Just to make this very clear I'm not racist in any way and if you feel offended by the term races and you think the only race is the human race then just think of the term as sub races.

I'm sure there's many here who have interesting theories to share about how the different races appeared, the way they did, and at what times they did, and anything else you might want to add.

I myself know I don't buy the mainstream theories and I'm puzzled by this because I can't find any alternative theory I find plausible nor I feel any of my own theories are that good either.

So hope the forum can shed some light on this.

God decided that people needed to look different. Really, I don't try to classify races by any means. We are all unique, and that's what matters.

Well, i dont really have any theories of my own, but im curious why you dont agree with the mainstream ones. This sounds like a good topic for discussions...

They appeared when humanity spread and adapted differently to their surroundings. The more sun a place got, the darker your skin was. Not very interesting, but clear race lines have never been drawn, and they really blur in certain areas.

Skin is not the only factor, how does that explain just for example, the asian racial type?. People always think about skin but as far as I have read skin has to do with ultraviolet exposure, what about facial feautures and skull measurements?. If we all come from the same source then we would have to look pretty much the same except for skin color, but somehow we don´t.....

you would have to look at what the early people of those nations did.

Hunters would have large eyes with long range for seeking prey.
Gatherers would have darker skin for protection from the sun
desert people would have dark skin and be a size the would help with water retention.
forest people would be small in order to navigate the forest....except for the amazon women who were large warriors, for fighting
intellectual races would have adapted lighter skin and various eye shapes
artic people would have been hairy and fat storers
tropic people would have been leaner and less hairy

the way I see it. we just developed how we would and this is where we are now...
South Park hit the nail on the head with the Goobacks episode im sure.....we will eventually be all one color throughout the whole world.much later

You're just getting nit-picky, you can recognize the differences more readily because you are a human. Not all German Shepherds look exactly alike, but they're all just German Shepherds. We are one race, we just look slightly different.

dogs being a great paralel for this discusion i concur that noone looks the same but we are more or less discussing shepard and rotweiler differences.
both dogs both close enough to crossbreed but quite obviously not the same species.

like blacks, and asians, etc


now like dogs there are probally clans of selective breeds.
this is shown in mating preferences that seem acceptable to the tribe.

in a sense im not surprised nazis took shape after all they would be regarding themselves as purebreds [ever seen dog shows.]
that being said racism is natural as beasts defending their blood line as to not let in weakness they have tirelessy wined out.

ironically cross breeding allows us to adapt our brood quicker. by obtaining the genes we need rather than wasting rescources evolving those genes.

think tech research rather than design something from scratch. steal the enemy prototype and then invest rescources on improvement.

I agree. The current ideas are not correct they are PC ideas.

I believe that a higher race one existed and has spread its DNA around the world giving rise to civilization. Thats why Europeans are advanced and others still live in mud brick houses.

I agree with most, that human just evolved to their habitat and surroundings, just like animals do.

Surprising no one has brought up the sons and grandsons of Noah up yet. They provide an interesting story that was considered fact in the past.

Interesting story though not much information for this particular topic: Human line nearly split in two

[size="2"][/size]So far the responses are underwhelming. There's nothing racist about acknowledging that human beings come in different races (along with interbreeding of two or more races). The skin color can be easily explained, as one comment has already said. But there are many identifying characteristics beside skin color, and we seriously should be looking for the reasons that things such as eye shape and color, lips shape and size, body types, and susceptability to diseases and other medical problems vary between races. These things do not make any one race superior or inferior, and this is NOT stereotyping (there are exceptions to all of these, but each trait applies in general). Why are oriental eyes almond shaped but not the rest of us? Why are some African groups lips thicker? Why are other Africans such as the Masai so tall and lithe (and don't have thick lips by the way)? Why are European noses often thinner and longer? These are just starter examples of the types of differences between us. Is it possibly because our "root stock" came from different sources? Intermixing races often yields delightful offspring, possibly brighter or prettier or stronger or... Please don't nitpick my refusal to couch these comments in political correctness. These differences make us more interesting, and the cause(s) of our obvious racial differences may have substantial significance. By the way, isn't it interesting that these racial differences seem to be physical only? Not mental? I hope this post will stir you to a more serious consideration of the topic because there really is a substantial question at the root of all this.

The problem with that, though, is that there's no consensus on what constitutes race -- it varies from culture to culture. Furthermore, it's not a simple, fixed genetic trait. Even if you reduce race to skin tone alone (which almost no culture does), it's determined by multiple alleles.

Race is a /social/ construct, not a biological one, so trying to find an physical origin or explanation for it is doomed to failure.

--Jaylemurph

Yeah finally we are getting somewhere. I posted this topic in this particular forum, not by coincidence, but because I wanted some insight from the point of view of the information that ancient civilizations left about this subject. I have read some wild theories about genetical engineering and the sort which seem to be the only ones to be adressing the topic of the different races of humanity. Because the bible don´t really treats this topic as far as I know, and mainstream science just tell us we came out of africa ( of course untill they find some older fossil somewhere else) and that we microevolved from an original race ( which?, negroid?, neanderthal?, other?) to all the diverse racial spectrum we can find nowdays all around the world.

Now, I can accept some pigmentation microevolution happening, stature modifications etc, but you look at a australian aborigine and a japanese person together and it is almost like they are bordering the limits of being from different species. How accepted sources explain this?, well as we explain everything I guess, living creatures can mutate from one thing to another completely different if you give them some millions of years of isolation and perhaps some cataclysm to help them haste the process. Well you know what, I don´t buy it.

I do believe the bible is onto something when it talks about god creating us from his very image, methaphorically speaking of course. I tend to think all " primary races" were present from the beggining, then they spread around and they microevolved and thus adopted the small phenotypical differences we see within their same sub racial groups ( i.e filipinos, chinese, japanese within the asian group, or mediterraneans, nordics in the caucasian group etc). Which makes more sense than saying all subraces are mutations of an original racial source IMO.

Now if this theory is even remotely close to the truth the question remains, how did all primary races appear on the earth?, we don´t even know how man came to be honestly, there´s no conclusive proof of apes mutating into humans, it´s just a theory, so if we start thinking of not one race of man appearing, but several, the equation gets much more complicated.

Of course then this is just the way I see it, and I don´t but my own theories much either to be honest, that´s why I would like some insight from the folks in here and better yet to talk about what the ancients had to say about this. I read the whole aliens mixing their genes with hominids etc etc, which is all nice except we have no proof of aliens being on earth, small issue right?

So then, are then any ancient texts regarding this issue without getting into gods, aliens or dimentional wormholes?

Of course there is a whole social burden on the term race, because of racism and it´s consequences. But the reality is that the term race never meant to imply some group of people weren´t human or something like that, it is just a mean to differentiate human phenotypes. And it´s necessary because if I want to describe to someone how a negroid person looks I can start pointing out every single detail of their physical appeareance or I can just say " negroid" and be done in a second. That´s the only real use for the terminology of race, all the superior/ inferior bit is a social construct and should be disregarded as it is clear any person of any race will act according to the enviroment they are exposed, meaning an european will probably act as an aboriginal if left in an aboriginal tribe long enough and viceversa.

So if we look at the issue this way and realize that everyone basically the same except in appearance then we can take off the social burden and continue to discuss a subject that is most certainly very interesting and I´d dare to say crucial to the discovery of the origins of mankind.

I'm not suggesting you'd think some races weren't human. I'm suggesting you're endowing words with a reality that doesn't exist because you've been /culturally/ programmed to understand them. Nazis thought "Aryans" existed, too, but most people understand now it was a fictional construct.

But what I'm saying is that what "Negroid" (for example) means varies from culture to culture -- it's not a term like "nose" or "toe" that means the same thing to all people. Three people that in America would all be called "black" would in Africa be recognized as three distinct races. Some Berbers from North Africa would be recognized as "Black" or "Middle Eastern" in America, but would be considered "White" to other Africans or European. And there is no genetically uniform definition for /any/ "race". You need to branch out and understand that your culturally specific terms -- what you essentially define above as a kind of functional shorthand -- aren't universal.

--Jaylemurph

Ok let us see, so you are totally denying the race terminology?, I´m sorry my friend, that might be your theory but last time I checked modern anthropology has the human specie divided in races from a biological point of view. So if you think races don´t exist that is totally acceptable, but I have to disagree with you.

The fact that an African American person would probably be recognized differently in Africa is because A. Americans ( which itself is a stupid term, black american people have long ago earned the right to be called just Americans, but well...) are in their majority highly mixed . If you look past the mixing you can get to see that there is a source for all races. Of course this is highly debated and also is the way I see it.

If you don´t, it´s ok with me, but I´d love to continue the conversation anyways. So if you guys don´t like the term race then find whatever term you like for the physical differences in humanity and then let´s keep going, essentially just change the word and the purpose of this thread remains the same.

cheers

Maybe some pics can say a hundred words on this matter. I´ll use mainly sport people because I like sports and it´s easier for me to find what I look for this way.






Europe is pretty much divided between the nordic and mediterranean types, then of course the whole spectrum that comes with the mixing of these two. Again, despite the small differences, just by looking you can group this 2 types on one same category. Most of the times when Europeans go darker than this it means they have had mixing with some African people at some point during invasions, wars etc. I don´t consider those the source types. Again being racially ( put whatever word suits you better in there ) purer has nothing to do with being superior or inferior IMO, but I think we can agree there´s people that have been mixed more than others, and some that look as they had no mixing whatsoever.







Again all this people being mostly Africans of no mixed breed can easily be grouped in another category even by the untrained eye despite their small physical differences. Again not genetically different, just superficially similar enough for one to be able to put them under a category.

this fellow on the other hand



has mixed ancestry and that´s easy to see, if he goes back to africa and meets the previous folks he will be stared at with curiosity, as he is doesn´t belong anymore to the source racial phenotype. That doesn´t mean race is a useless terminology.







Now again we have a japanese girl, a philipine girl and a chinese girl, all clearly follow the same case as the ones above.

I myself, don´t see any reason, except for social guilt and stuff of the sort, to not group the people of the earth by races. Again races have to do with superficial physical traits and nothing else. But again that´s my opinion and everyone is entitled to disagree. Still I´m sure that there are theories for these physical differences too, how they came to be.

I leave you with a picture of some australoid aborigenes, they puzzle me very much



Cheers

Well, you've clearly made up your mind on the situation; I assume you don't want to hear different opinions as much as you want to hear your own opinion repeated to you with the odd "That's clever" thrown in. That's fair enough -- but it's worth noting that flashing pictures back at me, repeating with images what you've already said, isn't any sort of informed refutation of the points I made.

--Jaylemurph

I had read once that there is a Vitamin D link to pigmentation. Basically, melanin is linked to a trait whereby the body can use sunlight to work with Vitamin D (either breaking it down or producing it - I'd have to check as I can't recall the biochemistry of Vitamin D). But basically, too much Vitamin D is poisonous, and leads to rickets and other ailments; and melanin blocks/absorbs UV radiation at the dermis level - before it gets to activate enzyme activity within a cell, resulting in "slower" production of folate. So the idea is, as humans migrated into Northern latitudes where sunlight is less intense than at the equator, darker skin is deleterious - the body would not able to produce sufficient Vitamin D/Folate (fetuses would not develop properly). Hence, any "fairer skin" offspring would have a natural survival advantage. Then, after 500 or more generations, you might end up with Nordic types. Near the equator, darker skin reduces the rate of production of folate. That's a good thing because UV is more intense at the equator where the angle of sun's incident rays is almost straight "down."
Of course, today, we have Vitamin D in milk - but it would have been a far far different story 500,000 or even 75,000 years ago.
Rickets, malformed neural tubes in fetuses and other ailments - like I said.
Also, many physical traits may be coded for on alleles or near genes that code for melanin pigmentation (By the way, all of us, except albinos, have the same amount of melanin. It just manifests itself differently in our dermis.

Here's a link: Vitamin D Pigment

Oh, by the way, humans tended to migrate northward moreso than southward because Northern climates are more temperate. Has to do with the Earth's tilt and revolutions around the sun, or some such. Basically, the southern hemisphere has more drastic weather. Hence, the predominance of "Nordic types" in the North as opposed to the extreme south. [This goes to the prior comments about Australian aborigines - likely from Africa, though, I must confess, I can't describe their migration patterns of 50 - 25,000 years past.]

Hey cut me some slack here, It is clear my intention here is not to expose my own opinion repeatedly, but I´m just trying to make a point that if you forget about the social burden of the terminology is not that unuseful after all, AGAIN I repeat if you don´t agree that´s fine. Still I would like to hear and discuss some theories from ancient civilizations about this matter. I know native americans had some theories from the beggining of human kind and the different races, I´ll look it up and post some quotes later to see if we can take a more productive direction on this thread.

Again the vitamin D theory is all good but only deals with pigmentation, so you must then believe we all came from a single source racial type in Africa and then the question remains, which one begun it all?, what did the first humans looked like?. You know, there are many forums on the net that deal with race, genetics, the studies of mtDNA etc. But I´m not posting this topic over there, first because they always end up with the "my race is superior than yours BS", and secondly because I know science and genetics have not yet arrived to any conclusion, so then we can see what the ancients had to say about it. And that´s why I posted it here on the Ancient Mysteries & Alternative History
forum.


Again the only people I hear adressing this topic with certain logic are the "alien astonaut theory" guys, and if anyone wants to discuss those theories, even when they are a bit "out there", I guess it is fine too!!!

Sorry if I sounded a bit repetitive Jaylemurph.

Cheers

Look up miniture poodles then youll understand how races came about.

Gotta good link for canine breeding?

Check out wiki they should tell you how we created the different kinds of poodles. While thats a mild case of selective breeding. With enough years that wild mutt's bloodline can be made into a tracker or a small danty long haired house dog.

The many breeds of humanity(sounds better than race) didnt pop up over a few centurys. It took time. And more importantly drastic evironmental, diet and social demands.

Hmmmm.... I think our different races are genetical modified to allow different abilities in different climates, etc. Our DNA has been altered (all that junk DNA - isn't junk in my opinion ~ I believe we are Greater than we think... and perhaps the unused DNA is about to be 'turned on' by a cosmic event - ie. alignment with the central sun) Could be we are a Grand Experiment and we are going to the next level.

It is easier to talk about tribes and how they evolved into ethnic groups than it is to talk about race in general only because tribes and ethnic groups have more of a written history. Even so you will reach a certain point going backwards that there is no history and that poses a problem.

I took an anthropology class a few years ago, and the professor stated the reason we have different races is because of climate. When we have hotter climates, we have darker skinned races; when we have colder climates, we have lighter skinned races. When we talk about climate, many years ago it was severe coldness or severe heat, and all other levels in between corresponding to different geographical locations. We also have to include migration in this picture.

You are operating under a false assumption.

The above dogs are all of the same species.

The differences in the races of humans are too slight to be easily measured with DNA.

What does that tell you?

The geographic separation of various populations of humans is more than enough to account for any and all differences in how we "look."

Harte

Not to mention the effects of Culture on different races and man's inate distrust of outsiders. So it is natural that people who looked the same and had the same religion and culture would all stay together and keep from interbreeding with other populations. Then slowly the populations would breed for what each culture defined as the best traits.

Given that technology had never developed ships, airplanes or horse riding, seperate populations of people would have eventually developed into actual seperate species.

The Lost Civilisation of Australia

http://www.rexgilroy.com/

and the URU book excerpts

http://www.rexgilroy.com/index-uru-book.html

That a people choose to work in stone does not necessarily mean they are devoid of civilisation...

hi ya atom.

though i respect your idea as an intellect,it saddens me that you think of it that way. HOW DO YOU JUDGE WHICH IS "ADVANCE/HIGHER RACE" ANYWAYS? no really, people.... its kinda strange that we all bable about race and racism, but really....HOW DO YOU JUDGE WHICH IS "ADVANCE/HIGHER RACE"???????

my fellow people of intellect, HOW DO YOU JUDGE WHICH IS "ADVANCE/HIGHER RACE"???????

does it have anything to do with polictics? because as far as i am concern id like to see a highly intellectual and political capable person to enter and win a fight in the octagon (UFC mix martial arts fighting ring) Does it have something to do with where they lived in like mud brick houses?...... hold up, wait a minute, are you saying that europeans do not make the basic stucture of their house from earth materials like cemment, bricks and rocks?? cause im a european and i do have a house thats basically made of earth materials. makes me wonder what your house is made up of..

superiority is like leadership

you dont know till it hits the fan.

Go back 2000 years, and it was the Southern Mediteranians, North Africans and the Middle East that were advanced, whilst Northern Europeans were livivng in mud huts.

Right and also not right. Many, many people have misconceptions that the Germanic and Celtic tribes of Europe were somehow "barbarous." Phoenicians seemingly carried on an active trade as far as Norway! And Norwegians and Danes likely ventured into the Mediterranean to conduct trade with Phoenicians and Egyptians. The Europeans had agriculture (insofar as the Northern latitudes would permit), and the sea-faring Angles, Saxons, Jutes and others made their way into Britain about 2,000 years ago to supplant Celts that were already thriving there.
Yes, Africa seated high civilization. And before Egypt there were probably earlier great Empires. Consider biblical references to Queen of Sheba from Ethiopia. Even if the story is a myth, it likely has some basis in historical fact.
And there were likely other Empires and dynasties on Africa's Ivory and Gold Coasts from times past.

Remember that our word "Barbarian" comes from the Roman Latin word for "people who cannot speak or read Latin" - that was how a Roman would insult a foreigner - like a member of the Germanic tribes. And a lot of our misconceptions about these Europeans of 2,000 years ago comes down to us because Julius Caesar, in his quest for glory, vilified the Celts, and the Germanic peoples (in writing) in order to justify the genocide he inspired in Gaul, Britain, and elsewhere.

Humans had high society and high culture everywhere - whether they lived in mud huts, concrete slabs, thatched straw structures, Mongolian gers, Turkish yurts, or greased leather teepees! And humans also sponsored warfare and mass killings everywhere.

1st Edit: I always forget Asia. China was the balls while Europe was still in diapers! And India, too!

I do think you're trying to explain the etymology for the "Greek" instead of "Roman Latin" ... and the word comes from a PIE word that meant "stammerer" -- not quite what you're trying to suggest.

--Jaylemurph

People migrated into different regions of the world, and gradually over time, each race evolved to suit their surroundings best. Skin color is because of climate, and the way each race thinks is greatly influenced by their culture. If you take one person of each race and put them all on an Island (no one allowed in and no one allowed out) and come back after a million years, there'd be just one race - a race that evolved to fit best into its environment.

[font="Arial"][/font][size="3"][/size]Now we seem to be getting to the real question. Evolutionary differences are easy to conceptualize. DNA and genes have established that humans are humans, so let's put aside all the crap about racism. The human "races" as we know them must have sprung from different root stock, not one common ancester. And there's the subtle little things like the human clock being slightly off earth's 24-hour day. All of this is unsubstantial except as clues that we MAY have originated from several varieties of humans (for discussion purposes let's call them aliens from several different worlds). Yes, we're all the same species and the definition of race is largely irrelevent, but it's very relevent to seeking our origins. Some races are apparently hybridizations of other races, and some are too broadly lumped. Linguists say the world's languages have several different roots, which also raises questions. It's really hard to peruse these questions without preconceptions coloring our thinking. But we need to speculate in order to conceive a list of possible answers to the root question that I believe the original poster is askiing. And it's a profound question too! And the replies and comments are showing more thought. Looking forward to more discussion!

Maybe you're phrasing your thoughts badly, but "The human "races" as we know them must have sprung from different root stock, not one common ancester." makes absolutely no sense. There had to be, by default, a single root. To say that there were different root stocks would mean that you believe that different animals that all just happened to be exactly the same just happened to evolve from animals that were exactly the same...unless black people evolved from crocodiles, while asians came from lemurs, etc. There could not have been different root stocks because then there would have to be completely different. As many people have already mentioned, the actual genetic difference between different "races" is less than the difference between different people in that same population.

"Most (85%) of our genetic variation is within populations rather than among them, even when different sequences of DNA (or proteins) are examined (Barbujani et al., 1997 ). Statistical divisions of humanity based on different kinds of genetic data do not group people consistently into races (Romualdi, 2002 )." http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/earthhis.../humanrace.html

It's so too late in the night to be talking about race of all things.

Dude..thats one of the most idiotic and sarcastic stuff i have read in here.
You are the racist.
Go shove your stuff elsewhere!

Not only racist, but historically inaccurate.

Dude (or Dudette) check my post above. Skin color because of melanin - Vitamin D production. Has to do with the angle of incidence of the sun striking the earth. Northern latitudes, indirect angle. Equator - direct angle. Check my above postings.

The guys talking about superior race? Not so. African blacks, typically, have higher hip bones. [Given time, I could probably find out why Europeans lost higher hip bones.] In a similar vein, Europeans have a higher body fat to protein ratio [Probably has to do with colder climates. That is, we would need a greater store of fat in the colder latitudes.]

Brain capacity and thinking ability? I challenge anyone to put an average African, an Asian, and a European WASP or Slav in the same environment and test each of the three (given a large enough sample) for intellectual acumen and come up with different propensities for intellectual ability. And I mean a controlled study with a control group - and as I said, average children from each region... But it is clearly unethical to do such a study...

Fact is, in America anyway, blacks still have inferior education or nurturing. It's just how the system evolved. And no matter how hard we try, it's extremely difficult to overcome 350 years of socialization. I know firsthand that America tried to make me (a male of color) into an idiot after I had graduated from university - through no access, controlled access, or just plain group peer pressure (after all, aren't African Americans supposed to be less intelligent?)

Most profound thing I ever heard in America? From a homeless (black, but really mulatto) man in DC: The founding fathers were some smart m'uuuh f'uuhs. They wrote the Constitution, and then they wrote the dictionary, too...
How's that for wisdom??

Not at all how it worked. Dr Johnson's Dictionary came out in 1759 (though there were plenty of dictionaries before his); the Constitution, 1789. I take your friend's point, but it does no good to elide facts to be pithy.

--Jaylemurph

I dont really believe in the following idea but it fits in with this topic, so...: Aliens came to visit earth. Their ship crashlads, and they r forced to stay here. Overtime they begin to change. Some aliens took to the difference well and looked different to the ones who didn't. So that was a whole new race. The others split up and look for suitable places to stay. Once they settled they began to evolve to match their surrondings.