Comment by ericmcer
4 hours ago
The Neanderthal extinction always made me think that erasure of races in our modern times will follow a similar pattern. People think of the Native Americans as getting wiped out by disease/violence over a few years, but their ultimate end (and every other races end) probably will be similar to Neanderthals: slowly getting bred out of existence until finding someone with >2% DNA is a novelty. Same thing will probably happen to any smaller populations as globalization/interbreeding means massive populations like China/India will end up being the majority of the DNA.
Yes but draw an arbitrary line around any group. Call them HNdrathals if you want. Define them at one instaneous snapshot in time as 100% conserved gene corpus. Then watch generation after generation, as some of the HNers (against all odds) interbreed with the surrounding populace. After one hundred generations, should we expect many people to be more than 2% HNdrathal? Yet did the HNdrathals ‘die out’?
Careful, HNers are a population with a history of trauma associated with unclosed parentheses. By raising our cortisol levels you may be lowering our fertility rate by exposing us to them.
Thanks, edited along w/ several other typos (checks glasses prescription) :)
1 reply →
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Ok. but ancestral groups are in no way "arbitrary" when it comes to DNA. So what's your point?
They are, a bit, we define quite broadly and there is “fuzz” at the borders of countries.
I lean your way of course, it’s not totally arbitrary, but where we draw a line tends to be a bit arbitrary.
I'm always surprised at the opposite. We have such distinct ethnicities. It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)
We are all mixed race.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-a...
We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races. Some more different than others.
> I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
By DNA there is rarely any non-mixed population of ethnic groups. That applies both to maternal(unless interbreeding is a preference) and paternal lineages, as people are quite mixed, but borders of cultures and beliefs(in various myths - including about their ancestry) is what is holding societies together.
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out. USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
"race" is not a concept that's really supported by genetics [1]
[1] https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscien...
The only DNA genes we have are coming from Middle East contact of Neanderthals with Homo Sapiens. There was no bred out of the extinction event, specific to Neanderthals only, as we are missing also majority of DNA of those early Homo Sapiens.
Races has nothing to do with any of that - Neanderthals themselves seems to had different looks, depending on region they were living and had contacts with other humans - and we all were the same species.
With neanderthals it was physical factors. With groups in modern times it’ll probably be cultural factors. Many groups have panda-like reproductive preferences.
As someone else commented “race” is not a scientific concept; it’s more about vibes
Yes, unless some natural or anthropogenic disaster makes it impossible to visit other continents.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
Native American is not a race.