Posted on 05/03/2014 1:51:51 PM PDT by globelamp
".. The orthodoxy's equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that "racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance."
The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that "human equality is a contingent fact of history," as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984."
"Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, has written a book that pulls back the curtain."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Thanks. Though your description sounds more like “the most average human.”
I guess I’ve never really understood what is meant by “direct descendant,” much less “more direct descendant.” How is one person a more direct descendant than his cousin?
The problem there being that both Japheth and Shem are considered ancestors of what we now call Caucasians.
Africans would be considered descended from Ham.
But that leaves no son to be ancestral to East Asians, what we used to call Orientals or Mongoloids.
Typically, the East Asians were considered sons of Japheth and not all Africans were looked at as sons of Ham. There were some who were considered Semmites, and some who where of Japhteth.
Remember Rwanda? That was between two groups, one who was NOT considered from the Hammite line. Can’t remember which side though.
But if there is no hard and fast separation between races based on the three sons, the whole notion of there being three races because they are descended from Noah’s three sons goes out the window.
I do agree that this separation is specifically disproven by the Bible. For instance, one of the sons of Ham was Canaan, and the Canaanites were physically indistinguishable from the Israelites.
In East Africa, the people fall into two general categories.
One is what are sometimes called the Bantu or Negroid. These appear to have spread out from somewhere in West Africa, and are the group from which most American blacks are descended, for fairly obvious geographical reasons. They are relatively short and heavy, and have the classical “African” or Negroid features.
The other used to sometimes be called “Hamitic” and includes the Tutsi, Masai, many Ethiopians and Somalis, etc. They are in general much taller and more slender, and have features we would consider more “European” or Caucasian, with more narrow noses, less prominent brows, etc.
The Tutsi are classic “Hamites,” which is now considered pejorative, and the Hutu classic Bantu or Negroid. They’ve apparently lived in proximity for at least a thousand years and there’s been a lot of mixing, so the distinction in appearance isn’t absolute.
But the physical difference in appearance was distinct enough the Hutu killers generally had little difficulty determining which people to kill.
Recent data effectively confirms multiregional evolution.
Oops.
Sigh...so what’s the bottom line? The Chinese are smart and Caucasians (with the exception of Jews) and Negroid races are boobs? We’ve pretty much known this for 50 years and I speak as a completely boobish Caucasian.
Your post is fascinating. Many Americans understand that our English got stuck in aspic. What makes it equally interesting, is that the British will often make fun of our use of English without understanding that it is often an archaic form of their very own language.
Thanks for bringing more details! I couldn’t remember the specifics with the Tutsi’s.
But remember that not all believe the Canaanites were Semites. There were a variety of peoples in the Levant during that time, and while the group that became the Phoneticians/ Carthaginians were Semitic, the Canaanites referenced could have been part of an earlier group that was in the area more related to the old Egyptian peoples. I do not remember what book that came from, but I think it was “In Search of the Genesis World”.
Human equality can only come from G-d, not from "nature red in tooth and claw." Yet on this issue theists and atheists seem to switch places (as they do on the topic of extinction, which to the atheist should be a meaningless repetition of what has always happened and to the theist should be the eternal and tragic loss of a niche species created especially by G-d).
Leave it to a “palaeo” to make my points for me.
When I took Anthropology in college, we were taught:
Caucasian - Europeans, Arabs, Indians
Negroid - Black Africans
Mongoloid - East Asians—Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Thais, etc.
Undifferentiated Mongoloid - Eskimos and American Indians
Australiod - Australian aborigines, New Guineans, Melanesians
Capoid - Bushmen, Hottentots; short brown peoples of South Africa
See this Youtube video on Shakespeare: Original pronunciation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
Thanks for the link!
“Capoid - Bushmen, Hottentots; short brown peoples of South Africa”
I never heard of this group.
But it fits in with my thoughts - because I was remembering Rawanda and how the one tribe slaughtered the other and, iirc, the only difference between these groups are a. their appearance and b. their social class (which I suppose might stem - somehow! - from their appearance).
Now I could be mistaken, but that is my recollection. There were no differences of language, religion, etc. It was pretty much just pure, what shall we say, ethnic (?) hatred.
It would probably be almost impossible for a white person to go over there and say, or you are are Hutu and you over there are a Tutsi (excuse any spelling errors, please).
So, you know, I just think it shows that evil lurks in the hearts of men and there isn’t a way to eliminate that you just have to try and control outrageous behavior.
Which was a failure in Rawanda so I can’t say much positive about that.
That is incorrect. “Hamitic” is a subgroup of the Caucasoid race. The taxon was reserved for populations inhabiting North and Northeast Africa that speak non-Semitic languages from the Hamito-Semitic/Afro-Asiatic family i.e. from the family’s Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian branches. This includes populations like the Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians, Somalis, Tuareg and Sahraoui. It doesn’t include Bantu/Nilotic Negroid populations like the Tutsi and Masai, though these groups do have some Hamitic admixture.
You may be correct about the precise definitions used for language classification, though I believe the term “Hamitic” has gone completely out of use.
However, what I was talking about were the racial categories outlined by anthropologists and explorers in the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th and generally accepted up thru WWII.
Under these notions, the tall/slender tribes of East Africa with “Caucasoid” features were classified as Hamitic or as blends of Hamites and Negroes and were considered to be the true source of anything vaguely resembling civilization in the area. They were considered to be “white” in some sense and vastly superior racially to the lowly blacks/Negroes among whom they lived.
This broad use of the term Hamitic is why the term has gone out of use, I believe generally even in the restricted linguistic sense you describe. It is wildly non-PC.
Wiki has a decent article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamitic
Taxonomy of peoples and languages, like other taxonomy, has no definitive existence in the real world. They are categories we assign, often somewhat arbitrarily, because this categorization has meaning to us. The categories we put things into often tells us more about ourselves than it does about the items we classify.
The "original" inhabitants of most of Africa were short and brown (rather than black) hunter/gatherer types.
They were pushed back and exterminated over most of Africa by Bantu "black" peoples coming out of roughly where Cameroon is today, as well as by taller, "whiter" types from the Northeast. Isolated groups remain, such as the pygmies of Central Africa are still there, surrounded by a sea of Bantu.
The Bantu were farmers and pastoralists rather than hunters. The process by which they moved in and took the land was quite remarkably similar to that by which whites conquered America and Oz. Scholarly discussion of this process, however, generally used neutral terms such as "migration," rather than the judgmental terms such as "invasion" and "conquest" used to describe the same process by Europeans. It is pretty doubtful the "Capoids" enjoyed the process any more than the "American Indians" did.
In S. Africa the Capoids were still around as Hottentots simply because the Bantu hadn't got quite all the way down to the Cape by the time the Dutch arrived. They have been pretty much absorbed into the "Cape Colored" group.
The Bushmen continue to roam desert areas, which the Bantus weren't interested in.
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History
by Nicholas Wade
Paperback
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