What if Homo erectus was alive today?

Hi, Austin.I had to slip in with my OCD and correct something that you wrote: This is untrue. All that is required is isolation. You're not going to find one species that evolved independently from two different ancestors, so no amount of evolution and no amount of selection pressures are going to turn any surviving Homo erectus into new Homo sapiens. The only thing that would do this is interbreeding (along with selection pressures).Think of it this way. I'm white. Is there a chance that my child will be born Asian? Is there any chance that my descendants will ever become Asian without interbreeding with Asians somewhere along the line?----- I'm a science fiction writer by hobby, and I occasionally deal with this very issue: how will humans view aliens? That's essentially what a Homo erectus is: an alien.Could the concept of a "Chosen Race" be extended to allow another species into our churches?Would we feel the same remorse in killing a Homo erectus as we would in killing a Homo sapiens?I think we'd generally treat them better than we treat cows and centipedes and squid, and we'd probably try to establish some kind of dialogue, even if only for the academic curiosity. But I think we'd still have a tendency to see them as "them," and us as "us": if push comes to shove, we'll favor ourselves over them for sure.-----Here's a thought: if you were the government of Florida, and H. erectus was found in the Everglades, would you be willing to let them carve out a chunk of your state as their homeland?I bet most countries would complain about the loss of territory, and that would be the beginning of a political grudge that may eventually escalate to war.

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Perdition.I think the final test would be whether we could procreate with them.I wonder how a fundamentalist would feel about that idea.
Would interbreeding be a sin, and all children produced, abominations?
If children are produced, what would prevent us from calling them just another ethnic group, instead of a different species?
And, wouldn't the "abominations" label then simply amount to racial bigotry?Edited by Bluejay, : I'm pretty sure fundamentalists won't "fell" anything

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, AustinG. That's completely untrue!There are hundreds of physical and physiological traits that distinguish different ethnic groups from one another. For instance, Africans and Caucasians have four-cusped molars, and Asians have five-cusped molars; African skulls are prognathic, while Caucasians and Asians have flatter facial bones; body hair patterns and fat-storage patterns are also different; races that live in bright places (deserts and snowfields) often have epicanthal folds to protect their eyes; and, of course, races have different distributions of skin, eye and hair pigments.The distinctness of the differen races in terms of appearance is evidence of genetic divergence. It's just that there's no real reproductive isolation, as yet (although most people generally marry within their own race). If Europeans, Africans, Asians and Amerindians were to stay isolated from one another, there's no reason why they wouldn't have each evolved into a different species.Taboo is the only reason someone would say that race is a purely cultural construct. Perhaps this very taboo would be the only hope for Homo erectus in our modern world. But, if we are reproductively isolated from H. erectus, I don't think the taboo would protect them in the slightest.

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Perdition. I don't know of a reason to think that they're not the same species as us, other than that archaeology defines them as such.There would be a number of factors involved: some erectus obviously were in Asia a long time before sapiens evolved in Africa, so these would probably be sufficiently divergent from us to prevent interbreeding. However, those in Africa, which are sometimes called Homo ergaster, a different species, are thought to be our direct ancestors, which means their population would only have diverged from ours about a quarter million years ago. I have no idea whether a quarter million years is enough time to become reproductively isolated.----- Mules are infertile because horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes. So, a mule has one horse chromosome that doesn't pair up with a donkey chromosome.Similarly, chimpanzees and gorillas have one more pair of chromosomes than we do. Whether the change occurred before or after H. erectus (I suspect it was before) might play into whether or not hybrid children would be fertile.I think the big cats all have the same number of chromosomes, though, and they have reduced hybrid fertility, so it's still possible.

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, TheWhale. No, I was wrong: the genetic differences are not consistent enough within "races" to show that "races" are distinct, cohesive groups, at least genetically.Sure, there is some biological component to race, but it's more in the distribution of haplotypes within a race, rather than in the distinct genetic identity of a race. Bluegenes provided a link to a Wiki page on haplogroups. Haplogroups are where you see the actual genetic diversity of humans, and, as you can see in the following image, each haplogroup is distributed across many races: For instance, we could say that the Amerindian race is defined by a broad distribution of Y-DNA Haplogroup Q. But, Q also occurs in many Asian populations, so many Amerindian people are more similar to some Asian people genetically than they are to other people within their own tribe.-----Now, you could argue that "culture" is equivalent to "ecology," and make the case that ecological distinction is sufficient to define subspecies, but we have yet to find strong reasons to suggest that human ecology is anything more than a learned behavior.

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, TheWhale. Here is the link to the American Anthropological Association's statement on race, which AustinG provided upthread (by the way, Austin, your hyperlinks didn't work: you've got the web addresses written as "http:///" with nothing following it).Here's the relevant part:

quote:

---

Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them.

---

Here are some recent citations on the subject: Witherspoon et al 2007 (should be free access)
Long et al 2009 (abstract: full text is not free)Both of these support the notion that races are not genetically distinct from one another.-----The following is a recent paper that suggests that race is an appropriate categorization system: Edwards 2003 (abstract: full text is not free)Basically, Edwards says that the variation between races is mostly in the form of varying allele frequencies, whereas the numbers the American Anthropological Association quote above uses only talk about presence/absence.It's a valid argument, except that, like Coyote said, allele frequencies are not distinct categories, but gradients, so it's hard to draw a line between two races.For your information, the other two papers I referenced are, in part, rebuttals to Edwards' paper.Edited by Bluejay, : I prefer capital letters at the beginning of sentences, but that's just me.

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Caffeine. Well, of course: it's an oversimplification, but the principle is still the same.----- And, naturally, you may have people use this "slippery slope" argument as a reason to not give Homo erectus civil rights.-----New random question:Would you vote for a Homo erectus for president?

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.