Human Migration, Race and Nationality

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 Bojo 14 Nov 2021

Not migration as in rubber boats from Calais. Has anyone got any thoughts or facts as to where we came from and who we are?

My understanding is that early humans(homo erectus etc) evolved in Africa and that over the millenia have spread out to all parts of the world, travelling via land bridges, many of which have disappeared. My thoughts are that these migrations long predated the origins of ethnic variations which came about as a result of migrating humans adapting and evolving as a result of local climate and geography. This evolution of ethnicity in turn predated diversification into tribes and then races and eventually nations. Does this theory make sense or am I missing something?

Post edited at 21:55
 elsewhere 14 Nov 2021

This might be relevant to that idea.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cheddar+gorge+man

OP Bojo 14 Nov 2021
In reply to elsewhere:

Thanks for that

 Bulls Crack 14 Nov 2021
In reply to Bojo:

There's a lifetime's study of anthropology and ethnology  out there!

 mondite 14 Nov 2021
In reply to Bojo:

I am not sure we can know. Since we would have had the distinct species such as Neanderthal and Denisovan around for at least some of that period and beyond knowing there was some shagging going on exactly what the groups interacted is unclear.

How the various hunter gatherer tribes interacted is also unclear in terms of how they saw themselves and each other and hence whether we would have had tribes before the evolution of ethnicity.

I think as scientific methods develop further there will be a lot more to be got from both DNA and isotope analysis to give us an idea of what was happening in the prehistoric past.

 veteye 14 Nov 2021
In reply to mondite:

Isn't there some new evidence of us interacting more than was originally thought with Neanderthals? (As an aside).

 mondite 14 Nov 2021
In reply to veteye:

> Isn't there some new evidence of us interacting more than was originally thought with Neanderthals? (As an aside).

The key evidence is DNA based. For non Africans neanderthal genes provide 1-4% of our genome. There is also traces of interbreeding with Denisovan and I guess some others may appear as more research is done. 

The use of DNA was a massive upheaval I recall reading one book from around the late 90s where pretty much everything was caveated with "this may change as we find out more" and one of the few firm bits was "we didnt shag neanderthals".

In reply to Bojo:

No idea how much  the science has moved on in the last 20 years, but Seven Daughters of Eve is a fascinating read. 

Unfortunately I don’t know enough to check your theory, although I would have thought there were probably separate tribes before there was anything we would call ethnicity. 

OrangeBob 15 Nov 2021
In reply to Bojo:

My understanding is that there were various migrations of our ancestors out of Africa.

Homo Sapiens (us) evolving in Africa and being the most recent group to then spread out across the world. They then displaced whoever else was out there, either by conflict, out competing, spread of diseases that Neanderthals hadn't developed immunity to, or interbreeding.

I think our ancestors, and their cousins, lived in groups, whether that would be extended families or tribes.

I think the different racial groups we have today are due to a mixture of interbreeding with other types of humans and adaptations to different climates.

 deepsoup 15 Nov 2021
In reply to Bojo:

Prof. Alice Roberts (still my beating heart) made a TV series about this a decade or so ago.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00klf6j

I went to a talk that she gave about it at the "Leeds International Festival of Ideas" a couple of years back - apparently the science has moved on a bit in the time since they made it with some new discoveries.  (She said they would not be able to repeat it now without some fairly significant changes.)  I'm not going to try to regurgitate any of that but I think the gist of it was that Homo Sapiens spread further around the world earlier than was generally believed when the TV series was made.

Also she always hated that they called it "The Incredible Human Journey" - mainly because it's science, backed up by evidence, and the whole point of it is to come up with answers that are entirely credible.  But also because it made it sound like a sequel to the Disney film about the "incredible journey" of two dogs and a cat.

That series seems to be up on Vimeo - first episode here: vimeo.com/454621740

OP Bojo 15 Nov 2021

Another thought that I sometimes ponder is that, in terms of human evolution, nationalities and nation states and borders are all rather recent and artificial developments. Surely, if you consider one individual "nation" - say France - there is now no single group of people who can really say "I am French in ethnicity, race and descedency. Over the millenia the groups (Franks)who may have originally made up that "nation" have moved around, interbred with other groups so that nowadays there is no such thing as "racial purity".

Post edited at 16:41
cb294 15 Nov 2021
In reply to Bojo:

Genetically, France is a melting pot of many races. However, your other claim does not follow. There are of course human races even today.

It is actually easy to find human populations that are genetically distinct and at the population level stable against introgression from other gene pools that they should be classified as races.

To avoid the whole politically charged issue of "black" vs. "white"*, the Han Chinese provide an excellent and obvious example: There are so many of them that in China there is very little introgression. Yes, Chinese also in China have children with partners from different ethnicities, but the overall pool is so big that the introduced haplotypes tend to be diluted out, rather than establishing themselves in the population.

This is obvioulsy not the case to the same extent with Chinese expat populations elsewhere, e.g. in South Asia or the US.

Size of the gene pool is also not the only mechanism that can stabilize a population against introgression, such mechanisms also include e.g. cultural, religious or social (caste!) isolation.

This is obviously a very broad brush description of a complex situation, but the simplification is not so bad that the overall picture is too far off.

In response to your opening post, I really recommend David Reich's book "Who we are and how we go here", which gives an excellent summary of the state of DNA based molecular anthropology as of a few years ago. The whole field still evolves rapidly, and you can essentially forget what was dogma even only 25 years ago.

CB

* just to say that there is no such thing as a "black" race. The genetic differences between certain African populations are much deeper than anything seen elsewhere. Not surprising given that essentially all modern non-African humans stem from groups migrating out of Africa, with a bit of admixture from various groups such as Neanderthals and two flavours of Denisovans.


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