What African tribe is the theoretical original "race"?

Factual Questions
1

I fell asleep with the television on last night. I woke up during a National Geographic documentary entitled “What is Human?” in which the origin of different races was mentioned. I was still coming in and out of sleep during the show, but I remember something about a major volcanic blast ca. 70,000BCE that may have killed most of the humans then in existence (due more to climate changes than the blast itself) until perhaps only about 2,000 were left. The humans then began migrating and racially changing as they adapted to their new climates.

The documentary mentioned a tribe of people on the African plains who still exist and are believed to be the direct descendants of the “Original Race”. They have the folded eyelids of many Asians, a skin tone that could easily be darkened or lightened depending on the climate, the high cheekbones of Mongolian, etc… This was just as I was waking up; I’ve googled some keywords but to no avail.

Does anybody know what tribe they are referring to? I want to see some photographs. Also, do you happen to know the location of the volcano that was mentioned?

2

If the story is true, then we are all the direct descendants of that original group.

3

That is the theory. The interesting thing was that you really could see “all races” in the features of these people, but unfortunately I was too close to sleep state to remember their name.

4

It was the !Kung/San people, sometimes called “Bushmen”. These are the guys you saw if you watched the movie “The Gods Mush be Crazy”-- the ones who talk with a “click” language (usually denoted by “!”).

But your claim (and theirs, if they made it) is very deceiving. We are ALL descendent from that original tribe, if there ever was such a tribe. Not all anthroplogists buy into the theory that humans went thru such a drastic evolutionary bottleneck, although it’s a pretty mainstream hypothesis.

The Bushmen people do seem to have a variety of physical characteristics that span the racial groups one sees today. But you have to remember that they have been evolving just as long as every other group on the earth, too, so there’s no guarantee they look anything like there ancestors of 60,000 years ago.

5

Here you go: San Bushment

6

But describing them as the “original race” implies that for some reason, they haven’t changed genetically at all in the intervening time, while all other groups have. I would imagine that’s not true. And of course, we’re descended from those people’s ancestors - but that means they’re descended from our ancestors.

Maybe they look a lot like various racial groups, and maybe they’ve stayed in one spot for a long time, but I don’t really see how one still-extant group could be considered the “original” humans.

7

The idea is that these guys have pretty much stayed in the same geographic area fro 10s of thousands of years, while the rest of us (including other Africans) left. But I don’t find it believable that they have actually lived in complete genetic isolation for all that time. It’s a gross oversimplification.

On a larger scale, it’s like saying (incorrectly) that we all evolved from chimps because chimps still live in the area where our common ancestor evolved. The truth is, of course, that chimps and humans evloved from a common ancestor that maybe looked more like a chimp than a human, but still is neither a chimp nor a human-- it’s something else.

So too, you and any San Bushman evolved from the same population of humans some 75,000 years ago +/-, but you DID NOT evloved FROM a San Bushman.

8

Aren’t we all the direct descendents of the first evolved Homo sapiens? Or are they meaning to imply that they split off the Homo sapiens line first? It would mean that they’re less similar to other groups of humans than the rest of us are to each other. Certainly if they have specific genes not found in other groups, they must be particularly dissimilar, and therefore probably unlike our own ancestors.

Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel states that the Khoisan (the !Kung, San, and some other groups if I understand correctly) are one of five major racial divisions of humanity, pygmies being another, and I can’t really remember what the other three were.

9

True, they haven’t remained genetically homogeneous (they’d be dangerously inbred and probably born with tails and exoskeletons by now if they had, besides which Africa has always been a highway continent of people constantly moving through, from, to, etc.), but they are probably the most like the common ancestors of the original Human Flavored folk.

They used a different word other than Bushmen last night that I’d remember if I heard but…

Of course there’s also the Neanderthal genes to throw into the fray. Scholars differ in opinions as to whether Neanderthals and modern humans had the ability to interbreed, but the findings on the Iberian peninsula implied that they could. Then add the H. Floresensis “hobbit folk” into the mix and it gets even more complicated.

10

The current accepted races are Capoid (pygmies- it’s believed that Khoisan are closely related to this group, though they are not pygmies), Congoid (formerly known as Negroid), Mongoloid (not a pejorative in this sense), Caucasoid and Australoid. Khoisan is considered “probably” the oldest language on Earth as well and has been studied for relationship to other languages (though to very little avail).

11

It just means that their ancestors were a group that did not have individuals who left Africa among them. Other Africans are derived from groups, some of whom DID leave Africa. It would be wrong to use the term “split off”, since they (and everyone alive today) is still ON the H. sapiens line.

Assuming for the moment that there actually is a thing called “race”:

Traditionally*, there were 4 broad races: Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid. Diamond’s statement is a recognition that you don’t just lump all sub-Saharan Africans into one “race”. The Bushmen are just as different genetically from someone who lives in Ghana, as they are from someone who lives in Tokyo or London.

Of course, those 4 broad “races” always had problems associated with them because you can’t really draw clean boundaries and there are lots of people who just don’t fit in. They also were set up by Europeans and were based exlcusively on physical characteristics-- and, intentionally or not, based on how “different” a group was from Europeans.

The fact that the San were lumped in with all other Africans is a good indictement of that whole “racial model”. All the Europeans saw were some dark skinned people with dark, curley hair. The fact is, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there is something very different about this group (the San) relative to most other sub-Sahars Africans.

*Of course there were countless racial models used over the years, but this is the simplistic one I was taught in school.

12

Wow. I really screwed up that last part about the 5 races. I misread the quote from Diamand. His 5 races were the 4 I mentioned, plus the San, often called “Capoid”. Sorry about that.

At any rate, most biologists will tell you that the concept or “race” is not very usefull scientifically, as you can’t come up with an objective way to decide who is in which race and who isn’t. It’s a social construct at best.

The idea of races more or less assumes that there were serveral (say 5 for argument’s sake) groups of humans that lived in complete genetic isolation for tens of thousands of years and developed different characteristics. The truth is, though, that all groups have passed genes back and forth and you can’t just a draw a line somewhere and say: people on this side of the line are race “A” and people on the other side of the line are race “B”.

13

There isn’t a Khoisan language, just so we’re clear. There’s lots of them. I don’t see how we can consider them any older than any other language family, since it’s likely that humans have all spoken since the dawn of language. And the differentiation among Khoe languages demonstrates that they have certainly not stayed the same all this time - and without records, it’s impossible to say how different it is from its original form.

The claims that the clicks are somehow something that harkens back to the dawn of language are completely unjustifiable; they’re unique to that language group and a couple nearby languages that have picked them up through areal contact, but there’s just not evidence that they weren’t originally an innovation that was added to the phonetic inventory of an older language. Further, even if clicks are some archaic feature that existed at one point in a Proto-World language (whose existence itself is hypothetical), that’s not to say that every other feature of the language couldn’t be innovative. But the claim that it’s the oldest language family is just without merit or evidence. There is no meaningful way to decide that something is the world’s “oldest language.”

14

Absolutely correct. In fact, we did a “what is the oldest language” thread in this forum a few months ago. I’m not sure if you participated in that thread, but you summed things up very well.

It should be noted, however, that the claims of the San being the “oldest” group of humans and the claim that their language is the “oldest” language are not independent ideas. The latter derives from the former. Both, however, suffer from the same fallacy-- ie, that one group can be called older than any other group. The only thing “older” about them is that the might (and it’s important to emphasize “might”) have stayed in roughly the same geographic location for a longer time than any other group.

The model being proposed goes something like this (and I’m oversimplifying, so don’t take any of this too literally):

About 75k years ago, there was a very small number of H. sapiens all living somewhere in Eastern Africa. Let’s call these people Group A. All humans belonged to group A, and group A encompassed all humans.

Flash forward a few thousand years and group A splits up. One group heads north and the other pretty much stays put. Let’s call these two groups Group A(N) and Group A(S). Both groups look the same, have mostly the same genes, and speak the same language. The only difference is that one group lives north and the other group lives south. The really both are still Group A.

Flash forward a few thousand years and the two groups start to look a bit different. They have slightly different genetic markers and their languages are no longer mutually intelligilble. We really can’t call these groups Group A anymore, so let’s call the southern branch Group B and the northern branch Group C. No one belongs to Group A anymore. In fact, there no longer IS a Group A (this is KEY, and we’ll come back to it later).

Flash forward a few more thousand years, and some of the Group C folks have migrated across the Red Sea into what we now call Yemen. The two groups are still the same, though, so we’ll call them Group C(W) for the group that stayed west, in Africa, and Group C(E) for those who migrated east into Yemen. Meanwhile, Group B is minding its own business in the south, and none of them was in the group that migrated to Yemen. They’re still Group B.

Flash Forward a few thousand years and the Yemen folk are now differnt from the group that stayed in Africa. Let’s call Group C(W)'s descendants Group E, and let’s call Group C(E)'s descendants Group F. Meanwhile, Group B is still minding its own business down south, but they’ve change too, so we now have to call them Group D. There is no longer a Group B or a Group C.

This scenario goes thru many iterations until we have the situation today:

Everyone on earth is descended from Group A.

Everyone on earth, except the San, is descended from Group C.

Everyone on earth outside of sub-Sahara Africa is descended from Group F.

What happend to Group A? THEY NO LONGER EXIST. The error people are making is saying that the San are still Group A, when in fact they became Group B and then Group D, etc. The hypothesis is that they did this while pretty much “minding their own business” and not mixing very much with the other groups. But, you can’t call them Group A anymore than you can call all the rest of us Group A.

Another way to look at it is the language analogy. Latin evolved into several differnt languages, including Spanish, French, and Italian. Neither of those three newer languages is Latin, and none of them is called Latin. In particular, we don’t call Italian “Latin”, even though it’s spoken in the area where Latin originated. It’s different from Latin, just like Spanish and French are different from Latin.

Calling the San people the “oldest people on earth” is like calling the Italian “the oldest Romance language”.

What some people might be arguing for (and even this is a bit controversial) is that the San, while different form what we called Group A above, are still closer genetically, physically and linguistically to Group A than all of the rest of us are. The idea is that since they didn’t migrate as much, they were under less selective pressure to change than the other groups. But we don’t really know this. It’s pretty much just speculation. The fact that the San appear to have physical characteristics that cut across racial bounderies lends this some credence, but it’s still an argument after the fact. There is no **direct **evidence that the physical similarities of other races are dervied from the same source.

15

There is actually some evidence that click languages may in fact be very old, although it is controversial.

Not all click languages are found in the same area as the Khoisan. A couple groups in Tanzania, including the Hadza and Sandawe, also speak click languages. But these groups are very different genetically from the Khoisan, implying that they have been separate a very long time.

If in fact the clicks in both groups are homologous (descended from a single ancestral language) this implies that this ancestral language was spoken a very long time ago. Of course, it’s possible that these click sounds are not descended from the same ancestral language, but are convergent.

Here’s a brief summary

Here’s the abstract of the original research

16
17

Actually, the topic of discussion here is more closely related to Y-chromosomal Adam and the work done by Spencer Wells (also referenced in the National Geographic cite I gave about wrt the San Bushmen).

18

Not to dispute anything you say, which is quite correct, but there is a certain taxonomic sense in which the Khoisan could be called “older.” The Khoisan lineage (clade) apparently branched off from other modern humans earlier than any other extant population. (In cladistic terms, this lineage is the “sister group” to all other human groups. I recognize that human groups may not strictly be clades, because there has been some intermixture over time.) Therefore this clade could be referred to as the “oldest” (or, more properly, most basal) human lineage still in existence. This makes no suppositions as to how much the Khoisan have changed physically or in other respects over this time, only that this group has been in existence as a separate lineage the longest. All other human populations/lineages are of more recent origin.

Similarly, the Monotremes are the “oldest” (most basal) extant clade among the mammals, even though they undoubtedly look nothing like the common ancestor of Monotremes and Eutherians, and have changed genetically at least as much as any Eutherian lineage.

19

True, if it can be established that they are, in fact, a separate lineage. How do you go about demonstrating that the lineage is “separate”, and just how “separate” does it need to be? Surely no one would argue that the Khoisan group has lived in genetic isolation for > 60,000 years, right?

20

The lack of complete genetic isolation does complicate cladistic analyses for groups below the species level. However, it is still possible. One frequently sees cladistic analyses for subspecies of organisms, as well as between human groups.

I’ve just been reading a paper comparing genetic and linguistic divergence among indigenous groups in lower Central America, which finds a good correlation between these independent measures. This divergence is in turn correlated with the present geographical location of of these populations, although not as well. The authors conclude that these populatons began diverging about 7,000 years ago. (They took some pains to eliminate individuals from the analyses whose ancestors were known to have intermarried with other tribal groups, as well as those who had alleles known or assumed to be of European or African origin).

In such cases, one has to assume that the rate of introduction of new alleles from other populations has been low compared to the origin of new variants within the lineage by mutation. This is probably the case in the Khoisan. In any event, such introduction of foreign alleles will have the result of making two lineages appear to be more closely related, and thus of more recent separation, than they otherwise would. Therefore estimates for the divergence of the Kboisan might be regarded as a minimum.