Re: [tied] The indo european "race"

05-08-03 00:41, Exu Yangi wrote:

> A-hem...at the risk of being politically incorrect, I am afraid that what we
> often believe we know is wrong. Or are you really saying you can't tell a
> Watusi from a Chinese? (Not an adhominem, I really want to know).
>
> If you say you can, then you know that races exist.
>
> If you say you can't, then I can understand you saying races do not exist.

Nobody can deny the existence of such differences. In different
populations different morphological features are prevalent. Note however
that different features, e.g. blood groups vs. pigmentation, have
different distributions and divide us in quite different ways. People
have traditionally (and arbitrarily) been obsessed with _conspicuous_
features, such as skin colour, straight/curled hair, etc., ignoring a
host of "hidden" characters that may be of more fundamental importance
from the point of view of human biology. I hope it's quite clear that
the idea of "pure" or "original" races is absurd. Everyone on on this
planet is a "mixture" of anthropologically relevant traits, which
doesn't mean that their distribution is uniform.

Nevertheless, as a species, we're surprisingly homogeneous, almost like
the cheetah. They say there's more genetic diversity in a single tribe
of chimps that in the global population of humans.

>>PS: do you know something about the hair colour of indo-europeans? in
>>the contrary to what I have said previously, many characters in latin
>>and greek litterature are blond!
>>
>
> Yes, their hair was colored. Probably black,brown, blond, and red in some
> persons. Also, there may have been persons with total lack of pigment in
> their hair.

And there were some who had no head hair at all.

Piotr