Again, my friend is making claims which I am not inclined to believe.
[ul][li]Do Native Americans (especially Apaches) have some genetic trait that prevents them from growing facial hair?[/li][li]Do Hawaiians have this trait?[/li][li]Are Native Americans (especially Eskimos) descended from Hawaiians?[/li][li]If so, how on Earth did they get from Hawaii to North America?[/ul][/li]
Thank you.
Cessandra
Killed a man with no hands. . .
People of Asian ancestry tend to have less facial hair than those nasty hairy Europeans. Both the Polynesians and the Native Americans are descended from travelers from Asia. The Americans probably walked over on the Northern route, the Islanders spread out by sea routes from Southeast Asia.
Normal humans have little hair except on the tops of their heads. It is only the Europeans that have that pelt. Lack of significant facial hair does not show close relation; excessive facial hair might show that you have some Indo-European in your ancestry.
I don’t think Polynesians are close relatives of aboriginal Americans or northeast Asians. I don’t know if it is known exactly how Polynesia was first settled, but by the language patterns in the area I’d think Polynesians originated in southeast Asia - probably Malaysia or Indo-China.
North Americans are probably descended from migratory Siberian people. And I don’t think there is any particular similarity between Malays and any Siberian people (except their both being human).
I don’t want to make people think like me, I want them to think like me of their own free will.
Boris –
Gerald Diamonds “Guns, Germs and Steel” traces the migrations of both groups (American Indians and Polynesians, including Hawaiians). You are essentially correct – they come from entirely different parts of Asia and have no direct connection.
Oh, goody. I’m finally right about something. Actually, I wish I knew more about where the “across the Aleutians” group of aboriginal Americans comes from - there are so many language families in the Americas that linguistic links don’t seem to help much. I mean one American language family - Athapaskan I think, is said to have signs of possible relation to the Sino-Tibetan family. Another - was it Iroquoian? - might have affinity to Indo-European. So those lines are too tangled to say much, at least to an untrained linguist like myself.
So I should probably take a look at your book idea, Beruang.
This is a little off the subject, but didn’t the original Japanese term for Europeans translate to “smelly big-nosed hairy uglies?”
Looking in the mirror right now, I can’t help agreeing with the description. But as far as hair goes, maybe Euros are more of an exception rather than the rule.
The Man, through the National Park Service, gives this uncited observation about American Indians:
“Indians do not have much facial hair. Hair which did appear was plucked out. A beard or mustache was not considered becoming. A pair of fresh water clam shells were pinched together to pull out the hair.”
Apparently, this applies to all American Indians, everywhere, all the time. Hmmmm.
Well, my experience is not all that extensive, but I was under the impression that Native Americans DO in fact have less facial hair than other ethnic groups - including most Asians.
Whites are indeed the hairiest ethnicity and, in fact, among Europeans blondes are hairier than brunettes (Makes sense. One of the functions of hair is to protect the skin from the sun. The less melanin, the more need for hair.)
As SK points out, though, it is problematic to make sweeping statements about all Native Americans when it comes to physical traits; it’s as sensible as putting Swedes and Portuguese together. Last I heard, there were supposed to have been at least three seperate major waves of immigration to the Americas in pre-Colombian times. Still, some traits seem to be common, and a paucity of facial hair is one.
As for why, if we really understood that we could play it backwards and market something better than this half-ass Minoxidil stuff - we’d make a fortune!
My experience doesn’t show blondes to be that hairy. In fact most of the blondes that are hairy are really red heads.
Also Greeks, Italians, Arabs, Jews and Indians/Pakastanis are dark and hairy.
Actually, not. They just LOOK hairy, bcause it’s dark, thick hair. Ask a dermatologist: blondes have more hair per square centimeter of skin than people with dark hair. Redheads are usually very fair, so they may as well; I don’t know the specifics for redheads.
Sigh, if only that were always true.
– the blonde with the VERY thin hair
I, too, have read that there were at least three migrations from Asia to America across the Bering Strait. This helps explain the hodgepodge geographic distribution of American Indian languages.
A former girlfriend from mainland China told me they refer to Europeans as “big nosed ghosts.”
The Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History has a temporary exhibit (running only through the end of the year, I’m afraid) on the Ainu, the original inhabitants of Japan. (The people we currently think of as “Japanese” are thought to have migrated from Asia, probably via Korea, in the dim and distant, and displaced the Ainu.) The Ainu have significant body and facial hair, and caused quite a stir when Japan was “opened” to the West, and Westerners “discovered” these hairy Asians.
Sorry, I can’t recall the source, but I remember reading that red heads actually have the least hair (on a folicles-per-square-inch basis).
Speaking as a blond with a fair amount of hair, one time on a train in China I was talking to some people and a teenage kid snuck up to me and pulled on my arm hair.
He giggled a little bit and began backing away. Joking with him, I asked why he pulled on my arm hair, expecting to hear a response like, “Oh, I was just curious; I don’t have any myself,” or something similar.
Instead he spoke at length about how white people are less evolved than Chinese, hence closer to apes and hairier.
So I threw my crap at him.
I posted this information once before, on another thread. I can’t find it now because the FRICKIN’ SEARCH ENGINE DOESN’T WORK!!! snarl
(pant, pant, pant, pant)
I feel better now. Anyway, two anthropologists, Dennis Stanford, who is anthropology curator at the Smithsonian, and Bruce Bradley, an independent researcher from Cortez, CO, claim that Europeans from the Iberian Peninsula (Southwestern France and Spain) may have come to North America as early as 18,000 years ago, which would be roughly 4,500 years before anyone got here from Asia over the Bering Bridge. (These are the Clovis people, so-named because their distinctive spear-points were first found in Clovis, New Mexico in 1927. )
Bradley and Stanford have noted that spear-points like those found in Clovis have also been found on the Eastern Seaboard and have dated much older than artifacts found in the West and identical spear-points have been found in Solutre, France.
You can read about it here: www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/html/dennis_stanford.html
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
Not that I know shit about this, but I am Polynesian myself, so I’ll say something.
I think you’ll find that languages between Polynesian cultures are virtually identical, and that includes some matches with Asia and America, including Eskimo…
Maori legend says we originated from Hawaiki. Nobody’s sure if that means Hawaii, or that the Hawaiians just renamed their islands after the great Origin myth.
-PIGEONMAN-
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Oh, by the way, I’d noticed the unusual absence of facial hair from most Pacific cultures too. I think it’s partially genetic, but mostly aesthetic.
-PIGEONMAN-
Hero For A New Millennium!
The Legend Of PigeonMan - updates every Wed & Sat. If I can be bothered.