Race

[tartanwiz]

Why are the races of humanity so different? We are all of the same species, i.e. Homo Sapiens, yet clearly we have very, very different physical features. Is it just the same as we have very different looking breeds of dog?

[New Forester]

As a species we use very slight variations in face shape to identify individuals -- we can each distinguish many thousands of different people, and recognise many hundreds.

 

Because of that we are very sensitive indeed to subtly different face shapes.  The relatively large differences between "races" overwhelm those subtleties, and we perceive that they are very different.  In fact, the differences are quite small -- we are one species with slight local variations.

 

An illustration of this is given by two men I knew who worked in the same office.  They were very different in size, character and face shape, but were constantly getting confused.  The problem was that they were both balding, wore glasses, had beards and rather pink complexions.  Those crude signals overwhelmed the usual subtle facial cues.

[camille79]

There was a fantastic programme on the BBC a couple of years back that looked at the origins of humans.  As I recall, the theory went that we mostly originated from N. Africa and the process of selection meant that those best suited to each climate thrived.  This is the reason N. europeans tend to have longer, narrower noses (to warm the air before it entered the lungs) than our african counterparts and similarly why it's only in northern climes that you find fairskinned blonds and redheads - they wouldn't survive anywhere else!

[New Forester]

Spot on, Camille, but eastern and southern Africa are more likely.  That's where all the earliest ape-people have been found.

 

Other species of human did arise elsewhere -- Neanderthals, for example, were mainly European, (though their ancestors, which were also ours, were of course African too).  Likewise the much earlier Homo erectus may have been just Asian, again developing from African ancestors.  Homo florensis too, now, the tiny people recently discovered on Flores -- they seem to been a very recent survival of a Homo erectus type.

 

The "Out of Africa" theory is now widely accepted by scientists.  It holds that all modern humans have colonised from Africa, and later diverged into the modern "races".

 

There is another group of scientists who say that earlier local types scattered over the Old World evolved separately and simultaneously into modern humans.  In my view this makes no biological or evolutionary sense.

 

However, it is not perhaps impossible that earlier types did interbreed to some extent with the Africans as they colonised.  This could mean that modern people in some parts of Asia have a small part of their descent from earlier species in that area.

 

On the other hand genetic analysis of modern Europeans and Neanderthals suggests that no Neanderthal genes survive in the modern population (despite appearances in some persons of my acquaintance).  This would not be the same thing as the Asian idea though, as Neanderthals were a parallel species to us, not an earlier, more primitive one.

 

However you look at it, all modern humans are incredibly closely related, and we have all come from much more "primitive" humans quite recently.

[Peter Pedant]

No I dont think we do look different.If some of us had two heads then i think you may have a point.

HomoFlorensis is a different species, it is in Nature of a week or so ago. Dony buy it (�10) but it is worth a trip to a library to see the article.

Florrie sure looks different! 3' 6" squat

eyes too close together\-a bit like Geo Bush

No no this is meant to be serious.

 

[CHOPS'R'US]

Hey put it this way if we all looked the same the world would be avery boring place wouldn't it lol.....

[Kingaroo]

"I shouldn't know you again if we met," Humpty Dumpty replied..., "You're so exactly like other people... Your face is the same as everybody has: the two eyes here, nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance, or the mouth at the top, that would be some help."

Chapter 6, Through the Looking Glass