The Human Race

and how it was run

It is hard to decide how to introduce this subject. Human  evolution can be  a touchy subject  when you start trying to explain how racial differences developed. For some people, any suggestion  that human evolution  did not proceed in a strictly linear way, makes you a  racist.

This seems to be why mainstream paleoanthropologists are stuck on  some strange ideas. By  this I mean, the branch of anthropology of people who look at fossils  and other evidence, and  theorize from this about  how  modern humans evolved. They have this need to categorize  early humans as different  species, or subspecies,  from  the presently existing people. 

Various prehistoric  people like the Neandertals or Denisovans  are  just  racial groupings of people. There have been no prehuman or nonhuman  organisms for about four million years now. Yet some people imagine an ethical question of when do apes become humans. 

This question does not go anywhere. Humans  have  forty six chromosomes, all the apes have forty eight. This makes interbreeding impossible. 

Not that  people have not tried. Attempts to inseminate chimps  and gorillas with human sperm produced nothing. 

This is the way  we must  define humans. We can all interbreed. It has nothing to do with ability to speak or even to  use tools and fire. 

If we start thinking that way then we get into defining people according to whether they have developed advanced technology, an urban lifestyle, and so on. We know where that leads. 

An Australopithecine from four million years back was a human. If he or she time travelled into the present would be a he/she human and have the same rights as anyone else on the planet. This is important  when we get to discussing  human  groups,  at different levels of competence, encountering and interbreeding with each other, as happened constantly in human history and prehistory. 

It is  even important when considering  all the ethical considerations that occur when we  encounter divergent races. The most common one, or group of them, are what are called Yetis, Almastis, or Sasquatches. Many, perhaps most, people  will think these people are mythological or hoaxes. 

These people have been around for a long time. We  have met them in recent times. There  are likely still some of them around. 

I plan to write  a blog  post  about one  interesting instance of interaction between  an evolutionarily  divergent  person and ‘us’. It will go into the  ethical problems  raised,   and all the idiotic attempts to explain her  away. 

That is for the future, although it  goes toward explaining the big problem with mainstream  paleoanthropology.   Like most of academia, it is hung up on Ideologic Naturalism.  That is, Liberalism  meets naturalism.

As I have often blogged, Liberalism is the  worst kind of ideology. It  is the fear that some fact of nature may hurt someones feelings, give support to competing  fanaticisms like racism,  or create ethical problems which can not be neatly  wrapped up. Liberals will expend huge effort to suppress some types of information, swarming on those who insist  that the truth has to matter. 

Much of history is  slanted or falsified in this way, including prehistory. Liberals need evolution  to go in a single straight line to modern humans. The facts show a  very long and complicated process. 

I think it is important to show this process. Truth matters,  and that is why I have looked at what  real scientists and real historians, working  outside the mainstream, have found about history and prehistory. I have  done a few blog posts already  about this. Just check my ‘general interest’ category.

I discussed how Indo European languages spread over earth, in “The Fun Topic of Historical Linguistics part one”.  I then went backwards and showed the most likely way in which all the world’s languages developed and spread, in “part two”. It seems like speech developed before 200K years BP and developed five major groupings.

I looked into what the real drivers of human evolution were, in “The Heroic Hand”. I concluded that it was not from getting superior brains. That came after we developed hands, and the shoulders to move them around.

I inquired into how the scientific revolution developed. Find that in “The Magician, the Artisan, China, The West, and the Scientific Revolution.” I want to look a little further into the issue of why it did not happen in China. That blog post is somewhere in the future. 

I have also developed informed opinions about human evolution in relation to all the present and prehistoric human races. That is what this post is about. As with the  above works, what I am presenting is the best fit for the evidence I have been able to find.

I am able to do this because I am good at using abductive reasoning to find the explanation which best fits the evidence. This is because I am a vary  advanced human. Actually, no, I am  just a participant in the Scientific  Revolution. 

migration and  recrossing

I think it is possible to talk about races without giving any traction to racists. That is, the “our race is better than your race, so we have the right to either dominate and exploit you, or if we cannot, to eliminate you” crowd. Trying to use different signifiers does not make this go away; talking about ‘subspecies’ or ‘clades’ only gets us to the same place.

We can talk about physical characteristics of different races. That is; the so and sos are resistant or susceptible to this or that disease. Pygmies do not usually make good basketball players. White men can’t jump, etc.

Physical characteristics are thought to be adaptations to local conditions. They are also adaptations to different ways of living. Human groups have migrated around and had to adapt to new circumstances. Chance and Random mutation are factors.

Certain sets of physical characteristics have been constant in certain geographic areas for a very long time. Meanwhile, these people have gradually become more modern in ways similar to people all over the world. 

This supports the ‘lattice’ or ‘recross’ model of evolution. It refutes  the ‘straight line’ or ‘replacement’ model as well as ‘tree branch’ or ‘evolution in place’. These  will be discussed further  below.

People have migrated around. In bad times, some migrated south and others hunkered down in isolated ‘refugia’. That is, places where it was still possible for stone age people to survive.

There have been two really big refugias; Africa and Southeast Asia. A common trope is that human evolution has been an “out of Africa” story. In fact, it has been an ‘in and out of Africa, over and over’ story.

The same is true for South East Asia, especially an area called “Sundaland”. It is presently mostly under water. The parts above sea level are presently called Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Sundaland has had a major effect on evolution and intermixing in that end of the eastern hemisphere. Whenever Earth cooled and the sea level dropped, people came down from the north to live there. When it warmed up again they either drowned, or went back north or into Sahul.

Sahul is what we call Australia and New Guinea when there is dry land between them. It is important to know these kinds of things if you want to speculate about human prehistory.

Some people assume that these migrations, and recrossings, were a mere matter of advanced males coming in, wiping out the earlier male population, and taking the females. This says more about their mentality than about how recrossings worked. It seems sometimes to have happened that way, but more often people coexisted with neighbouring people and gradually blended with them.

It was mostly females who drove these migrations. No population was going to get established in new territories unless the women decided to come along on the trip. It also seems  most often to have  been advanced women recrossing with less developed males,  rather than the reverse. 

This is why I  tend to give prehistoric populations  the feminine pronoun. 

unwanted truth

Study of the genes of modern people is a very good way of learning prehistory and human evolution. This method does tend to tell people what they do not want to hear, or which is politically incorrect. Thus these studies often fudge or misinterpret data.

The most ridiculous example of this is the attempt to tell us that Europe was inhabited in the fairly recent past by people with brown hair, blue eyes, and black skin. Whether this is supposed to mock white racists, or make black people feel better, is not clear. There is no explanation of where these blue eyed black people came from, or where they disappeared to.

Blue eyes are a very recent genetic mutation. It occurred in the Balkan refugia during the ice age, among light skinned people. Genes for darker pigmentation cancel out the blue eyes gene.

These people spread over Europe at the end of the last ice age, and were then overrun by later people coming in. They intermarried and passed on their big blue eyes.

Another unwashable story is that the Neandertal people of prehistoric Europe were an evolutionary dead end, meaning; they died out. Such crude and ugly looking people could not possibly have been the ancestors of the ‘white’ or ‘caucasian’ race. Except they could not possibly not be.

Hundreds of points of Neandertal anatomy from fossils are carried over in present ‘Caucasian’ populations; certain nerve fossa in the skull, the way their front teeth were, the way their tendons connected to their joints, the way their noses were. The possibility this traits could all have come up again in a more recent population, without a predominant genetic contribution, is zero. This means, something is very fishy about genetic studies from Neandertal bones which claim that only a small number of Neander genes exist in modern people.

Another racial delusion cherished by certain types of people is the idea that the ‘Negro’ people are the oldest of races, and that this would have to make them mentally less developed and a ‘fossil population.’ The more advanced races evolved from them after they moved out of Africa.

Actually the Negro or Black people are the second most recent of the major racial groupings to emerge. They emerged about 80K years BP. They have been fairly successful.

By the way, I do not really like these signifiers for different racial groups; Negro, Caucasian, Mongoloid, Australoid. These were thought up by nineteenth century scientists who were full of nineteenth century ideas about the origins of these groupings. However, finding better terms to refer to what I am talking about is a challenge.

The lattice model

I have already discussed how the “straight line” model of human evolution is popular with  western Liberal naturalists. I have also discussed the ‘evolution in place” or ‘tree branches’ model, which remains popular with some people. It fits with their ideas of racial uniqueness and superiority. 

It was even, until recently, the official policy of the Chinese Communist Party that the ‘Chinese race’ evolved in China from one million years ago without any recrossings from elsewhere. 

“Evolution in place’ is the idea that the human race spread out over earth in very early times, found suitable environments, and stayed there. They all evolved the same kinds of characteristics independently, which maintaining local characteristics, and remained a ‘pure’ race, of course better than all you other ones.

This is all nonsense for several reasons. First of all, local climates have not been constant for a million years. There have been ice ages and warm periods. Places which were nice to live in at some times were underwater or frozen wastes at other times.

Western Liberals tend to subscribe to  straight line evolution and it is  supported in their Liberal universities. Human evolution  proceeded step by step with more advanced  steps quickly replacing the more primitive one. In the last  step  the ‘modern’ humans   replaced everyone else  only  about  forty thousand years BP. 

Somehow  in that brief time we were able to develop all the racial differences. But this ‘proves’ there  are no differences between races. Somehow that has to be ‘proved’. 

There is a really brilliant evolutionary biologist, Professor Alan Templeton. He has demonstrated that a ‘lattice’ model best explains how all the races developed. Human groups have been moving around the planet, crossing and recrossing with each other. This has greatly accelerated human evolution.

The lattice model is the simple and obvious answer for  both “straight line and replacement”  and “tree branch and evolution in place”. That is, why do all these local racial types stay so constant over such a long time while also gradually taking on certain universal characteristics?

This is because successful groupings, who develop superior adaptations, expand across the world. But they do not simply ‘replace’ earlier groupings. Replace is a euphemism for ‘wipe out’ and shows what the mentality is, of those who make this assumption.

When different human groups come into contact with each other, they tend to coexist for awhile and then intermarry to produce a third grouping. The characteristics of the local grouping, especially when adapted for local conditions, are retained. However, the specific traits which gave the new comers, usually fewer in numbers, their advantage spread among the older population and are also retained.

about brains and abilities

You might see why I am such a supporter of interracial marriages. To me, that is evolution in action. If you cross two strains of a species, you get a hybrid with the best characteristics of both strains. If it works for tomatoes, it works for people.

This does not mean I am a eugenicist. Nobody has any right to decide who should breed and who should not. Especially, what races or groups of people we need more or less of.

Most ideas of the ‘fitness’ of different groups focus on mental abilities. Sometimes a specific personality type or bad characteristic is attributed to a specific group. All ideas of desirable characteristics are subjective and there is no way to measure them in a population anyway.

The exception is general mental capacity as shown by ‘intelligence tests’. Few people will say that  lower average mental capacity is better than higher.  The only thing these tests show is that there is only minor difference in brain processing capacities among the different peoples. 

These differences are explained by factors other than different levels of evolutionary brain development. Mostly, these are environmental   and ‘epigenetic’ factors. Epigenetics  is  about how  life experiences causes bodies to  turn certain genes on or off for the next generation. 

The human brain is a marvelous thing;  hugely flexible, able to adapt to whatever its owner needs to do in her life. However, the brain is a high maintenance asset. It takes up twenty percent of our energy with two percent of our body weight.

Capacities which a species of living organism does not need, and which are costly to maintain, are quickly switched off and go dormant. Capacities which it needs due to a change in environment, are quickly reactivated.

The human brain seems specially structured for making these kinds of adjustments. The amount of grey matter, the stuff within which thinking is done, is allotted to different parts of the brain by only a few genes. This is why large shifts in average intelligence in certain populations, in a span of only two generations, have been recorded.

This could be why the population groups with the highest intelligences are exactly those who culturally value and esteem intelligence and education. It could also be why the populations with the lowest average intelligences are exactly those where intelligence is of no particular value. In fact, in some milieus, high intelligence can be an impediment.

Eugenicists and open racists still have the idea that intelligence can only develop in populations over many thousands of years. Yet all the basic capacities of the human mind have been around in all peoples for a very long time. There are no inferior races or “fossil populations”.

It is usually thought that our big brains, our intelligences, which distinguish our species from all other animals. But   it needs to be clear exactly what  abilities distinguish us. 

I used to think speech is what separates us from animals, but this is wrong. It is all these special abilities which distinguish us as a species. We are all human because we are one species, one breeding pool. That is true whether some of us  use some of these capacities or not. 

Speech is only one of these  abilities. Our present speech system seems to have developed around 250K years BP (before present). Before that  we used other communication systems which developed over  a very long time. 

Speech is a very complex trait, which required both mental structures and the physical speech apparatus to evolve. For a long time, while this trait developed, humans spoke to each other partly in sign language. Yet we did speak to each other. 

Speech is only one of the  abilities which separates us from animals. Despite the many people deluding themselves about it, primates cannot be taught to speak, no matter what means are invented for them. They will always signal, not signify.

As well, humans have lit and tended fires for  two million years, and  made serious tools for that long. No animal will ever do these things. Humans do it because  we developed hands, followed by the brain with which to make full use of our hands. 

stages of evolution

Modern biology now understands that evolution does not proceed gradually, but in jumps. It is the same with the Human species. The pattern has been for a physical development to occur, followed some time later by a jump in mental ability, and in the sophistication of tools.

There seem to have been five of these stages or cycles. The first was when Australopithecus developed, the ape that walked upright, freeing hands for other uses.

The second stage was when hands fully developed, enabling a power grip and a precision grip. This allowed the emergence of what paleoanthropoligist fossil hunters  call Homo Habilis, who could control fire and make simple tools. Habilis was still a forager.

I prefer to call these people by the kinds of tools they left behind. So I call these  Habilis people the Oldowans. 

Eventually this led to Homo Erectus, or  as I call them, Acheulians, who was adapted for hunting. She had hips and shoulders adapted to prolonged running and for throwing projectiles. She had a larger brain.

This was all enabled by the more efficient use of food energy enabled by the use of fire. Fire is part of the human digestive system. It has been demonstrated in several experiments that humans cannot survive only on raw food.

The fourth jump was of course, the big one, fully developed speech. This led to a further jump in the sophistication of tools, to what I call the Mousterian tool era.  Yet talkative people coexisted in the same spaces for a long time with less talkative ones, who often seemed to easily learn  the Mousterian tool making methods. 

The final development was the fully human form, which came with art, advanced stone tool making, and wearing of clothes. Bodies became lighter and fully upright, not hunched over. There was now a vertical line from the heel to the top of the skull.

To accommodate this, the brain case moved forward, subsuming the brow ridges. People started eating softer food and teeth shrank, leaving the nose and chin projecting. Now you had the modern human face. This is what all people look like today. 

These were the  Auragnacian people, sometimes called the ‘Cro-magnons’. All known contemporary people are  Auragnacians. All human progress since  this development  has been technical, not biological. 

the evidence

Before I explain how the modern races got here, I need to finish  explaining what evidence I use. The information from which I have drawn my conclusions is from four sources.

First there are fossils and other archeological evidence, such as tools and artworks. There is the evidence of campsites and fires, which go back at least 1.5M years BP. Fire use emerged suddenly all over the inhabitable world.

This leads us to paleoclimatological evidence; what parts of the world were habitable in prehistoric times. Also, when climate changed, what refugia and migration routes were open, when coastlines advanced or receded.

Third, in recent times, it has become possible to examine the DNA of modern human populations. It is possible to extract partial human DNA from fossils. We can trace human migrations and interbreeding through haplogroups.

‘Haplogroup’ is a term used in genetics. It means, all organisms who inherit a particular genetic variant or mutation, in a direct line from the ‘founder’. We can find traces in modern population’s DNA echoing back to the earliest prehuman migrants from Africa, and all the major migrations since.

Haplogroups  are a  pretty technical topic, which  could take a blog post in itself to explain. Scientists look for a gene in a  part of  a subjects DNA which looks very old, and which has  developed a lot of mutations. Then they  find  other people with the base gene, but with different subsequent mutations.  This shows how a base population  has spread out from the   founder,  migrated  away, and founded new populations, by the chains of mutations they develop. 

There are some haplogroups which are transmitted only in male or female lines; the male Y haplo and the female mt haplo. This reveals much about how recrossing occurred.

Sadly, I do not think haplogroup evidence  and ‘hap maps’ are  fully reliable.  There is a kind of ‘world haplogroup’ fraternity which is secretive  about  how they  choose the genetic markers, and  how they test for them. Often they will ‘reclassify’ a haplogroup, giving it not just  a new  designation  among closely related mutations,  but moving  it to  entirely different levels. This strongly suggests they are  guessing or making up a lot of this. 

 In the end, we can just look at the faces of modern people. We can compare them to each other and with facial reconstructions from fossils. It all looks like the results of processes which have been ongoing for a very long time.

The sad truth is that most paleoanthropologists are not very scientific. This is because the subject is so politically loaded. Thus we have all the silly stories, such as are mentioned above.

We now have all this information, but few people want to put it together. We are mostly left to draw our own conclusions. So I used my talent for applying Occam’s razor to things.

That is, the explanation which best fits the facts. So here is my explanation for the facts I have accumulated from my readings.

the story

Here is how the modern races got here. Things started when Habilis/Oldowan  moved out of Africa into the other habitable parts of the world. She developed a distinct variant in South West Asia, and one in South and Southeast Asia. I will call these the west and east lines because they continue, with recrossings by new people coming up from Africa, to the present.

This first wave occurred before 1.5M years BP. The second happened about .75M BP when Erectus/Acheulian also left Africa. She intermarried with the earlier migrations and created hybrid western and Eastern lines.

Several variants of Acheulian developed in these three areas, but one of these in Africa developed the modern speech system. A very significant thing about these people is that they had resemblances to modern people called ‘oriental’. They had flared cheekbones, flat noses, and curved brow ridges.

Paleoanthropologists have messed things up by naming every premodern fossil they dug up as a new subspecies, when there is little difference between them. I will call these people The Talkers, or Mousterians. These people appeared in Africa, seemingly in the Rift Valley, about .25M BP.

The talkers soon spread all over the world; the third wave. While some of them recrossed with the earlier lines and created new people, other Talkers groups merely coexisted. They clearly taught Mousterian tool making and other skills to earlier peoples.

In the west the Talkers gradually died out. In the east the Talkers seemed to have become the present day Oriental peoples. Thus the Orientals would be the oldest race.

The recrossings of the Talkers produced three new hybridizations. From the Eastern people, it produced a new people called Denisovans. These evidently have something to do with modern “Australoid” people.

From the Western people, Talker recrossings produced the Neandertal people, ancestral to modern ‘Caucasians’.

Finally, in southern Africa, Talkers crossed with some other late Erectus group to produce what I would call the “Full Moderns”. These are the people who developed the fully modern form, about 150K Years BP, and launched the fourth wave of migrations.

However, they never seem to have got into the east. Only a handful got into south west Asia and formed what is called the ‘Cromagnon’ people. The ones who remained in Africa developed the bushy headed mutation associated with African peoples.

These people are associated with the Y haplogroup A0. They once dominated in Africa. A remnant now exist in southern Africa and are called the “Bushmen” or Khoi-San peoples.

Some of these yellowish skinned  bushy headed people recrossed with some very  tall,  black skinned  people  to produce  a very  effective adaptation. These are the people now called ‘Negroid’ or ‘black’.

These black people are the  second most recent race, after the pygmies. They have been very  successful. They are rightly called ‘Black’ because they are the main people who still have genes for true black pigmentation.

A thing about black skin pigmentation is that all early humans  were black. The yellow to brown variation  seems to have occurred in Acheulian times.   Some northern people have become highly depigmentized for  unknown reasons. 

Blacks emerged about 80K years BP. About 60K years BP they managed an ocean migration into South East Asia and established themselves there. They were the last racial group to arrive there.

They have, of course, taken over Africa. Several groups of them, in response to a sudden climate change about 60K BP, went into the deep forests of central Africa, previously uninhabitable to stone age people. There they helped form the ‘pygmy’ people. 

The  African pygmies  are a strange group. It is debatable  they  are a race.  They  seem to  have come from several groups of people who  went into  the deep forests and made  the usual adaptions for living in that type of environment.

Finally, I come to the fifth wave, the Cromagnon wave. After a period of development in South West Asia, about 70K BP she began a rapid expansion over the world. Most modern people are ‘Cromagnon +”.

CM+Neandertal = Caucasian. CM+the old Eastern Talkers = Oriental. CM+Denisovan = Australoid. CM+northern black people = Northern Blacks2.

The only people who seem to have little Cromagnon in them are the Koi-San, the Pygmies, and these “Nilotic” blacks who seem to have moved into southern Africa and then north again. As well, a few isolated people in the east, such as the Andamese and the “Negritos”. This was largely because they were just as advanced as the Cromagnons, who had no advantage over them.

So that is the story of why we have all these different racial types.  They often look strange, with odd local traits. Yet there  are no differences between them that  really matter. 

Differences in human groupings since the Cromagnons are no longer about biology. It is about the uneven spread of civilization and technology.

stranger stories

Some incredible stories are revealed by paleoanthropology, archeology, and by the genetic legacy of modern populations. Very early people often undertook some amazing migrations. These were not gradual infusions of populations, but marches or open boat voyages of thousands of stone age people over thousands of miles in a short time.

The oceanic Blacks went to the other side of the world in boats or rafts. Some Caucasian people, at the start of the last ice age, made voyages from east Siberia down the coast to Australia. The Luzian people got from Asia into the Americas about 50K BP, before there was a land bridge.

The Luzians are a somewhat sad story. They looked much like modern south east asian peoples. They were partly wiped out by the ancestors of modern American aboriginals, who came into the Americas about 30K BP.

In this case there really was an ancient genocide. But people with the Luzian features survived in places. In Central America they began agriculture and founded the Olmec civilization, the first in the Americas.

Many strange types of people existed in the past. Several ‘pygmy’ types have existed, including the ‘hobbits’ of Flores Island in Indonesia. Many races of giant people existed as well.

Giants are a fascinating topic. They are too much for ‘scientific’ types, and evidence is ignored or even actively destroyed. Fossils of men eight or ten feet tall have been found but dismissed as acromegaly cases or hoaxes.

In many places tools have been found that could only fit a giant’s hands. In other cases, stones have been stacked up which could not have been lifted by present day men, at a time and place in which no mechanical means existed. There are plenty of early written accounts of giant people.

I find nothing implausible about giant humans. The human species can evolve pygmy stature to adapt to local conditions. It could evolve a giant stature in response to different conditions.

future evolutions

The agricultural revolutions, and the accelerating rise of technology, have  effected human evolution. Humans are now more delicately built and size differences between genders has decreased.

Intelligence does not seem to have increased. Coping in a stone age world would have been as mentally taxing as living in a modern city. Those who have observed the last ‘hunter-gatherer’ people do not think that the average resident of a modern slum would have the intelligence to cope with that kind of life.

Human populations will lose whatever is of no survival advantage. Civilization has turned much of the human race into something like domestic animals, kept for the benefit of an elite. The elites themselves seem lacking in the intelligence and qualities of character to really manage modern societies.

In the present world, people with the most advanced intellectual characteristics often seem to be the outcasts. They have a hard time thriving. This seems to be part of the flaw in civilization which some people talk about. I have addressed that topic in this post.

How civilization has developed as it has, and whether it has benefited humanity, will be a subject for future blog posts from me. Subscribe.