If, say on some parallel universe earth, humans stayed put circa 0 A.D. (or even before then if necessary), i.e. the Chinese stayed in their corner, Africans kept to Africa, whities in Europe etc., would/could enough differences between the races develop to actually justify the term races? How long would it take (thousands of years? tens of thousands? hundreds?)?
Or put another way, were we meddling with our own physiology with no clue whatsoever right from the get-go?
The short answer is, yes. But it would probably take on the order of 10s of thousands of years, not just since 0 AD.
The point is, though, that we spread out from Africa about 60k yrs ago, and have been sending genes back and forth ever since. Had we spread out into isolated pockets with no gene flow, we could have developed “races”. But it didn’t happen that way.
I don’t understand your last question.
It is true that the fact that no distinct human races exist is an accident of history. If some of the various varieties of archaic Homo sapiens were still around they’d almost certainly qualify as a scientificly defined race. It just happened that every other variety of Homo sapiens was either wiped out or integrated into the larger breeding population.
Large animals that are capable of long distance travel are much less likely to develop distinct subspecies than smaller animals that are confined to a specific geographical area. For example, wolves (Canis lupus) and brown bears (Ursus arctos) both live all across europe, asia, and north america. And it is very difficult to separate them into different subspecies. People have tried, but the subspecific or varietal boundaries are very subjective. Humans are the same way.
Subspecies are sometimes easily definable on islands, since the island population is often reproductively isolated from the mainland population. But that isn’t the case with island dwelling humans.
I heard once that according to anthropologists there are only two human “races”: the African “bushmanoid” race, which includes pygmies, San and Hottentots (but not negroes); and everybody else in the world. That is, the bushmanoids are sufficiently different, physically, to merit a separate classification, but the rest of us are all to similar to justify such a thing. Does anybody know if this is true?
But that’s really just saying the same thing as what actually happened. I would guess that if a 50ky old Homo sapiens (post evolutionary bottle-neck) were transported into our time, he’d be a different race, too.
Time and isolation are necessary for races to form. 50k yrs is plenty of time.
Slight nitpcik, I’ll agree.
Well, subspecies have developed in birds in a something like a hundred years, so I would GUESS, that if each tribe/population kept to itself and did not interbreed with another- then yes, the Hiuman species would have several subspecies. In fact now, if you use the same criteria that the “splitters” use to define some subspecies of birds & beetles (or like Lemur mentioned with wolves), then there are several subspecies of Humans now. For example, the Ainu of Japan came close, and still are not far from being a “subspecies”.
But there is one big problem with the theory- what we (used to)think of as “races” are not even close to subspecies or "races’ in abiological sense. We just lumped all dark skinned bushy-haired populations together, and call them the “Negro race” depsite the fact that those tow external characteristics developed separatly in several groups of humans. The “black” of the Pacific Islands is more closely related to the asians than to the “black” of Africa. And even in Africa, all the populations are not related that closely, even if they have “black skin & bushy hair”. It’s like someone lumped Labradors & Poodles together becuase they both had black & curly fur.
So, yeah. If we put each human into a group with those he is closest to, and kept those groups completely separate for 2000 years- there would be “subspecies”. If conditions were greatly different in each, and we lost many of the advantages of civilization, then perhps even species, although that would likely take longer.
No they haven’t. Several thousand years, probably closer to 10,000 years, at best.
The San have some of the “oldest genetic markers” found in existing human populations. They can be shown to be pretty much equally genetically distant from every other popluation group (including other Africans) and more gentically distant than any one group is from any other. Does that make sense?
Does this make them a seperate “race”? Well, it depends on your definition of race. It certainly would indicate that if there is a seperate race out there, they would be the prime candidate. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a biologist who would call the San a seperate race.
Brian.
BTW, the word “pygmy” is usually meant to refer to a different group (found in the Ituri forest region) altogether from the San, although the San are short of sature. The 'pygimes" look pretty much like other Africans, just really short. San look very different.
If you’ve ever seen a picture of a !Kung San person they look like a composite of a European, AFrican, and Asian. They do seem to have a melange of characteristics that define the “traditional” races. Some biologists have suggested that they look more like our ancestors looked 50k yrs ago than any other living group.
BTW, these are the guys who speak with the “click” language, and their unique genetic profile has lead linguists to postulate that “clicks” were in the original human language and that the other existing languages without clicks have lost them over time.
I know the pygmies of the Ituri are not San, but I’ve heard that, despite their negroid physical appearance, they’re more closely related to the San than to their negro neighbors. The Hottentots of Namibia and South Africa are a San-Bantu mixture, I believe.
BG: I hadn’t heard this. If you have a cite, I’d be interested.
Sorry, I can’t remember where I heard or read these things – I have a vague memory of an ethnic map of Africa I saw in a book, think it may have been a National Geographic publication, classifying the San and pygmies as one group. What I know about the Hottentots comes mainly from James Michener’s novel about South Africa, The Covenant. Not really an authoritative source, but historical-fiction writers usually make some effort to get the basic facts right.
If you’ve never seen a San bushman, rent a video of The Gods Must Be Crazy. You’ll find it in the comedy section. It’s set in Botswana, a country just north of South Africa, where most of the Kalahari Desert is located. San are short (not so short as pygmies) and slight, with triangular faces, light-brown skin, and black hair that grows in little tufts all over the scalp.
By the way, I think several of the South African Bantu languages, such as Xhosa, also use “click” sounds. I don’t know whether or not they picked them up from the San, who definitely were in the region first.
Colibir- there is a scientific artile published not to long ago, which showed significant changes in DNA in fruitflies in Columbia, due to only TEN years of man-made environmental changes. That’s 10 years, mind you, not 10000. Now, true, that’s also fruitflies, but still…
DrDeth, it is not the amount of time, but the number of generations. I don’t know what a fruitfly generation is (too lazy to look it up), but let’s say a month. Then ten years is 120 generations. In human terms that’s 3000 years (at 25 years/generation). So maybe differences would show up in 3000 years, but there is another factor. Those environmental changes were very likely extreme, in order to speed up the evolution. So maybe 3000 years of Vitamin D deprivation is sufficient to breed light skin, but it takes more than skin color to define a race.
Just to throw out some food for discusion. Native American men do not have the ability to grow hair on their face. I am the victum of genitics becouse of that. I am 9/32 Native American (1/4 from my father, 1/32 from my Mom.) I have to deal with shaving or have a beard that rivals in amount of holes the apple that fell in vat of apple worms.
And it’s a hilariously funny movie, too. I laughed my ass off.
There was a sequel made, but I never saw it.
Also, there are 29 Khoisan languages. I know many of them have “clicks” but I’m not sure if all or even most of them still retain them.
AFAIK, no language has absorbed the “clicks” that didn’t already have them.
A question so loaded it’s a wonder it can walk.
Now wait a second. These people and I have a common ancestor, say 60,000 years ago. Let us suppose that this common ancestor spoke a language that is the common ancestor of their language and my language. Why can we deduce anything about the phonemic structure of this language from their present-day speech, rather than for example, mine?