All about the ancient tribes
The idea of “ race ” began to evolve in the late 17th century, after the beginning of European exploration and colonization, as a folk ideology about human differences associated with the different populations—Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans—brought together in the New World.
At the beginning of the story, we have the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by the publication of the book Systema naturae in 1735, in which the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus proposed a classification of humankind into four distinct races.
The world population can be divided into 4 major races, namely white/Caucasian, Mongoloid/Asian, Negroid /Black, and Australoid. This is based on a racial classification made by Carleton S. Coon in 1962.
(A) The old concept of the “ five races:” African, Asian, European, Native American, and Oceanian. According to this view, variation between the races is large, and thus, the each race is a separate category. Additionally, individual races are thought to have a relatively uniform genetic identity.
According to the generally accepted story of human evolution, the human lineage split from that of apes some 7 million years ago in Africa. Hominins (early humans ) are believed to have stayed put in Africa until about 2 million years ago, when they migrated first to Asia and then to Europe.
From about 1.2 million years ago to less than 100,000 years ago, archaic humans, including archaic Homo sapiens, were dark-skinned.
The main human races are Caucasoid, Mongoloids (including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and American Indians, etc.), and Negroid. Khoisanoids or Capoids (Bushmen and Hottentots) and Pacific races (Australian aborigines, Polynesians, Melanesians, and Indonesians) may also be distinguished.
The mid-20th-century anthropologist William C. Boyd defined race as: “A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant ‘constellation'”.
To understand and answer the constructed response essay question, the easiest way is to memorize the acronym “RACE” – this stands for reword, answer, cite and explain.
Although the concept of race is often associated with ethnicity, the terms are not synonymous. Race includes phenotypic characteristics such as skin color, whereas ethnicity also encompasses cultural factors such as nationality, tribal affiliation, religion, language and traditions of a particular group (Fig 1).
OMB requires that race data be collectd for a minimum of five groups: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. OMB permits the Census Bureau to also use a sixth category – Some Other Race.
China is officially composed of 56 ethnic groups ( 55 minorities plus the dominant Han). However, some of the ethnic groups as classified by the PRC government contain, within themselves, diverse groups of people.
Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans.
” Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society, but it is not a biological concept, and that unfortunately is what many people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans — genetic differences,” says Templeton.
Through transglobal sampling of neutral genetic markers — stretches of genetic material that do not help create the body’s functioning proteins but instead are composed of so-called junk DNA — researchers have found that, on average, 88 percent to 90 percent of the differences between people occur within their local