How did different races come about?

Question

After reading some of this stuff, the tower of babel story is starting to sound credible!

Answer 1

diffrent branches of homo erectus.

Answer 2

its funny that youre asking this in anthropology, as anthropology is the answer to your question.

Answer 3

humans do not have races

Answer 4

Different production techniques, different raw material and different angels at different intervals.

Answer 5

Different burning time in h**l... all life is suffering.. so we all came from h**l.... right? lol

Answer 6

Due to groupism

Answer 7

Well, I am so happy to chime in on this one! By the standards applied to all other mammals, we are not different races at all; we are all one race.  We can have children together, we have no meaningful differences in how our organs work, we are equally intelligent, and so on.  We are all one race.

Of course the first thing people do in any group is try to figure out who is the same, who is different, and how to use that to get ahead (or at least not be left out). Human nature?

We evolved in much smaller groups (essentially extended families), not more than 12-50 individuals or so. In this setting, it is important to protect one another from strangers until you are sure they are safe (and with people competing for food and space, strangers were often not very safe).

So, how do we decide someone is an "outsider"? Are they taller? Do they speak differently? Are they the same skin color?  If not, we get to call them a different "race", and that is shorthand for "not us".

You can not identify any particular group as a "race" of people based upon apperance.  If I tell you I have red hair or kinky hair, can you decide what "race" I am?

In the islands of the Carribbean, there are people decended from probably the earliest settlers.  They have very light skin,  kinky red or brown hair, are generally smaller in stature, and some have hazel eyes.

What race are they?  Race is all nonesense.

You don't have to go back very far in pre-history to see that all modern human beings decended from African ancestors.

Genetic studies also seem to have pinned down that we all carry mitochondrial DNA showing decent from a single female human!  We are not just all the same race, we are all cousins.

Your question, however, probably refers to the differences in our physical appearance (there is not much, if any, difference in our mental abilities) from one part of the world to another, or from one group to another.

Let's consider skin color, as that is often held as a major indicator of "race".

People, like all animals, survive better if they meet the requirements of the environment in which they live. By chance, some children will have darker or lighter in skin than their parents (random change).  If skin color conveys some survival advantange, over the generations skin color of the group will become lighter or darker.  

In Norway, with little sun (and with most of the skin covered to keep warm), light, transparent skin allows the body to use the small amounts of sunlight that it obtains to produce vitamin D in quantities sufficient for survival.  Dark skin blocks sunlight in the wavelengths that provide Vitamin D.  Dark skin tends to radiate heat away a little more quickly than light skin.  In Kenya, light skin is not an advantage; a light skinned person would fry very quickly indeed! With all that sunlight and warm temperatures, clothing is minimal, and dark skin is the survival winner every time.

The same thing happened with our size/shape (tall thin people loose heat fast), our ability to store fat (islanders are often large in the Pacific. Why? Perhaps because islands can suffer big swings in food supply and a big people with the ability to store fat survive better during famine).

In the modern world, we are much more mobile that were our ancestors. Now we are living all mixed up together, and in many countries live in heated or air conditioned homes.

Skin color is no longer linked to survival in the USA for example.  Nor are many of the evolved differences in our features. Wide nostrils, for example are more efficient in warm zones, narrow nostrils work better in very cold air.

What has not changed from group to group, however, is that all cultures ("races"?) still idealize cooperation, kindness, the value of the individual, and so on, even if the actions of many people may not always adhere to the ideal.

It is amazing how we still have that process of "them" and "us" at work in our heads, as if we were still living in a single valley and only knew our extended famalies. Perhaps in time the survival advantage of looking at people as individuals will allow us to evolve!

Have fun with Anthropology.

Answer 8

http://www.understandingrace.org/

This provides a basic overview.

Answer 9

I have no idea, I think it just mattered what part of the world you were from.  The closer to the equator you were the more melanin was in your skin, the colder the climate, the whiter you would be

Answer 10

The tower of Babel is completely credible!

Genesis cotnains a historical account.

There are no satisfactory 'evolutionary' explanations of how the nations and languages came about.

There is actually only one race - the human race - but many nations.

There is a good article here

http://www.creationontheweb.com/images/p...

Answer 11

The short answer: The term "race" comes from past efforts at classifying human diversity. While it's obvious that humans are a diverse species, and that many of those differences can be scientifically quantified and put into discrete categories, often by trait, the overarching idea of race ends up diverging with the scientific study of human diversity. When we talk about race, we are talking about a lot of things - geographic origin, sets of traits, and cultural habits and stereotypes, among other things - and putting them all together.

The study of race, and the concept of different races, came out of the desire of early researchers to classify the diversity they saw around them. Unfortunately, many of these researchers applied a significant amount of bias into their studies. Once this bias was realized and accounted for, it's not like human diversity went away. It  looked a bit different from a research point of view. Anthropologists haven't worked within a racial framework (or a completely racial framework, I should say) for decades and decades, choosing instead do deal with each group of people as a study that can be compared with other studies done by other anthropologists. The emphasis is now on classifying the differences between people and seeing what groupings form, instead of the other way around.

That's where the concept of race came from, essentially. Large trends in human diversity come primarily from geographical isolation over long periods of time. These large trends include skin color and dietary tolerances, but they also include things like different languages, so there you go.

Answer 12

That's a long story. And race is accepted as valid by the majority of biology phd's and forensic anthropologists, in spite of what people like to claim. Surveys carried out put forensic anthropologists in the yes to race, cultural  anthropologists in the no to race, and biologists mostly in the yes. It's a fallacy believed by many educated people that 'they've proved there's no such thing as race', perpetrated mostly by well meaning science journalists. If you take a look at the research being done, specifically the genetic items to do with race, you'll realise there's absolutely no consensus among scientists at all about race.

The percentage of 'human only' DNA that creates racial differences is about 4%. People should remember that we share 60% of our DNA with a banana and 98.6% with a bonobo chimpannzee. A very small difference in DNA (0.4% of the total) can create a whole new species.

http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpre...

There are at least four DNA studies that show the 'out of Africa' (we are solely descended fro one group of Africans) theory to be impossible. Very few anthroplogists agree with it, no matter what you see in the media. A lot of geneticists have published arguing against it too.

There are modern human remains in China over 100,000 years old, so it wasn't a recent exit from Africa either.

The best theory is that we include a little archaic homo Erectus and Neanderthal DNA, they were never really seperate species. Don't let the 'we didn't find any Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA' fool you, as it's actually very easy to lose a Mt DNA lineage. Some ancient modern human bones don't contain DNA descended from mitochondrial Eve, and Cro MAgnon bones have now rare Mt DNA as very common, so it's easy for lineages to be lost.

After the wave of modern humans moved out of Africa they mostly displaced and partially absorbed the archaic humans, putting variation into the non-African gene pool. Then there was a very big supervolcano eruption about 74,000 years ago, mount Toba in Indonesia. This wiped out everyone in the vicinty, and caused a big 'gap' between the East and West human population, as everyone from Indonesia to Iran died.

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stanle...

This supervolcano caused a 'nuclear winter' that lasted for six years, and this really took the human population down again, to a bottle neck of about 15,000 people, most of the survivors would have been in the tropical areas of Afica.

Humans seemed to have bounced back faster than the Homo erectus, and we replaced them in Asia, but it took another 50,000 years to overtake the Neanderthals.

These groups of survivors spread out out become the modern races, Sub- Saharan Africans, Europeans, Asian and Australoids, due to a combination of founder effect and archaic genes causing differences between the populations. Each adapted to the local climate and diet too. Europeans are tolerant to dairy products and alcohol, for example, but East Asians aren't. Skin colour is a non race related adaptation to UV light levels (you get some jet black Asians, like the Sri Lankans in the link below).

http://www.imagesofceylon.com/people/p32...

Answer 13

I read this site, well skimmed,  and I pretty much says that "races" isnt a word or w/e. that were only .012 % different

"different colors

-picture of 5 Differ..colored. people

"or same color, different shade"

i dont really believe all that, but you can check site out for your self.

Answer 14

Tilly,

It sounds credible to me too. Since prior to the Tower of Babel people were working together and all speaking the same language---but then they tried to build a tower to heaven, and were making alot of progress. The mother tongue, the language which everyone originally spoke, became confused and distorted because God put a language barrier there to stop people from being able to team up together and do works of evil.

I believe that at Babel, when everyone's language got confused--- the mother tongue was separated into hundreds of languages. And since there was so much confusion, people grouped together based solely off of who they could understand.  People who understood Hebrew only made their own group, People who understood Latin were another group, and every single language in the ancient world had its own group. SInce people could no longer communicate effectively with each other, they split from the Horn of Africa where they all originally were living. Some people went West, to West Africa, some went to the Congo, some went southward, some people went to the Middle East, others stayed  where they were---like the modern day Ethiopians, Somalis, Eritreans, and Kenyans, and Sudanese---, long story short small populations all went their separate ways. ANd whatever climate was in the area, they physically began to adapt. If they started off with curly hair, but went some where cold, then their hair straightened, thinned out to allow better UV penetration to get vitamin D, and became oily to allow the skin more moisture.  Eye color, eye size and shape changed with the climate too. Skin color, hair color, lip size and shape changed too. Tropical people  in hotter areas remained taller and long limbed to prevent heat  stroke, cold climate people  got shorter limbed and longer torsos to facilitate heat retention, in really cold areas endo morph body types were beneficial, and so on.  ANd then these isolated populations intermarried with in their own groups---and over time every generation in these very different populations had their own distinct look.

Every one changed once they left the Horn of Africa. ANd people changed even more so, when they left Africa all together.

So yes, I do believe the Tower of Babel story. i do not believe in evolution. Adaptation does not mean evolution, all it means is an organism---person, animal, plant---changes to better suit its environment.  Adaptation is seen in everyday life, if you accidentally eat something spicy but it tastes good, then you'll just get a glass of water to wash it down. From that day on, whenever you eat that spicy food, you'll always drink water with it. That is a behavioral adaptation.

The people changing to fit the climate stuff, was physical adaptation stuff.

Answer 15

the same way there is different types of dogs and cats....its how we adapted to the area we live.... evolution....for example in africa way way way back when the cave men arived there... it was hot and the sun was unbearable to there skin... but as time past they became more and more adapted to this sun and heat... over time one of them adapted by having dark skin... this  trait was past down and after time they all had dark skin.

Answer 16

I may not be 100% on this...

The different races we have on this planet come from a lot of things.

Mostly just the adaptations of the human body to become more "climate-controlled". For instance, Africans, exposed to the heat and sun of the equator, over time, built up a darker more rezilliant skin. The mellonan increased until they ended up with Dark or Light brown skin... and it's also why they age so gracefully.

One could deduce that Caucasians have not lived in as harsh of climates, so there was no need for our skin to be darker than it is...

The ammount of hair on a group of people can be determined by the coldness of a climate as well.

By passing down these charachteristics within our seperate races we have also passed down things like general nose size and eye shape... by living in seperate parts of the world we have developed and passed down our own languages and accents.

Now that people are more accepting of interracial dating, marraige and having children we get to see these beautiufl babies with amazing features.

Answer 17

geography: location of people in different climate and adaptation techniques