo; & Piazza, Alberto. “Scientific Failure of the Concept of Human Races,” in _The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton University Press (Princeton, 1994): 19-20.
In regards to the later, the authors explain how genetic information abundantly proves that there are no distinct “races” in the human species. The number of “races” identified by recent authors who cling to the “race” concept ranges from 3 to 60. “Race” classifications are arrived at without consistent criteria. C-S et al note that there is without question only one human species. All attempts to find smaller groupings within the human species are entirely arbitrary. Gene frequencies vary so greatly within particular populations that they prove useless for distinguishing among geographically defined populations. Even the most isolated human groups carried with their founders diverse sets of genes; large regions of the world are all well known to have experienced many migrations and consequent exchanges of genes.
C-S et al conclude “From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to gain any consensus; none is likely, given the gradual variation in existence. It may be objected that the racial stereotypes have a consistency that allows even the layman to classify individuals. However, the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis. . . .” What I said, in other words…
There are two levels of variability to consider. Intra and inter-group (within and between group) variations in the genome. C-S’ considers an analysis of that part of our genome which can be measured by various markers (of allele
variation) of the 6% to 15% of our variability –not our entire genome note, of our *variability, which is a vanishingly small 1% or so-- which varies by region or group. (If you want to see the technical discussion of how they measured allele variations, see http://lotka.stanford.edu/distance.html) The difference in the estimates depends on the markers used. Templeton, using the “classical” blood markers gets around 15%, others get around 6% using more refined methods.
I.E. our variation by things which one might call racial is tiny! Say, at maximum 15% of approximately 1%. (Some refs: re much lower degree of mtDNA variability among modern humans see M. Ruvolo et al. [1993] Molecular Biology and Evolution 10: 1115-1135; re much less Heterozygosity of modern humans than in other primates see D. N. Janczewski et al., [1990] Journal of Heredity 81: 375-387; re Human races not having unique set of shared derived characters characterizing any human ‘race’ see P. A. Morin et al. [1994] Science 265: 1193-1201; re max mtDNA maximum for humans (1.1%) for other primates, around 3% see R. L. Cann et al. [1987] Nature 325: 31-36. Also Research by Maryellen Ruvolo, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 13/9/66. which examined mtDNA estimated mutation rate of 0.8% per million years. It estimated gorillas separated from chimps and humans cica 8-10 MYA; humans and chimps circa 6 MYA. Found a very large difference between mtDNA of Gorilla gorilla gorilla (W Africa lowland) and E. Africa species G. g. graueri and G. g. beringei indicating a split about 3 MYA and almost making them separate species. Most interesting was how little variation there was in human mtDNA. “Her findings support previous research showing that modern humans are remarkably less diverse genetically than are the great apes. 'The most different humans on the face of the earth are less different than two lowland gorillas from the same forest in West Africa.”)
As Templeton says in connection with his paper, “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective,” (American Anthropologist, Fall 1998) “The 15 percent is well below the threshold that is used to recognize race in other species. In many other large mammalian species, we see rates of differentiation two or three times that of humans before the lineages are even recognized as races. Humans are one of the most genetically homogenous species we know of. There’s lots of genetic variation in humanity, but it’s basically at the individual level. The between-population variation is very, very minor.”
That’s the importance of understanding the population bottleneck which Homo sapiens sapiens (H.s.s) passed through. Through some event or events, the African population which gave birth to H.s.s got squeezed down to a tiny number of people, which squeezed out a lot of variation and made us disgustingly homogenous. Kinda like cheetahs, except we’re more behaviorally flexible. Indeed, as few as 500 persons may have formed the group of H.s.s. which wandered out of Africa and populated the rest of the world.
On London Calling’s comments:
(I) Historical refernce in re Kenyans was to historically recorded population movements. That is in the last century or two.
(II) Genetics
(1) Your reference to the Genome project is not really necessary, there is a large data set on human population genetics: the genome project is doing something else entirely, pinning down the functionality and loci.
(2) Categories, examine critically
(a) West African descended? Make that Mixed African, European and Native North American descent with Asian and/or sub-Continent admixtures also present (Caribbeans esp.). Sound like a coherent “racial” / genetic heritage? This is a non-category, other than for cultural reasons.
(b) East Africans: given that the Kenyan runners derive largely from a few ethnic groups, I am willing to entertain
(III) African mothers / Birth Rates:
This is silly. I see no data which would lead me to expect that there would (a) be coherent selective pressures across Africa as a continent to produce a coherent genetic impact on African populations. This is born out by higher rates of African diversity, stemming from their older origin. (b) substantial differences in selection as compared to extra-African populations until the industrial age, but then that’s a blink of the evolutionary eye.
Re knowledge of past birth rates: contra your assertion we could look to both archaeology and to Swahili records. But then we would be making the incredible logical error of equating a population in place in the region with paleolithic and intervening populations of tens of thousands of years. Since it is well established that current population is intrusive in recent times, as I recall sometime from the fourth century forward according to linguistic and archaeological analysis, we would be commiting an immense blunder of ahistoricity.
.