[ul]labdude and Coldfire: The highest twinning rate in the world is among Nigerian women.
coosa: There is a fringe of anthropologists, including Coon and Wolpoff, who support what is called the Multiregional Hypothesis. The idea is that Homo sapiens evolved from H. erectus spontaneously and independently in several different places (three or four, I think) around the world. It’s hogwash, IMO. But if it were true, it would give speciation an extra 200,000 years or so to act. These people give no credence to the mtDNA evidence that suggests all living humans have a common ancestor only about 100,000 years in the past. I’m guessing the Biology 101 professor was a proponent of this Multiregional view. Only the fact this thread isn’t in the BBQ Pit prevents me from saying what I think about these people. I never heard of the 70% threshold either.
Boris I know there are a few small groups in East Africa that are lactose-tolerant and traditionally depend on dairy products for the bulk of their diet. Most Arficans are lactose-intolerant, however.
Chronos Type-B blood (the phenotype) is rare in Native Americans but not absent. In some areas (Alaska, Greenland, Great Lakes, and part of Argentina), type B was about as common as in Western Europe. Type B is more common in Asia than in any other continent.[/ul]
If having two wisdom teeth is being more
evolved, than me with eight must be really
devolved.
Coosa: I really doubt that claim, though I haven’t heard it before and therefore have no direct evidence about it. However, some scientists are now considering Homo erectus to have really been the same species as us, Homo sapiens. If that is the case, I find it really hard to believe that Aborigines are almost a different species!
I’ve also never heard the 70% thing. I’ve always heard if they cannot interbreed, they are different species, not some (apparently random) percentage.
All in all, I have to wonder about where your professor got his information…
David B: I think you are confused on the Hss - erectus issue. You’re thinking of probably either archaic Hs (known under a number of names) or H neandertalis (old Neanderthal) – both of which are sometimes lumped in with Hss. The old lumper-splitter thingys. Erectus is not the same species as Hs. I’d hazard the opinion that given recent genetic analyses, Hn is not Hss either and probably was not interfertile.
Bibliophage: You hit the nail on the head. But I think you should cut old Wolpoff some slack, I mean lumping in with C. Coon who really went off the deep end into non-science is a little premature. Although, if Wolpoff keeps denying the ever more massive genetic (not just mtdna) evidence multi-regional is wrong… Well he may be walking down the path to fringedom.
On that 70% thing: even if this were true (as a margin of speciation and true in re Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals), and I never heard of this before, it would prove nothing insofar as you wouldn’t know if the data did not reflect cultural practices such as (a) abortion (b) contraception © underreporting of mixed children (d) infanticide etc. Utterly useless. Frankly, I’d say its pure racist agitprop.
In re Nigerian women and twinning: Note this is only among SOME Nigerian ethnic groups! That’s the problem when folks write about Africa – they ignore the staggering diversity.
Re comments on “Africans” vs Europeans vs Asians (reaction speeds, birth times etc) : until someone does studies grappling with genetic diversity and understanding underlying biases, I regard all this work as complete crap. Who is black? Who is European… etc. Cultural definitions which have no biological utility. E.g. the PNAS article back in 1998 purporting to establish the first private allele for non-African populations. Undersampled sub-Saharan Africa and neglected key transition zones, such as Saharan and East Africa populations. Poor conceptualization, poor execution all from unexamined assumptions.
Boris B: Your lactose parsing seems okay except there are African groups which depend on adult dairy consumption (again we always seem to over and inaccurately generalize about Africa), but what do you think Aryan is? It’s an indian word after all, or are using it for Nordics, in which case its inaccurate.
Thanks to everyone who responded on my ‘70%’ question. I have no idea where my instructor got his information, but he certainly told it to us as fact. I’ve been curious ever since, as I’ve never seen anything else about it either!
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Collounsbury, if I went a couple of hundred miles up some fork on the Niger River, wouldn’t my study group be 100% Black for the last n generations despite what my underlying bias might be? You are correct about Aryan being an Indian name. However, it dates back far enough that the difference at that time between them, the Medes and Persians, the Hittites and Mitanni are minor, with slightly greater differences with their Kurgan cousins still north of the Black Sea but planning or in the process of takin over Europe. But as Boris B mentioned, its use puts some people in a bad mood. Anyway, your privileges of saying you are not politically correct are suspended for one week.
Coosa, I checked around about the 70% threshold and after “racist” and “BS” the only repeatable thing I was told was that you should change schools or colleges.
Jois, I started to mention earlier that this was a very small community college . . .
Actually, I’ve changed colleges 3 times in the last 5 years! One of these days I’ll actually get a degree sigh.
One of the most important lessons I seem to be learning is not to believe what someone tells you just because they HAVE a degree.
Cossa, Glad to hear you changed colleges! BTW: one of my brothers took ten years to finish college, went to about 5-6 of them all over the USA, one of the least boring people I know. Good Luck!
Mipsman:
Politically correct? I always prefer to be scientifically correct, rather more effective.
So, in re your Niger river question the answer is in three parts
(1) what do you mean by “black” – define it genetically and we can rap about that
(2) even by old fashioned visual (and unscientific) standards the answer is NO. All kinds of folks who mix up the picture since the nth generation x10. See next point.
(3) in re the genetics and paleoanthro, transitional populations morphologically between Northern African/Mediterraneans and Sub-Saharans have been attested for tens of thousands of years, since the early holocene as memory serves (memory I do stress). Historical records (Graeco-Roman forward) speak of indigenous “ethiopean” populations in North Africa to boot, and this is back up by the physical evidence. Pops were a lot more complicated than our old mythologies would have had us believe. That’s fun.
What does this tell us? Simplistic victorian ideas about race are backassward and inaccurate ways to try to get a real understanding of human diversity, paleoanthropology etc. However, lots of people love to ignore the science and cling to racial ideas for political reasons.
In re Aryan: you missed my point. The ‘racial’ usage is a late 19th century appropriation of an Indian term. It’s none too accurate for scientific or population terms and has all that Nazi baggage to boot. Non-trivial reasons I think. Lose it for something more accurate.
So, please do suspend you priviliges in re not being politically correct for one month.
DUDE!
Impressive 1st post. I think I wasted mine making fun of CalifBoomer ( Don’t Ask ).
Welcome aBoard!
I read somewhere that many Arctic groups have a much higher incidence of left-handedness than is common here in the States.
If true, has anyone an idea of why?
Coll, you and Jois should get along very well. She also sees no place for any archaic Hs genes in Hss (assuming that I read your post correctly). I love those discussions and hope another gets started soon.
Back to your comments on race. I can see (have seen) how some people could “define” human races in a way that makes no taxonomic sense, solely for an exploitative, racialism rationalisms or other purely political purposes. But to say that race is undefinable is to deny the evidence of one’s eyes or to use a racialist’s “definition” as a strawman.
Look at breeds of dogs. There have been numerous strains (races) developed over the 20K years either through deliberate breeding or as a survival mechanism. Can you say that there is no such thing as a cocker spaniel because the cocker spaniel is the combination of innumerable earlier breeds (races), many probably extinct? Is the fact that if you breed a cocker spaniel with a different breed, the offspring will look different reason to dismiss the cocker spanielness of the hound?
(Let’s try to stay real dispassionate here). The same should be true for humans. I believe that there is/was a Mediterranean “race”, descendants of the Neolithic settlers and probably of the original Hss stock out of Africa. I believe that there is/was an Indo/European “race” from out on the Eurasian steppes that invaded parts of Asia, Anatolia, India, Persia, and Europe leaving a genetic component on the original inhabitants of from near zero to almost 100%. I believe that there was a very dark skinned “race” all along south Asia. It relationship with “black” Africans would be a fascinating topic. I believe the Bushmen are a “race”, as are Austrailian abo’s and there might be several North American Indian “races”. There were/are a number of north Asian and sub-Saharan “races”.
In these cases, these people were/are isolated breeding populations that developed distinctions in skin, hair, and eye color, physigonomical differences and physiological differences. They were races. They could interbreed but they had distinct appearances. If they themselves were the result of combinations or segmentations of earlier “races”, that would be interesting to know also. I would like to know where we come from. We have to look at ourselves to see the story of our development.
The mantra that culture has nothing to do with race seems designed to throw much of human prehistory out with the bathwater. I find the Bantu irruption from their West African homeland across most of subSaharan Africa a fascinating story, on par with the Indo-European invasion of Europe. Were the Bantus a “race”? I bet you they were originally. Now, Bantu speakers might have various proportions of original Bantu genes (again, compare the situation in Europe). But to close one’s eyes to the concept of race removes one of the few tools we have to reconstruct a great deal of human pre-history.
I am ready, willing and able to be corrected on any errors of fact or opinion. Looking forward to many an enjoyable debate with you and Jois on this and related subjects.
Would you please, please, mipsman and others, get Hotmail.com addresses! If nothing else than so a good natured, easy going individual like me can tell you I’m going to get the hip waders out and will be back shortly 
Jois
Collounsbury
Well, either we disagree about the meaning of Aryan, or one of us is not being clear. I believe it is a word from Farsi or a predecessor tongue, describing the race which was cradled in Iran. If language and physical characteristics are any clue, this racial group scattered itself all over an area extending from Sri Lanka to Iceland to Spain to Siberia. So it is perfectly accurate to refer to Nordic people (minus, perhaps, the Finns and Lapps) as Aryan, just as it is accurate to refer to any ethnic group associated with an Indo-Aryan language as Aryan. I have noticed a seeming relationship between lactose tolerance and Aryan descent, which, I submit, may not be coincidental. But I know I further court bad moods by continuing this topic.
I was not aware of any African tribes who consumed a lot of lactose. I maintain that I made a perfectly accurate generalization about Africa (absent statistics to the contrary, which might make me change my mind). To be accurate, a generalization need only be generally true. I hereby declare that Africans have generally darker skin and hair than Europeans. Someone could point out, impertinently, that P.W. Botha is lighter-skinned than some Italian on a beach. Counter-examples only underscore the caveat that generalizations are generalizations, not rules.
Boris, I think the “Aryans” technically really are only the Indian representatives of the big family you describe. I usually use the term Indo-European when I want to refer to the whole gang.
Collounsbury: Rule #1: Don’t be a jerk.
Dude, you know exactly what he means by saying black, aryan, and what not. Don’t be a pretentious dick and pretend not to understand simply to be politically correct, or seem WAAY intelligent, or whatever you’re doing. Debate all you want, but seriously, we’ve got some damn smart people here, and some damn testy people too. Don’t sweat the small shit, especially when you know what he means. Overdefinition does not mean intelligent. It’s also one quick way to lose a debate, or show just how knowledgeable you aren’t. We all know what ‘is’ is. Aight?
Thanks.
–Tim
Collounsbury wrote: “I think you are confused on the Hss - erectus issue. You’re thinking of probably either archaic
Hs (known under a number of names) or H neandertalis (old Neanderthal) – both of which are sometimes lumped in with Hss. The old lumper-splitter thingys. Erectus is not the same species as Hs. I’d hazard the opinion that given recent genetic analyses, Hn is not Hss either and probably was
not interfertile.”
Mipsman! Is this what you were thinking of when you thought
Collounsbury and I would get along well together?
I just don’t think AMH = Neanderthals.
Have you seen the study on fDNA? I’ll try and find it just in case.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v66n6/991491/991491.html
Genomic Differentiation of Neanderthals and
Anatomically Modern Man Allows a
FossilDNA-Based Classification of
Morphologically Indistinguishable Hominid
Bones
Imagine if they can do this on any fossil regardless of age?
Might be imagine only!
The back end of this thread is a classic demonstration of the problems our culture has in any discussion of race. This is not intended to insult any of the posters; it’s just an unfortunate side effect of our history.
To get back to the question raised in the OP, I suggest we use the following definition of race:
Race: A grouping of individuals who express certain distinct genetic characteristics, usually superficial(by which I mean visible), as a result of a long period of interbreeding in isolation caused by geographic barriers.
As a result of such geographic isolation, races often developed unique culture or cultures.
Excluded from the definition of race are groups that engage in self-imposed isolation, such as the Amish, for two reasons: (1) such self-imposed isolation almost never lasts long enough to result in the development of distinct superficial differences, and (2) hormones bein’ what they are, self-imposed isolates usually have lots of cheaters.
Hmmm, this gives me an idea for a new thread.
V.
Interesting cite, Jois, thanks for keeping me up on the literature. I admit the current research does seem to indicate that there are two species. However, is there any indication that quantitative differences in mtDNA, like the 6.7% difference mentioned in the article, has any correlation with interbreeding capability? What is the difference between horses and mules (nonfertile offspring) and dogs and wolves (fertile offspring)? Could some of the mtDNA difference just be genetic coding for furrier toes in Neanderthals? Every time I see somebody with prominent eye brow ridges, I think he has some archaic Hs genes from somewhere in his family tree. Note brow ridges are almost exclusively male, maybe missing in mtDNA.