Is it true that Chinese people are Caucasian?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by At World's End, Dec 11, 2008.

  1. At World's End Registered Member

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    Well, good thing for us is that AAA is finally stepping in big time, and aims to change the word from "race" to "ethnic origin".

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    http://www.aaanet.org/gvt/ombdraft.htm
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I don't know where this came from, but it's wrong. There are continuous cultures in China going back much farther than that. All non-African people got to where they are by migrating out of the Middle East, because that was the first place they settled after leaving Africa fifty to sixty thousand years ago. But the expansion into eastern Asia happened around 40,000BCE, much earlier than this assertion. An exhaustive worldwide DNA analysis was performed just a couple of years ago and the migration patterns and genetic relationships of the non-African peoples are now known in far more detail than they used to be. (See the old "Out of Africa" thread for references.) Much of what we thought we knew just ten years ago was turned on its head by the increasing speed and falling cost of DNA analysis.
    This didn't start until historical times. Even in the Bronze Age there was not a whole lot of travel between Mesopotamia and eastern Asia. Hardly enough to leave major DNA traces.
    That's just a reinforcement of the same gene pool. The Mongols, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and most other ethnic groups of east Asia are all of "Mongoloid" stock, to use the now-unpopular term for that branch of our species. They're all descended from that original burst of migration from western Asia to eastern Asia around 40,000BCE.
    Absolutely wrong, assuming you mean people of Semitic (Arabs et al.) and Indo-Iranian (Persians et al.) descent. The Uighurs, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and related peoples are Turkic, and the Turkic peoples are all descendants of the Mongol/Mughal "hordes" who migrated westward. Their languages are Mongolic and so is their DNA. By the time they became identified as the "Ottomans" and settled in Asia Minor, they had intermarried with everyone they met along the way so their DNA is almost as much a Melting Pot as America's, and they picked up and spread the Islamic religion and culture, but their history is well documented and they started out in the region of Mongolia.
    Yes, although the old Caucasoid/Negroid/Mongolid paradigm is seldom used academically any more. It's not very useful since all but the most remote still-Neolithic or -Mesolithic tribes have by now got enough DNA from other peoples that they hardly qualify as distinct populations. To use an ugly but apt comparison, if we were dogs we would all be counted as mongrels, not distinct breeds. With, as noted, the exception of a few tribes in places like New Guinea and the Amazon.
    No. Anthropologists have known for generations that clearly recognizable Chinese cultures go back much farther than that, something like 7000BCE when China hit the Mesolithic/Neolithic cusp and began producing enough artifacts to leave good digging sites. "Competition" with the Egyptians sounds like something from 1960s "Red Chinese" propaganda. The scholars of the earliest dynasties of China and Egypt surely knew of each other's existence and a few intrepid explorers may have even made the trek through the intervening civilizations of India and Mesopotamia, but transportation technology being what it was in the early Bronze Age, there was hardly any serious exchange of ideas and cultures.
    Where do you guys get this stuff??? Please read up on the latest research. It's definitive and incontrovertible.
    The DNA analysis in fact traced the lineage of the aboriginal Americans to a single tribe in central Siberia.

    The Navajos have a creation-mythology about always having lived where they are now. The scientist showed them photos of people from that Siberian region and they just dropped their jaws and said things like, "This guy looks just like Uncle Ernie." The elder looked into the camera solemnly and said, "Then I guess it's true: We really are all brothers." It would sure be nice if the rest of humanity could accept that reality.
    No. Aryan refers specifically to the peoples whom we now call Indo-European: Celtic, Germanic, Roman, Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic, Persian, Armenian, Indic, and a few isolates. "Caucasian" includes the entire rest of that gene pool, notably the Semitic peoples.
    Actually it's rather recent. The second wave of Siberian migrants across Alaska into the New World happened about 4,000BCE, and the people of the Americas descended from them don't have the epicanthic eye fold that their modern cousins back in the homeland have. (The first wave came over about 10,000 years before and possibly much earlier. The third wave, the Eskimo-Aleuts arrived around 2,000BCE.)
    Some traits are inherited through genetic drift and genetic bottlenecks, and are not necessarily the result of survival pressure.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    In my case, from my closest empathetic simulacrum of whatever dementia inspired the OP.

    The idea of a secret, hidden, camouflaged "race" is just too good to allow to languish unappreciated.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2008
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  7. CutsieMarie89 Zen Registered Senior Member

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    Well a lot of blacks in the US are probably mixed and have a recent Caucasian relative. What does that make them (aka me)? This is so confusing

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  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It makes you Chinese, according to modern research. Read the OP.
     
  9. CutsieMarie89 Zen Registered Senior Member

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    Oh!!! That must be why I'm so good at martial arts.

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  10. At World's End Registered Member

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    Actually, Chinese people condemn violence, and the so-called Chinese people loving martial arts stuff is nothing but a recent Jewish media agenda to demean Chinese people.

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    Throughout history, China has been a strong military nation that did NOT like martial arts. See Sun Tzu's Art of War and take a look at ancient Chinese battle formations and weaponary. I don't know where the Jews got the idea to spread the lie that Chinese people are good at martial arts 'cause 99 percent of Chinese people never even done ANY martial arts.

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    Last edited: Dec 13, 2008
  11. At World's End Registered Member

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    I found this to be quite interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_O_(Y-DNA)

    According to that haplogroup thingy, it appears that Chinese people started settling China around 35000 years ago. Anyhow, it does appear that they originated in the Middle East though.
     
  12. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    At World's End is less apposite that At Wit's End.
     
  13. LogicTech Registered Member

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    They weren't from the Middle East.
     
  14. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    I think he means Africa. Its all connected.
     
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    If we can stop talking about "races," which means virtually nothing any more, it's correct that almost all people who identify themselves as "African-Americans" are likely to have a significant component of "Euro-American" DNA. There was a taboo in colonial America, carried over into the southern States after independence, against light-skinned slaveholders having sex with dark-skinned slaves, and it was about as effective as any taboo in a post-Neolithic culture. Particularly for the light-skinned men in the position of power.

    As I said in my previous post, if we were classified under the same system we dog breeders use, every human being on earth except some of the ones way back in the jungles of New Guinea and the Amazon, would be classified as a "mongrel." Since we first invented transportation technology thousands of years ago (first boats, later riding animals and the wheel, then engine-driven vehicles and finally flying machines), everybody's been going everywhere and "cross-breeding" (again using dog language) with everybody else.

    Greeks, Romans, Ancient Egyptians (who were very likely not "black" or "Negroid" but a return wave of migration from western Asia since their languages are in the same family as Hebrew and Arabic), Phoenicians, Persians and Arabs (and those are just the people I can name without looking it up) had routine contact with sub-Saharan Africa long before the modern era. So there's a good chance that your African ancestors already had a good smattering of DNA from non-African people before the slave traders shipped them over here.

    (It's presumptuous of me to assume that your family is from the United States, but the treatment of slaves was roughly the same throughout the Western Hemisphere.)

    But even if they didn't, after a few generations over here the Melting Pot affected them like it did all the rest of us, even if until very recently there was a conspiracy not to say so out loud. Some Southern planters quietly sent their "mixed race" children off to Europe where there was less of a stigma on skin tone, and they assimilated into the mainstream European population (and gene pool). Most of the ones who weren't so lucky assimilated into the slave population.

    Europeans of course already had their own smattering of African DNA since a modest number of Africans had been coming to Europe both as slaves and as freemen for centuries. Ditto for the Middle East. As I already said, this mixing of DNA has been going on for a long time and anyone who takes the concept of "race" seriously is many hundreds of years too late, or even thousands.

    Barack Obama calls himself a "mutt," which I guess is a more humorous and less offensive word than "mongrel," so I'm happy to acknowledge it. All Americans are mutts regardless of the shade of our skin. Now that we have a presidential proclamation to that effect, Isn't it about time to just say so and get over it?

    I have long argued against identifying people by the color of their skin. As Heile Selassie said, the color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes. DNA testing has demolished any reasonable categorization of humans by "race." If Americans choose to identify themselves by the culture of their ancestors, that's fine. If a person wants to wear traditional Croatian clothing, cook Croatian recipes, speak the Croatian language with his friends, learn Croatian dances and practice Croatian social customs, then he can call himself a Croatian-American and hey that's the kind of thing that makes America such an interesting place to live. If his children decide they don't want that for themselves, all they've got to do is shop at Kmart, eat at McDonalds, learn to play baseball and watch rap videos, and they've become un-hyphenated Americans. In fact, the father can do that himself if he wakes up one morning and decides to.

    The same thing applies, or should apply, to people who are identified as "African-Americans."

    But if we call them "black," well geeze that's not something they can change. More importantly, it's not even something their children can change. In the USA there are people who call themselves Italian, Russian, Iranian, Mexican, Chinese, etc., and many of their children just call themselves Americans. The children of people who identify themselves as Africans should have the same option.

    I'm not comfortable with the idea that a person is stuck with the identify of their parents, because that's what the Melting Pot is all about. Even the children of people who call themselves Jews, historically one of the most clannish people on earth, can simply decide not to call themselves Jews, and by golly in America they're not Jews any more. My grandfather did that.

    This isn't the Third Reich. (And man was that ever a good thing for my grandfather!) Americans are not supposed to be bound forever to the cultural identity of their ancestors.
    As I pointed out in my previous post. Of course when the first migrants arrived they hadn't yet differentiated into separate tribes of Chinese, Mongolian, Laotian, Japanese, etc.
    Well duh. Where else could they have come from? At that point the only places populated by Homo sapiens were Africa, Australia and western Asia. They're clearly not descended from Native Australians (or whatever the politically correct name is these days) because they are the one and only non-African people whose ancestors did not come over in the wave of migration that brought our ancestors. (They came about ten thousand years earlier during a severe ice age when rainfall was low and there was very little food to be found anywhere. They walked along the southern coast of Asia and when they got to Australia, due to the vagaries of the climate pattern there was food there, and there they've stayed.)
    The migrants from Africa (at least the second wave, who didn't go to Australia) settled in the western Asia for about ten thousand years before they resumed their exploration. So it's fair to say that all non-Australian non-Africans are descended from ancestors who came from western Asia, as long as we remember where their ancestors came from.

    And... as long as we remember that we all also have ancestors among the original Africans.

    The Navajo elder got it right: We're all brothers.
     
  16. OilIsMastery Banned Banned

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    And Caucasians are Asians because the Caucasus are in Asia.

    This all goes to show that the concept of race is silly nonsense.
     
  17. At World's End Registered Member

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    How is the border of Asia defined anyhow? It's not a country, so there is no national border for Asia. Who defined Asia and what was the original Asia?

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  18. CutsieMarie89 Zen Registered Senior Member

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    Just because someone is Asian doesn't mean they are martial arts masters. I was just joking. Although I do practice a few Chinese martial arts. Not all martial arts have to be violent, like Tai Chi typically isn't.
     
  19. At World's End Registered Member

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    That's correct. Martial arts are sometimes practiced by monks in China, who, in the past, used their martial arts skilled to help the poor and the disadvantaged civilians against government oppression.
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    From Wikipedia:
    Thus, the Caucasus are actually on the border between Europe and Asia, or even on the European side of the border.
    The concept goes back to the early European civilizations, primarily the Greeks. They coined the name "Asia," although its etymology is obscured and may be derived from an Akkadian or Phoenician word for "east." (This resonates with the Chinese name for Japan: Ri-Ben, "sun root." Japan's name for itself, Ni-Hon, as well as our name "Japan" are all derived from it.) The Greeks of course had no idea how big the continent of Asia was. They just used the name generically for nearby areas that figured in their political plans like Anatolia and Persia, to distinguish them from the empires of Europe and Africa. (They didn't know the extent of those land masses either.)

    Today it's just convention that labels Europe and Asia as separate continents. Africa may be connected to Asia, and North America may be connected to south America, but both connections are through a very narrow isthmus. Viewed from far enough away, they do kind of look like separate continents. But the "boundary" between Europe and Asia is rather arbitrary, and (I'm not going to look this up) about a thousand miles wide. Some geographers just call the entire land mass "Eurasia."
     
  21. John99 Banned Banned

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    Obviously we have human groups that are distinct from eachother so we cant just pretend this is not a reality. I would like to know how that happened, the distinct groups of humans in their defined area's.
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Bear with me while I put this into a more humbling (pre)historical context.

    A zoologist would probably call "human" any of the species in the clade that broke off from the chimpanzee/bonobo clade about 7MYA, in Africa. An anthropologist would more likely reserve the name for the species that started making tools about 2.5MYA, also in Africa, which defines the dawn of the Paleolithic Era. A number of these species migrated successfully to Asia and started their own bloodlines, but they were all dead ends.

    Judging from the DNA record, our species of "modern humans," Homo sapiens, probably arose around 200KYA, but the earliest fossils we've found date to 130KYA, also in Africa.

    We stayed in Africa until around 60KYA, when the first successful emigration took place. Members of one tribe, who still exist as a community in Africa with a recognizable gene pool and call themselves the San, walked into western Asia. This was a severe ice age so rainfall was low and food was hard to find, so they were motivated. Sea levels were also obviously low so getting across Suez wasn't hard. Asia was just as desolate as Africa, so they walked along the southern shore (which is now under a couple hundred feet of water) all the way to Australia. (They had to build boats since the sea level wasn't that low.) Weather patterns were as weird as they are today and there was plenty of food in Australia, so they stayed there and thrived.

    Their descendants are the aboriginal Australians, the oldest non-African ethnic group. (I'm oversimplifying, there are a few tribes on nearby islands.)

    Nothing changed for another ten thousand years, when another group of Africans--of the very same tribe, the San--once again set out across Suez. This time the weather was more hospitable so they settled in western Asia, with curiosity and population pressure slowly expanding the boundaries of their settled area.

    The people who stayed in Africa were the ancestors of all the people who now live in sub-Saharan Africa, the major ethnic group that can be called Negroid, if you insist on using that antique paradigm. We have no idea what color their skin was. Skin pigment is so ephemeral, it might have changed ten times since then. These folks abandoned north Africa when it dried out and became the Sahara, and left it for someone else to settle later.

    And remember my caveat that the people who now live in Africa (and everywhere else) have highly mixed DNA and cannot be properly called "races," regardless of dominant physiological characteristics, especially ephemeral ones like skin color.

    Meanwhile, around 40-30KYA, a group of the settlers in west Asia decided to explore east Asia. They established successful colonies, and their descendants populated the eastern side of the continent. They were the ancestors of all the people who earlier anthropologists called "Mongoloid." Their cousins who stayed behind in western Asia were the ancestors of all the people the anthropologists called "Caucasoid." Nowadays the people loosely grouped as Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid tend to have, respectively, dark, light, and vaguely yellow- or red-tinged skin, but remember that this could have changed a dozen times so we don't know what their ancestors looked like. Skin pigment changes rapidly with the level of sunlight so in an ice age the Africans were probably very light, and even today the "Caucasians" in north Africa, southern India and other really hot places often have skin as dark as sub-Saharan Africans.

    The "Caucasoid" people eventually made the trek to Europe around 20KYA. There they found the one remaining other species of humans, the Neanderthals, who had also established the Paleolithic Era by inventing tools. We don't know much about their history, but hopefully we'll eventually find a body well-preserved in the ice so we can do a DNA analysis and learn more. Until then, based on anomalies in modern European DNA, we make an educated guess that our people interbred with the Neanderthals and out-competed them, rather than killing them off.

    Finally, around 15KYA or possibly earlier, a group of east Asians migrated to the Western Hemisphere. We don't know what color their skin was but we do know that they didn't have the epicanthic eye fold that we Westerners use today as a quick identifier of "Oriental" people. These are the people whose descendants populated almost the entire territory of the Americas, including the Aztec and Inca civilizations. Another batch of them came again, about ten thousand years later, and established themselves in much of the region north of the Rio Grande. Finally the third group of colonists showed up around 2000BCE, becoming the Eskimo-Aleut people.

    The people who now live in most of Europe are descended from a much more recent wave of migration from Asia Minor, starting around 5000BCE. However, DNA analysis indicates that they, too, did not kill off the people they found there but interbred with them. The only remnant of the original inhabitants is the Basques, and for all we know there could have been multiple waves. At any rate, all the Europeans are of "Caucasoid" stock with the exception of a few of the eastern peoples like the Huns, Magyars, Finns and Bulgars, who were probably Mongol tribes.

    Again, this is vastly simplifed. The Turks are a Mongol tribe who left their DNA all over southern and central Asia. The Polynesians are a story in themselves, and their westernmost outpost is the island of Madagascar. The Americas were conquered by Europeans who brought over African slaves and marginalized the native people. Latin American nations are a healthy mix of Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid heritage. The USA, for reasons I've hypothesized at great length elsewhere, still has recognizable, separate communities of light-skinned and dark-skinned people. There are still a few tribes of identifiable Native Americans throughout the hemisphere. Caucasoid people from western Asia re-colonized north Africa and established Egypt and Ethiopia, although this assertion is not universally accepted because today the DNA of their descendants is a Melting Pot of a dozen ethnic groups from three continents. The Semitic and Indic peoples are all Caucasoid.

    I can't make it any simpler, without falling into the Caucasoid/Negroid/Mongolid paradigm of 100 years ago, and that just doesn't do justice to our species.
     
  23. At World's End Registered Member

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    As for why people who lived in different places for a long time look different, where is no single theory agreed upon by everyone. My theory is that each local generates a specific type of radiation, perhaps from the soil, perhaps from the water, that would, over time, genetically alter the inhabitants who live there. For instance, eastern Europeans such as Serbians and western Europeans such as English clearly have physical differences, though this difference not that big. I suspect that local radiation plays the biggest part.
     

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