Posted on 02/27/2002 4:56:58 PM PST by blam
Are you speaking of Idi Amin? You pick your ancestors and I'll pick mine.
It may be premature to study Africa and Africans-for many reasons.
I think a detailed study of aboriginal Australians, polynesians, Han Chinese and Indonesians would be very interesting, and might speak to your issue about how variable phenotype can be with a common genotype.
Perhaps Mensch is to the right of Wardaddy, one never knows for sure.
The gist of your comment escapes me. If you mean to infer that somehow Idi Amin is an ancestor of mine, that is chronologicly impossible. If you think I desire to have Idi Amin as an ancestor, thats not right either. Exactly how does one pick ones ancestors?
My ancestors all came by boat, under Capt. Noah, landed in the Caucasus, that is why we are called Caucasian.
"Several millennia" is just a speck of time compared to 80,000 years. And "environment" is not just geographical location. Environment is all of the factors that existed at a certain period of time: desease, weather, air quality, competition with other species, etc., etc., etc.,....
If Africa had been empty of people, and a group from say, Europe or America migrated there in our current time, there would be no way to predict how they would turn out 80,000 years from now. There would be just too many factors to consider in their environment.
No, that's an over-simple answer. They are referring to a set of bones from a female who died 80,000 years ago. There's no telling how many others were in her group because they haven't found the other bones. They really should be referring to "Lucy's group" rather than "Lucy."
ME"Are you speaking of Idi Amin? You pick your ancestors and I'll pick mine."
I presume that you look on Idi Amin as a cousin - a branch from your family tree. This is just more of the gobbldy gook so many people embrace without any solid facts other than the word of some pontificating self important PHD.
Yesterday I was admonished for being a pragmatist on one thread and then called a racist on another. I'm not sure where I fit in around here at times. All I know for sure is that you are in the direction from which the sun sets from where I sit. If I can believe your homepage. Which I do btw.
Well considering that genetic variation is tiny amongst humans I consider Amin (as I do you) to be more like brothers... Chimpanzees I look on as cousins. Pity we don't get to choose our relatives.
This is just more of the gobbldy gook so many people embrace without any solid facts other than the word of some pontificating self important PHD.
Praytell what do you consider to be "solid facts"?
5"5", Complete with eyebrow ridge, bandy legs, huge chest and arm muscles, very hirsute, etc. In fact, all over Europe, there are little pockets of people who look like Neandertal hybrids.
On the other hand, your basic Massachusetts Kennedy voter doesn't look at all like a hybrid. I'd wager straight Neandertal, or a simian/homo semi-erectus cross.
And "environment" is not just geographical location. Environment is all of the factors that existed at a certain period of time: desease, Sorry, you appear to be confusing the endogenous and exogenous features: a desease is that of a population, it is endogenous thus and not a part of the environment.
weather, air quality, are most certainly parts of geography.
competition with other species, the same, if you consider geography in a broad sense, as it has been done for decades now.
etc., etc., etc.,.... So, besides these "etc." and a few misused quasi-scientific words, what did you really say in your post?
I should have used the html for etc.,etc.,etc.,.....<./smirk.>. I've always liked that line from "The King and I."
Just in case you missed my meaning, this is what I intended to convey: whether you choose to call it "environment" or something else, everything, that happens, everything that can effect they lives of individual people can have a direct or indirect effect on the gene pool. The future of the gene pool is affected by the life or death of individuals. The point I was making was that there are simply too many factors (if you like that word better than environment) that are all coming into play at the same time to predict what factors will have a greater impact on future generations. Some of the factors are cultural, like marriage customs; some factors are what you might agree to be environmental, like the geograpical conditions; some factors come out of sharing the environment with other life forms, like being exposed to desease, or other preditors, or competition for food with other humans. The list of factors at any given time period could fill an encyclopedia.
Rgards, TQ.
I think that the biggest problem with analysis is that we don't know much about what circumstances existed in pre-history. Six different anthropologists will give you 10 different answers. They each have their own point of view, and sometimes their own particular agenda. I find each of the theories interesting, but I don't hold to any one theory.
The most interesting theory I've come across is the idea that many varieties of humans existed at the same time. The Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthal may have been different races rather than different species. The current homo sapiens may be a blending of those races, rather than the winner of the battle between the two.
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