Polycarp, if this is true, what branch did modern man come from? It was my understanding that Neandertal and Cro-Magnon man were the most recent named branches of homo sapiens, and that the Neandertal essentially became extinct a few thousand years after CMM showed up.
Probably my problem is that it is not nearly as cut and dried as I am saying, but where exactly am I going wrong?
PeeQueue
That seems to cover the evolution of man in Europe and the race otherwise known as “whitey”. But, the on-line encyc. seems to dance around the subject quite a bit. No one wants to say Canary Islanders or Australian Aborigines or blacks or Chinese might be inferior to whites because you can prove scientifically that is not the case – but then, no one wants to say Neanderthals weren’t inferior. It’s possible the various modern races all evolved from different earlier inferior races in different regions simultaneously, but I don’t know about that. Or, the neanderthals always were the inferior ones on the block and superior man existed outside of Europe for much of the time they were around, with Cro-magnon branching off a superior line and showing up to essentially conquer Europe.
The fossil evidence is just plain lacking. Plenty of theories though.
This is not quite accurate. There are several subtle ways that races differ. A trained anatomist can make a pretty good guess as to a person’s race and gender from the skull. If you get the pelvis you can tell gender absolutely. But there are several differences. I agree, they are not significant, they are like asking if a person has an epicanthic fold, and they are statistical guesses. If someone has an epicanthic fold, tan skin, straight black hair, etc, you guess they are Asian, even though there are many non-asians who have epicanthic folds, tan skin, and straight black hair.
What the mitochondrial studies have proved is that all modern humans had a common ancestor 120,000 thousand years ago. That means that the various “races” cannot be older than that, and are probably much younger. Was that mitochondrial Eve a “person”? Well, who knows, but I’d have to say she was. And there is no evidence for any neandertal remnent genes in any human populations. In fact, the most genetically diverse humans live in africa. Bushmen are more different than “Black” africans than caucasians are to asians…in fact, whites and asians are sister groups to each other, in contrast to the diverse africans. Which leads us to the conclusion that modern humans evolved in africa circa 120,000 thousand years ago, and non-african humans derive from groups that left africa.
From last week’s The Onion:
As a good friend of mine always says, “How do you define superlatives?” What’s all this talk of inferior and superior? Different branches of homo sapiens evolving at different times says nothing about which is better or worse. Perhaps in the rough environment of the time, the ones who questioned their lot in life were worse off (i.e. girls didn’t like them) and the dumb ones produced offspring more often (i.e. chicks dug them). In that case a later branching might produce a stupider bunch of people. Is that good or bad? I wouldn’t know how to answer the question.
Genetic mutation might have created a group of really small people that are able to survive better than their taller kindred in one area. Are they inferior or superior to their kindred? What is the criteria for inferiority or superiority?
That being said, Lemur866 said:
If this is true, what do the scientists call this sub-species or whatever? If it’s not Cro-Magnon or Neandertal, then what?
PeeQueue
Yeeps. Lemur, I grant something of your point. Certainly if I were digging in Uganda and found a fairly recent burial, I would be able to distinguish whether the deceased had been a Tutsi, a Hutu, or a Twa, by the length of the skeleton. And a 150-year-old skeleton in the Midwest U.S. would probably be clearly a Native American or a probable Caucasoid immigrant on the basis of cheekbone structure. But these characteristics are specific to time and place, based on known populations living there. Given a skeleton from an unknown date and provenance, you could not establish its ethnicity. And given a skeleton from prior to known migrations, even knowing its date and provenance would therefore not lead you to a provable ethnicity.
I am aware of the skeletal marks for gender. But “race” and not gender was the question raised. BTW, do you know how to determine the gender of a (Homo sapiens) skull?
PeeQueue, “Cro-Magnon” is not synonymous with “modern man” – it is a specific culture with a nearly unique skull structure (both brachycephalic and dolichocephalic) found in Ice Age Europe. And nobody knows about the origin of races. Carleton Coon, in a highly controversial theory, suggests that the human races may have evolved from Homo erectus separately; Alan Thorne believes he has some evidence that would support this theory. But there is absolutely no proof.
Subspecies and geographic race in non-human animals are nearly overlapping classifications – mammalogists tend to use the former for the larger subgroups and the latter for the smaller, less obvious ones. Modern man belongs to a single, nonsubdivided species with several races based on general characteristics in the soft tissues shared by all or most of one and not with the others. Obvious example here is the !Khoi-San group of southern Africa (“Hottentots” and “Bushmen” in the traditional, pejorative terms), with pale brown skin, steatopygia, tufty hair, and some unique characteristics of both male and female genitalia.
Finally, regarding “mitochondrial Eve” – it is a brilliant and insightful experiment that created this theory. Unfortunately, the sample choices and other methodology were inadequate to adduce the “proof” put forward by the theorists based on it. (Barb did some detailed research on this during her final year of studies.) Quite simply, the samples were not properly random and too few in number to bear out the results; with the same number of samples and a different sampling method, the results could have skewed in quite a different direction. Besides which, the assumption of constant rate of mutation of mitochondrial DNA is itself subject to dispute – nuclear DNA does not hold to a constant rate of mutation.
Well, gender is very difficult, very inexact. But as we know, males will have more robust skulls than females. Males tend to have brow ridges, larger external occipital protruberance, etc. Assigning gender really is nothing more than guesswork. If you find an extremely gracile skull it’s almost always female, if you find an extremely robust skull it’s almost always male. Oh, you can sort out gracile children from gracile females by the teeth…the adult teeth erupt in a predictable pattern, and the teeth wear. If you find someone with the teeth worn down to stumps, they are obviously older than someone with brand-new teeth.
Now, race. Yes, of course it isn’t clear cut. Quoting from my “Digging up Bones,” by DR Brothwell:
My anthropology professor was sometimes called in by the cops to give information about skeletal remains. You can often get a pretty good idea of what race a person is, also of course you can try to get an idea of how old the skeleton is. So, if you are in Alaska and find a generally asian skull, you can guess it is an Eskimo skull. It could be someone from Japan who was shipwrecked in Alaska hundreds of years ago, but it’s almost certainly an Eskimo. If a skull is caucasian in nature and two hundred years old, you can guess it is Russian, since they were the only Caucasians in Alaska at the time. But you can’t do more than assign a skull to a major racial group, and often not even that.
If I simply handed you a skull and asked you to guess what race it was, sometimes you might be able to tell, sometimes not. Just like frequencies of blood types vary by population, so do skeletal characteristics. Dolichocephalic or Brachycephalic? Do the frontals meet the temporals or do the sphenoids meet the occipitals? ARe there accesory bones? What are the sizes of the various plates and protuberances and foramina? You measure these things, then compare to frequency tables of various populations, and decide which population would be the best fit for the individual skull you are examining. Not exact, no, but not just a wild-assed guess either.
I’m not sure if Cro-Magnons in Europe seem to be more like modern Europeans or not. Perhaps if a Cro-Magnon were alive today, we’d have to assign them to a completely new “race”. But I wouldn’t be suprised if modern Europeans have a large amount of Cro-Magnon genes in them.
Mitochondrial “Eve”. Well, perhaps the studies were flawed after all, and it’s back to the drawing board. However, even if the initial estimates were wrong, perhaps more rigorous tests will give us an idea of the the maximum distance between human populations.
I would say that all human races are at the same “grade”, of course there are no superior and inferior humans. But this is a historical accident. There could have been Homo erectus or Neandertal populations hanging around somewhere up until modern times. Then we’d have actual, not illusionary, differences.
Lemur886,
I think we do have actual differences today, I just wouldn’t know how to say which differences are better than others.
If a homo erectus guy was around now, would we necessarily be superior to him? He would almost certainly be able to kick my ass in a fist fight. Maybe I’d best him in a chess match. But then, maybe he’d have a much better grasp of weather patterns, who knows?
Also, my thanks to you and Polycarp and the rest for all the great information.
PeeQueue
There was the Out of Africa I migration when Homo erectus spread throughout Eurasia from England to Java (1.5-1.7 million years ago).
There was the Out of Africa II migration when anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens probably came out of north Africa and spread throughout Eurasia, Oceania and later the Americas (100,000 years ago).
Where I see a problem is that (500,000 to 200,000 years ago, there were a variety of archaic Homo sapiens groups throughout Eurasia, the Neanderthals being the most famous but there are also recent Chinese findings that I have read about on this board.
Unless you postulate an Out of Africa 1 1/2, where archaic Homo sapiens spread out displacing Homo erectus, the archaic Homo sapiens evolved from the indigenous Homo erectus. We Homo sapiens sapiens either evolved from one of these archaic Homo groups or directly from Homo erectus (that point is probably minor).
But as these Homo sapiens sapiens went out into the world, they encountered their cousins. The earliest migrants encountered Neanderthals in the Near Eaast. The oscillation in the glacial climate caused the alternating Hss/Neanderthal occupational layers and a little genetic mixing probably caused the more modern looking Neanderthals for which this area is famous.
I believe that this scenario occured innumerable times throughout Eurasia. The more successful Hss contributed the overwhelming amount of the genes but local archaic Homo sapiens contributed enough in different areas to cause races.
Jois has called me a multi-regionalist for believing this. I do not believe that current races date back to Homo erectus/archaic homo days but I do beleive that those groups contributed something to our Hss ancestors who were probably an extremely homogenous racial group coming out of Africa.
Polycarp, I am envious of you having a wife who can discuss these things. If she ever wants to mess around, please let me know.
PeeQuee: Of course we have racial differences, but these are minor things like skin pigmentation. There is no difference in cranial capacity. Homo erectus was a very intelligent creature, but they had smaller brains than fully modern Homo sapiens. We can argue all day long about what intelligence is or is not, but any reasonable person can agree that humans are smarter than chimps. And any reasonable person would agree that modern humans are smarter than Homo erectus.
Now, it is true that Neadertal people had large cranial capacities…but they had smaller frontal lobes than modern humans. So they were probably very, very smart but not abstract thinkers. We know that their material culture did not change for hundreds of thousands of years.
Mipsman: I don’t know why you feel we have to invoke archaic Homo sapiens to account for racial differences. Racial differences are very minor…a few different skin colors, different proportions of blood proteins, a few epicanthic folds.
If we imagine your scenario of archaic and modern Homo mixing, then it seems likely that most of the “mixing” was between male moderns and femal archaics. Which would mean that we’d expect to find some extreme outlier mitochondrial DNA. It seems to me that all humans alive today have mitochondrial DNA derived from one population ~100,000 years ago.
It strikes me as unusual that we’d see the patterns of racial differences that we see if your scenario was correct. For instance, skin color. Why would the skin color of the archaic populations get fixed in the mixed population? If your scenario was correct, we’d probably see most populations appearing the same, but each region would have some kind of unique alleles that occured in some of the populations. Lets say that the archaics in area A had blood type “C”, rather than A,B,or O. We’d expect to find a few people in area A who had blood type “C” that was radically different from the other blood types. Even then, most alleles from the smaller population would have dissapeared due to genetic drift…it is much more likely for a rare allele to disappear than it is for it to be fixed. So…why would the racial differences between the archaics get fixed in the moderns replacing and mixing with them?
Dang! I dunno how I missed this thread, but anyway, here I am.
It’s hard for anybody to really say when humanity began. Heck, there is so much in flux right now, I’d say that several of the different viewpoints already expressed could be true. For example, Jmullaney said:
This was generally the way people thought about it a little while ago, but it’s my understanding that mostly they are thought of as their own species, Homo neanderthalensis, now.
A new book is out that, I think, really goes into great depth on these subjects and could overturn a lot of the way scientists view the evolution of humanity. The book is Extinct Humans by Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz.
I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Schwartz, interviewing him for an article (I thought the article would run in my local paper, but the editor thought it was “too arcane” – as in, people are too dumb to understand all this stuff < sigh >, so I’m working on getting it printed elsewhere). They really have come at this whole thing from a different and, I think, better angle, explaining that there is no reason to think that human evolution has been any different (until QUITE recently) from the evolution of all other animals. In other words, we’ve always been taught that human evolution was linear – A evolved into B evolved into us. But other animals have very bushy trees, with lots of speciations and dead ends. Tattersall and Schwartz say that an objective look at the hominid fossil record, without any preconceived notions from earlier times, says the same thing about pre-human evolution.
I really would recommend this book!
I would agree with what David said. I guess since I’ve got biology training, the bush and twig model seems natural and obvious to me. I have to remember that most people view human evolution with that “march of humanity” graphic in mind. We’ve known for a long time that the robust Australopithecines were a side branch, and now it is clear that many other fossil humans were “side branches” too. I put “side branch” in scare quotes because modern humans are a side branch too.
Lemur, I just don’t think there has been enough time for the original Homo sapiens sapiens to have covered Eurasia and Africa and physiologically differentiated themselves to survive in their new environment. Some who went north paled and grew Robin Williams hairy, some went south and developed dark skin to resist sun damage, some became Austrailian aborigines and some became Bushmen all in a few ten’s of thousands years. Maybe, but it would require some heavy duty genetic selection, fortuitous beneficial mutations and massive die off’s of the undifferentiated root stock.
In the Middle Eastern corridor, there are overlapping Neanderthal and Hss layers during the period of 100,000 BC to 40,000 BC. The best explanation I have heard is that this is the result of glacial oscillations, colder favoring the Neanderthals (and driving them out of Europe) and warmer favoring the Hss. So the Hss were pinned down in the Near East (and probably North Africa and the rest of Africa) until about 40,000 BC when we can trace them in eastern Europe which we can trace as the Aurignacian culture.
Probably some Hss flanked the Neanderthals and went east into Asia and Australia. Some genetic comparisons postulate a European-Asian separation at 60,000 years ago which fits in well. In addition we know there were Hss in Australia 55,000 years ago. That, however, would indicate the first Hss inhabitants of Asia were of the physiological type of the Australian aborigines, Andaman Islanders, Phillipine Negitos, etc.
However, you have Chinese bones, dated to 25,000 years ago, that resemble Cro-Magnon. This would be expected if the Near Eastern Hss finally broke through the corridor around 40-45,000 BC and, while the group we call Cro-Magnon (or Aurignacian) went into Europe, some of their cousins headed east.
I think it more likely that the Australian aborigene type existed throughout south and maybe all of Asia before 60,000 BC and was partially absorbed and partially driven out to the periphery by invading Hss starting 60,000 BC and by further invasions after 40,000 BC.
Australian aborigines are anatomically Hss and are proven to be cross fertile with Europeans (aqnd Blacks and Asians for that matter). They had at least an additional 50,000 years of adaptation to their environment before the invaders of 60,000 and 40,000 BC came along. Any genetic contribution they made to the invaders would have some benefit.
My position is that, although we do not have the fossil evidence yet, this was repeated along the Urals, in the Central Asian highlands, the coastal Chinese plains, the West African jungles, and the East African highlands.
The original Hss type, which I guess might still survive in the classic “Mediterranean” type, (the Cro-Magnons probably looked like Moamar Khaddafi), spread out, absorbed a small genetic input from the existing archaics already there and those succesful adaption features of the archaics that they passed on were reinforced and resulted in racial differentiation.
It would seem that the alternative is that the original African Hss invaders got skin cancer until a mutation produced a protective skin pigmentation, the northern Eurasian Hss invaders had rickets until a paling mutation allowed them to absorb Vitamin D easier, and northern Asian Hss invaders were freezing until a successful mutation developed a compact body type. All that in 40,000 years. It is possible but the loss of life or at least breeding success of the original undifferentiated Hss must have been huge.
Mipsman, depends on what you mean by “messing around!” 
Sounds like you’ve pretty much got a handle on things. I had many a fight with my issues in evolution professor about multiregional vs. out of Africa.
Just one final general comment on Neandertals. Adam Yax said:
Scientifically trained artists have attemptd reconstruction of Neandertal faces and come up of something that looks muzzel-like, with heavy brow ridges and an enormous nose.
Hmmmm… Maybe they wouldn’t be all that noticeable at a Straight Dope get-together! 
BTW, do any of you folks have any thoughts about teaching evolution in schools? [Polycarp comments – I hope she realizes what she’s getting herself into here!! :))
Y’know, you could just register and stop letting Poly filter all your messages. You could pick a username that reflects your interests–say “SkullDigger.”
How do we know that Poly isn’t changing your dialoge? I think you ought to join us.
mipsman said:
Well, some of the best minds in the field disagree with you. Also, I would say that the evidence disagrees with you. I talked to Jeffrey Schwartz (the scientist I mentioned above) about this very question because I had discussed the possibility in an earlier Mailbag article, and he said there is basically no evidence to support the idea that you are promoting. (You may not disagree, considering that you said we may not have the fossil evidence.) But for the fairly small differentiations you are talking about (skin color, hair, etc.), the amount of time is not really too short. In fact, if the scenario you proposed were true, there would be a lot of evidence available in DNA – evidence that simply does not exist.
David B., multi-regionalism, even in the attenuated form of small genetic contributions from geographically indigenous archaic populations, is admittedly out of favor in the halls of anthropology. Could you ask your friend, J. Schwartz, how Australian Aborigenes fit into the Out of Africa II scenario? If they have been isolated for 55,000 years, are they a relict population of the original Hss, cousins to the Cro-Magnons?
So it’s settled – we have PeeQueue play an Australian Aborigine in chess, and whoever wins is the master race.
Thanks for all the insights, everyone. It really is a complicated topic which will probably never be fully resolved. I’ll try not to exagerate the timeline in other threads though.
Mipsman: the Australians fit in perfectly with the out of africa scenario, since they have probably been in Australia for only 20,000 years or so. I don’t know what dates the oldests sites in Australia have, but they are not older than the hypothesized oldest mitochondial branchings. 55,
I think you are overestimating how divergent australians are. I believe that the australian “race” once covered all of southeast asia…vietnam, malaysia, thailand, indonesia, new guinea, australia. They have been gradually pushed back by the northern “asian” types. Australian aborigines are from the same branch as new guineans (new guinea used to be part of australia back in the ice age) and various melanesian islanders…all the dark skinned pacific islanders. My memory of this is Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, I don’t have the book anymore so I can’t give primary sources that he quotes. The same thing happened to the bushmen, they used to inhabit most of sub-saharan africa but were replaced by the bantu peoples.
I don’t think we need to have very strong selection to get the racial differences we see, since these are just a few alleles. Rather than massive die-offs, I would probably invoke the founder effect. Probably most of the people who lived outside of africa came from a very small population of migrants. We would expect that all non-african people would form a single branch alongside the various african branches. Just look at what has been accomplished in just a few hundred years by dog breeders…you can have tremendous variation in hair, skin, ears, etc in just a few generations. I know people aren’t dogs, but sexual selection may play a role in the external diversity.
Anyway, this still doesn’t address how the external “look” of the small archaic populations could have been fixed in the larger modern population. It seems to me that it would have to be the other way around…the ancient archaics could only retain their distinctness if they formed the majority of the mixed population. And then we would expect certain populations to be more archaic and others more modern. But it seems that all extant human populations are equally modern, even australians.
Can we make it best 2 out of 3?
PeeQueue