Someone started a couple anti-African threads. They got deleted before I read through them, but someone posted “Everyone is African!” or some such thing.
This always grates me. Modern day Africans are as African as anyone else is. I don’t like this idea that Africans are somehow the “original.” No, they’re not. Africans today are the result of just as many generations and mutations as humans everywhere else. It’s not like they’re some pure strain the rest of us mutated off of, or evolved from.
Look, we all are descended from a prima facie misiing link in our family tree… it, they, she, he probably originated in Africa.
Well, it wasn’t actually Africa at the time. It was a land mass on planet Earth. And if that land mass broke apart differently people might be saying we’re all South American, or Australian, or whatever. Therefore, “we’re all African” is a moot point. We are all homo sapiens.
But on the other hand, those who remained in Africa, in the same relative area, never had to adapt to different climates the way others had to. They had already adapted to their location. Of course those who migrated within Africa itself had to adapt.
I have read- and wish I could cite, but it was in a print periodical and specifically Nat’l Geo IIRC- that DNA evidence as well as some linguistic and material culture and geographical evidence suggest that the Oromo people of Ethiopia and Kenya ( pic pic pic pic) are probably the living people who closest resemble the last common ancestors of all humans. Perhaps it’s a confirmation bias, but it is interesting when you look at them and begin to see the different ethnicities in their features, the “ah, if that nose narrowed/widened just a bit and the skin were a bit darker/lighter and…” much more easily than you do with a Bantu or Pole or Indian or Ainu.
Which is exactly why we should quit making such a big deal out of skin color.
There is only one race: the human race.
Yes, it was Africa as we would recognise it. Continental drift is a process over a far longer timespan than that.
it was indeed africa more or less as africa is now (with some climate changes over the past few thousand years and such) but I have a question concerning that.
Was India a part of Africa when the first homo sapians evolved? It was basically the last real big “contintental” shift, when India broke off from Africa eventually colliding with Asia and creating the Himilaya mountains (which are still growing, btw, at something like an inch every year or couple years or something). So yea, was India a part of Africa at the time?
Absolutely not.
East Gondwana, comprising Antarctica, Madagascar, India and Australia, began to separate from Africa (and the rest of Gondwana) about 165 million years ago. East Gondwana itself began to be dismembered about 120 million years ago as India began to move northward.
The Indian Plate began to collide with Asia between 50-55 million years ago.
Not only do these dates predate humans, they predate the existance of any of the hominids. These dates are more on par with the beginning of the whole primate lineage. Homo sapiens have only lived for the last 250,000 years or so.
Thats right,we are all brothers in the human race.
I disagree. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Daytona 500, the Boston Marathon, the Kentucky Derby, everything Michael Phelps was in… the list goes on.
