RE: Morphological and Genetic Races in Humans

["Tracy L. Ford" <dino.hunter@home.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
Jaime A. Headden
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 2:08 PM
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Cc: david.marjanovic@gmx.at
Subject: Re: Morphological and Genetic Races in Humans

David Marjanovic (david.marjanovic@gmx.at) wrote:

<To draw any line here would be even a lot more arbitrary than to draw one
between *Homo ergaster*
and *Homo sapiens* in East Africa, who are surely just chronospecies there,
_if we had a much
better fossil record from 200,000 years ago_.>

  And should I say that I draw no lines? I do not recognize genetic
exclusivity, period,
full-stop. My point here is that interbreedability exists in spite of the
fact that broad
catagorial (maybe one criterion per group) can exist within many races. Even
so refined as a 2,000
count set of races, it is irrelevant. There is an essentially african
morphotype (does not cross
the Bushman type), there is an essentially mongloid or asian/amerind
morphotype, and there is an
essentially caucasian morphotype. As with dogs and cat breeds, the
intermixing of types has led to
a good deal of confusion regarding what we recognize as a "race," by fuzzing
the boundaries. This
is what happens at a finer level than dog or cat breeds, but dogs are not as
prevalent in their
mixing as humans are [same for cats].

  There are broad morphological features that indicate an essential type
that we have had to deal
with for thousands of years. One can argue that Avars are not even a race,
nor are the Turks, as
they are essentially middle-eastern in type. I see that in the effort to
destabilize the
exclusive-race theory (which is a good thing) that the nature of the
distinct racial morphotype
has been lost. It means nothing, except as a measure of diversification in
human history. The more
plesiomoprhies, the more ancient a lineage. It's as simple as that.
Caucasions as a whole
typically lack the head brows, broad cheeks, and have saddle-shaped nasals,
as a result of their
ecology [cloudy, temperate, more delicate masticatory needs, etc.]. To argue
the abscence of these
types is to take the "no race" concept too far.

  Interbreeding occurs, and I'm sure that in a few thousand years, if we're
lucky, it will have
occured to such an extent that it would not be any more possible to
distinguish a person from
Africa from someone from Svalbard from a person in the Australian Bush or
the deeps of Amazonia.
Do I worry? No. In the past 5000 years I am very certain the distinctions
were much more prevalent
than they are now, as intermixing had not occured as much.<<

Hmm, odd, I thought this was a dinosaur list and we talked about dinosaurs.
Did I miss something someplace? :)

I just hope were not going to follow the media and claim anything
prehistoric animal is a dinosaur because I'm trying to figure out how this
involves dinosaurs?

Tracy L. Ford
P. O. Box 1171
Poway Ca  92074