An earlier thread questioned if Neandertals and CroMagnons interbred, which got me thinking . . . did they have various races like modern humans? They are always drawn to look like hairy white people. Is that an inaccurate portrayal? Could there have been various races that developed in different parts of the workd at the same time? I know this is kind of like asking the true color of dinosaur skin. Any ideas?
From what I understand of the theory of human development, anatomically modern humans originated in Africa and spread from there. Racial differences developed over tens of thousands of years according to the varied environments these proto-humans found theirself in. So, probably the answer would be: It depends on when and where you look. At the beginning in Africa humans were all one “race”, but there weren’t very many of them. Over time as we reproduced and spread genetic diversity, and races, developed.
A human jackass? I can’t answer you without being completely unscientific.
Finland’s paleoanthropologist Björn Kurtén, in his novel Dance of the Tiger, depicted Scandinavian Neanderthals as white-skinned and blond, while their Cro-Magnon neighbors were dark-skinned, like people in India. Shocking? It’s kind of obvious when you think about it, after all. The Neanderthals had been there up North many thousands of years longer, so of course they were white and blond. The Cro-Magnons at that time were recent arrivals from the South. Did this upset any racialist preconceptions you may have had about the more “primitive” Neanderthals being dark-skinned (like Negroes) and the more “modern” Cro-Magnons being light-skinned (like Europeans)?
No - the OP was asking, were there races within Neanderthal? Or within Cro-Magnon?
And asking that question doesn’t mean the OP had any preconceived notions about primitive Neanderthal=negro, Cro-Magnon=Anglo. Much less would a mention of a novel upset that alleged proconception. Sheesh.
To the OP - I don’t know. The only thing I can offer is I don’t think Neanderthals had a large enough habitat to see significant racial differences.
My guess would be that Cro-Magnons, with much wider range, did.
FYI, it’s Neanderthal. While some people choose to pronounce it with the h silent, it’s still spelled with the h.
For references to human jackasses, see www.whitehouse.gov
This is where people run into a problem with a word like “race”. The American Anthropological Association states that there are not now, nor have there ever been different “races” from a biological or anthropological viewpoint.
What, exactly, does the word race mean when applied to pre-history?
P.S. here’s a SDMB specific site with links and explanations put together by our very own eponymous.
“Race” in the biological usage of the term (carefully excluding humans for the moment) is a subgroup of a species which exhibits characteristics unique to itself and distinct from another subgroup of that same species, while interbreeding freely and fertilely with other “races” of the same species. Downy woodpeckers here in North Carolina are noticeably smaller and have less vividly white coloration than they do in upstate New York – but they are one species, and the Pennsylvania and Maryland specimens are in between on these characteristics.
These “geographic races” have little or nothing to do with the concept of Black vs. White of racism – but one’s vision of a “typical” Swedish girl and a “typical” Italian girl are going to have significant differences that can be ascribed to a “Nordic” and a “Mediterranean” “local race” in the human race.
It’s a convenient term for describing “groups which exhibit a given cluster of alleles on variables within a species,” that’s all.
One key point that Barb discovered in doing her research for her undergraduate thesis was that the “Neanderthal” populations of the Middle East antedated those of Europe, and, while unmistakeably Neanderthal in the distinguishing body characters, were less pronouncedly so than the later “classic” Neanderthals of Europe. It’s sort of as if the particular features that characterize one’s image of “a Neanderthal” are exaggerations of the “normal” Neanderthal body structure, quite possibly as a reaction to the Wurm Glaciation and resulting harsh climate.
So yes, in a quite real sense Neanderthals at least exhibited “race” characters – though theirs are known mostly from skeletal features, not from the usual skin/hair/eyes soft-tissue features that are the first-impression distinguishers in living people.
Well, more true in Britain, less true in the U.S., although the taxonomic designation is always Homo neanderthalensis.
…Or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, if you belong to the reduced but still-active school that considers them to be a subspecies of modern man rather than a full separate species.
Questions about human races usually turn into debates of one sort or another, so I’ll move this thread to Great Debates.
Since we’re nit-picking here, one could consider Cro-Magnons to be a race of Modern Humans. Cro-Magnons are really only those modern humans found in Europe. One never talks about African or Asian Cro-Magnons. So it is very unlikley that the subset of modern Humans (Homo sapiens) in Europe 40k yrs ago had, within it, different races. If the OP means “were there races of Homo sapiens back in the time of Cro-Magnons”, that’s a different question. Clearly the farther you go back toward the origin of Homo Sapiens (roughly 100k yrs ago) the less differentiated the races are going to be.
Neanderthals are very different. They existed in Europe and parts of the Middle East for a VERY long time. It would be starnge indeed if, over that period of time, different “races” as we would recognize them did NOT exist. Given that we only have bones to go from, and that we don’t have a large sample size of them, it’s hard for us to deliniate “races”.
As for the Neanderthal/Neandertal confusion it comes about because the spelling reform in German that happend some time ago (not sure exactly when, but either late 19th or early 20th century). The “h” in Neanderthal was dropped in German, when used to denote that region of Germany, so that now it is spelled Neandertal. But the scientific classification of Neanderthal man was made BEFORE the spelling reform and retains the older version. In any event, both should be pronounced the same-- i.e., no “th” sound, just “t”. BTW, the “thal” or “tal” in German has the same root as the (somewhat antiquated) word “dale” in English for “valley”.
IIRC, it takes about 2000 years for the melanine content in the skin to drop to that of Northern Europeans.
Given the timespan, it is therefore quite likely that there were dark and light skinned ‘races’ in Homo Erectus or Neanderthals or Cro-Magnon.IMHO
Latro:
Did you mean 20,000? I don’t have a cite, but I remember hearing some anthropologist use that date for changes in skin color. 2,000 seems way too short.
But I do agree that it is likely Homo sapiens had begun to differntiate into “races” by the time of the Cro-Magnons. We certainly had been around for more than 20k yrs before we got into Europe.
As for H. erectus, those guys were everywhere! Europe, Asia, Africa. Surely there were different races of H. erectus. Hell, they were in southern Asia for close to 2M yrs.
Hmm, could well be.
'T was something with a 2 and some zeroes, must look it up.
Good point. The Neander valley was in a part of Germany (Bavaria?) where there was a tendency to use Latin and Greek words in name-coining. Basically, it was the Neumann Valley (new-man > neo + ander in Greek roots). In the German spelling reform (which I think was just after WWII), the silent H’s of many words, including thal, were dropped.
[hijack]The principal U.S. and Canadian monetary denomination comes from a Sudetendeutsch term – “crown-size” coins (i.e., the size of old silver dollars) were originated in St. Joachim’s Valley in German-speaking Bohemia, where they were referred to as Joachimsdalers, and eventually the “Joachims-” was dropped and the spelling changed as it entered English, to leave us with “dollars.” [/hijack]
And, just for the record, the spelling of scientific names assigned in accordance with the rules for binomial nomenclature is fixed at what the scientist doing the formal description chose. Hence, a wildcat native to Myanmar might be Felis birmensis because at the time the zoologist naming it coined the name, Myanmar was called Birmah (later Burma), and it doesn’t change simply because the nation decides to use a different name. Hence the -h- in the middle of “neanderthalensis” is stuck there, even though the reference is to a find in what’s now called Neandertal.
This very interesting article (It is a pdf file) states that there are about 4000 generations of homo sapien, enough time for allelles to express themselves in different ways (the variation of genes between humans is far less than most imagine. What most see as different genes in different races are the same genes expressed differently). What the article doesn’t say is how many generations does it take to change the expression of the gene.
We’ve got plenty of geneticists here. Do any of you know?
“Or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, if you belong to the reduced but still-active school that considers them to be a subspecies of modern man rather than a full separate species.”
Rhino:
Polycarp brought up a good point, above. To expand on that a bit, there is a school of thought in paleo-anthropological circles that there really has been only one species of Homo all along. The most vocal guy on this subject is Milford Walpoff. His theory, called the Multi-regional Theory, is that ever since Homo arrived on the scene, ~2M yrs ago, we’ve been one species. That species spread all over Africa, Europe and Asia and was one big breeding population that, together, evoloved into H. sapiens. He claims that he can see modern racial characteristics in ancient bones. To give one example, he will show certain dental features of modern Asian poplulations that he finds in Peking Man (H. erectus in China ~500K yrs ago).
This is pretty much the minority view among scientists. If you’re interested in the majority view, a good place to start would be the book by Ian Tattersall “Exinct Humans”. I’m sure Walpoff has some books out, but I don’t know any titles off the top of my head (gotta love Amazon.com for something like that).
Also, skin color is NOT a very good demarker of race. For example, you can find very dark skinned people in Africa, India, Australia, but no on would put those peoples in the same race.
“Or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, if you belong to the reduced but still-active school that considers them to be a subspecies of modern man rather than a full separate species.”
Rhino:
Polycarp brought up a good point, above. To expand on that a bit, there is a school of thought in paleo-anthropological circles that there really has been only one species of Homo all along. The most vocal guy on this subject is Milford Walpoff. His theory, called the Multi-regional Theory, is that ever since Homo arrived on the scene, ~2M yrs ago, we’ve been one species. That species spread all over Africa, Europe and Asia and was one big breeding population that, together, evoloved into H. sapiens. He claims that he can see modern racial characteristics in ancient bones. To give one example, he will show certain dental features of modern Asian poplulations that he finds in Peking Man (H. erectus in China ~500K yrs ago).
This is pretty much the minority view among scientists. If you’re interested in the majority view, a good place to start would be the book by Ian Tattersall “Extinct Humans”. I’m sure Walpoff has some books out, but I don’t know any titles off the top of my head (gotta love Amazon.com for something like that).
Also, skin color is NOT a very good demarker of race. For example, you can find very dark skinned people in Africa, India, Australia, but no on would put those peoples in the same race.