Racial Diversity among Hominids

I think it depends on how far neanderthals migrated and how long they lived in certain areas of the world. If most of them lived in hot climates like the African regions, they would most likely have been dark-skinned. Had they lived in colder climates, their features would have changed accordingly (lighter skin, more hair etc.) It isn't impossible to speculate at all.


By the way, if you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading the Earth's Children series by Jean Auld. She has some fascinating theories about how homo sapiens and neanderthals would have interacted. And they are very entertaining novels.

 

Neanderthal is in Germany...but the current majority opinion in science seems to be that the first humans were from Africa.

 

Neandertals were found in Europe and some of Asia. From what I recall, they co-existed with other early hominids like cro-magnon(?) As far as races, the interesting question would be "what came first : races or the branches of hominids?" Were there white neandertals, black neandertals, etc.? Anybody know?

There's a documentary on the Discovery Channel I think that showed the evolution of hominids. It was one of the most interesting docs I've watched on that station.

 

I saw Neanderthal on the Discovery Channel it was about the Neaderthals and Cro-Magnons coexisting together..it was quite interesting! I think they ended with a Cro-Magnon and Neaderthal hybrid..how many of those existed?

 

Did anyone catch the documentary "Journey of Man" on Houston PBS a few weeks back? It chronicled work by University of Texas / Harvard grad and anthropologist/geneticist Spencer Wells, Ph.D, that traced the genetic roots of all the various peoples, specifically, all males, in the world to one man in Africa around 50,000 years ago, 2,000 generations ago.

His research hinged on the fact that in males, the Y sex chromosome is inherited entirely from the father, unlike all of our other chromosomes, which are an amalgam of genes from both the mother and the father, known as genetic recombination. Therefore, the Y chromosome does not undergo genetic recombination, and remains largely intact and unchanged from one generation of males to the next, EXCEPT, and this is key, through occasional, yet inevitable, normal genetic mutation. These genetic mutations in the Y chromosome, termed "markers," are then passed down to the successive generations of males. Over time, the markers accumulate over generations of males, and different lineages have different accumulations of markers. By taking blood samples of males from all over the world, and sequencing the Y chromosome from each, he was able to piece together a genetic roadmap using these markers as guides. What he discovered is that all the markers point to a common Y chromosome, a common origin, a common starting point or basis.

Mind-blowing stuff, if you're into this kind of thing.

Interesting findings presented in the show that I can remember:

- Through genetic analysis, it was long known that Aboriginal Australians are very close genetic descendants of the bushmen of Africa, but no one had much evidence that such a long migration (from Africa to Australia) had ever taken place. So Wells speculates that early humans left Africa and followed the coastline (of what is now the Indian Ocean) to Australia. To test his claim, he took blood samples from males in a village in southern India, looking for an intermediate marker in their Y chromosome that would link the Aborigines to African Bushmen. Sure enough one man's Y chromosome contained the marker he was looking for.

- There were two main groups of humans that left Africa. The first were ancestors of the Australian Aborigines and Indian Dravidians (the "missing link" described above. Apparently, from googling, this is controversial and flies in the face of the conventional Indian belief that Aryans were the first to arrive in India, with Dravidians coming later.). The second group migrated to the middle east, near the Kazakhstan area (insert Borat joke here), and this group fanned out to populate the rest of the earth, from Europe, to India (the Aryans, I suppose), through East Asia, and finally to the Americas. Each group lived more or less in isolation and from these groups developed the rest of the various races which we see today.

- The ancestors of the Native Americans were from northeastern Asia. Nothing new there. However, through his Y chromosome gene mapping technique, he theorized that a small group of 10 people (I think it was 10, whatever it was, it was a small number, maybe it was 7) crossed the land bridge to North America. The descendants of this small group of 10 people (something like 3 males and 7 females, don't quote me on that) came to populate the entire landmass of the Americas in about 2,000 years time (don't quote me on that either). Man, that's mind blowing. Start with 10 people, and in 2,000 years you have two continents full.


Anybody else catch this that can verify/correct/add to these facts? Hope I didn't butcher it up too badly.

When I caught it, even though I missed the beginning, I was absolutely entranced. If his findings hold true, we all, everyone in the world, more or less have the same great great great .....(repeat 'great' about 2,000 more times) grandfather. AFAIK this is some of the most direct scientific, genetic evidence to date that we are all cousins, albeit distant cousins, but cousins nonetheless.

I ordered the DVD from Amazon and should get it in a couple of months. If you're into this, you should definitely give it a look.

 

moomoo,

I'm not really too into this stuff, but wow, what you typed has gotten me really interested in it. If it doesn't come on tv again sometime soon, I'll probably buy the DVD, too. Really cool stuff - thanks!

 

Thanks moomoo....now i can fall asleep all comfy knowing that i'm cousins with dubya, karl malone, and bin laden

 

Dude, if I remember correctly, in the show they actually brought up that question!

"Could GWB actually be related to OBL? Could he be related to Saddam?"

Sure got my attention!

 

Human Origins - my favorite class I ever took at UT.

FIRST: The original question. Yes and no, there are and aren't races between early man. Early early early man lived more on an individual basis, maybe in a small (5 - 10 people) community, and they were all in Africa. At this point, no there aren't races.

Skip ahead a couple million years, and yes, there are. There are 2 species of Homo sapiens (younger than about 80,000 years ago) because of the geographic distance between the two, anthropologists and other scientists called them (and still do) by 2 different names. But the more people look at it and examine things, the more they realize that these 2 are probably the same species, but just slightly physiologically different because of the environments they migrated to.

IIRC, those two are Homo ergaster (African and European) and Homo erectus (Asian). And what's really interesting is that though each group stayed to themselves, it seems as though they occasionally crossed paths and traded tools and belongings... There are isolated incidences of tools found in one location hundreds of miles away from the second location where they would have been commonly used, and vice versa. I'll have to look that up to double check.

SECOND: moomoo's info and some other random facts. moomoo is right about what he said. But keep in mind, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The trouble with the genetic analysis of the marker genes on the Y chromosome is that mutations can revert back to a state that was prevalent a long time ago.... It makes it a bit tricky to determine who's really close to their ancestors, and who's changed so much, it seems the same.

If yall are interested in genetic analysis, yall should check out the "molecular clock" it operates on a similar level with genetic analysis.

Now, as far as the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, yes they did live together, for a time. But Neanderthals were built for the colder climate and were very big and bulky, very slow moving. Cro-Magnon just out-competed Neanderthal for food and resources and most likely is directly our ancestor, rather than Neanderthal.

And some other interesting facts about hominids in general...

The Australian ancestors aren't exactly an original group... What happened was that when the ice age was ending, but it was still pretty damn cold here on earth, man started migrating across Asia. Some of them went north when they got to the Pacific. They walked acrosse the Bering Strait, and inhabited the "new world".
The others went south, and pretty much walked, swam, and "boated" across Java and the Phillippines until they got to Australia. But by that time, the ice had melted too much, and they couldn't really get back. So they've just been stuck there for a really long time and hadn't changed much genetically until the Brits dumped their convicts over there.

Homo habilis is latin for "handy man". Homo habilis was the first species to produce complex stone tools from breaking stones apart and producing sharp edges. Although hominoids had been scavenging leftover meat from predators, now man could literally cut meat off the bone and make a quicker getaway, thus enhancing the survival rate. They also used the bones as tools as well. Man also started hunting large game with these tools.

There's a skeleton of an Archaic human in South America that is older than any skeleton found in North America so far. And believe it or not, central Texas is an archeological hot spot for artifacts of the first indigenous people.

And here's my last bit of nerdness: The entire reason that we became bipedal was because of the deforestation of Africa at the end of the Ice Age. The forests turned into grasslands, and bipedalism allowed for a more efficient way of moving between patches of forest, and was a means for standing up straight enough to see over the tops of the grass (so they could see predators coming)

 

Double post:

Damn I'm a nerd.




BTW, if any of you fellow longhorns are more interested in any of this, take Antropology 301 with Dr. John Kappelman. He's a bit monotone, and you'll have trouble staying awake, but it's a hell of an interesting class.

 

What hominid type does Patrick Ewing belong to?

 

Ya know, the flood of Borat jokes threatens to derail this thread....

 

I've seen that documentary twice, well not the whole thing. When it was on recently, I got tired of the long interruptions asking for money.

 

When and why did people start pronouncing it "Neandertals" instead of "Neanderthals?"

 

Because it's German. Neander is the name of the valley. Tal, or Thal (but it's still pronounced 'tal') is the German word for valley.

It's never really been pronounced Neander-thals. People just mistakenly see it and say it that way.