\doc\web\99\17\asev.txt Notes on evolution of Asians and other races from h-bd Date sent: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 18:02:51 -0500 From: "J. P. Rushton" To: "h-bd@egroups.com" Subject: [h-bd] IQ Evolution [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] Phil Rushton replying to Scott MacEachern who wrote: > Let's leave aside one unsupported assumption in this: that Asian > populations evolved in cold-temperate conditions. (There is a big > chunk of Asia that is tropical to sub-tropical.) REPLY: All the (outraged) attention is focused on low African IQs of about 70. Yet surely the scientific goal must be to understand the remarkable consistency of the East Asian-White-Black pattern not only for IQ scores but for barin size, crime rates, reproductive effort, marital stability, longevity, personality and temperament. Focusing overly on just one element (African IQ) may cause us to miss the forest for the trees. So what then led to East Asian brain size advantage with concomitant IQ scores (as well as African disadvantage)? Explanations that fit the entire pattern are better than ad hoc piecemeal offerings. The theory of r-K selection that I have proposed based on climatic predictability as well as on selection by cold climate fits all three population groups and explains about 60 variables and also apparently fits with the sequence of racial divergence in human evolution. East Asians evolved in harsh winter climates about 40,000 years ago. The epicanthic fold is an adaptation against the glare of the sun on ice. The "yellow" skin is due to an extra layer of fat as an adaptation again cold. (North Europeans look "pink" because the blood vessels are not so covered indicating that the "classic Mongoloids" (who score with IQs of about 106) evolved in colder environments than North Europeans. MacEachern is simply misinformed. > I was thinking here, for example, of Richard Lynn's appropriation of > Kenneth Owen's study of South African school children, where the > student's knowledge of English was so poor that test > administrators had to communicate with gestures, for a derivation > of African IQs. One would expect that, if researchers are going > to make sweeping generalizations about that most fundamental of > human qualities, intelligence, they would at very least make sure > that their data are of some minimal standard. But that doesn't > seem to be the case. REPLY: Richard Lynn did not "appropriate" anyone's research showing African IQs = 70. He reviewed the literature and almost all studies show this remarkably low estimate, including Kenneth Owen's excellent 1992 study of 4,000 high school students who certainly did not need to be instructed by "gestures." My own recent studies of South African Black University Students with an IQ equivalent of 85 (just now confirmed in a follow up experiment aimed to raise the scores) amply confirm Lynn's findings (and Owen's). FINALLY, I don't see how the system of storage and domestication in Africa can be remotely compared to those operating in Eurasia. MacEachern should give point by point evidence if he wishes to hold this position. From: "Scott MacEachern" Subject: [h-bd] Re: [hbe-l] Evolution of human intelligence [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] On 24 Nov 99, at 11:00, Ken Hirsch wrote: > I have read Miller's papers. He seems to consistenly argue that > variability is not a key factor, yet you stated that his model requires a > caricature of African environmental variability. Note that it is not cold, in and of itself, that is supposed to cause intelligence increase according to these models. Rather, the effects that temperate climates are supposed to have upon the temporal and spatial distribution of resources is supposed to confront humans with a unique set of behavioural demands, with in turn selection pressure for increased intelligence. His mate selection hypothesis involves the assumption of a qualitative difference between African and Eurasian foraging techniques, with African environments consistently providing African women with such constant supplies of vegetable foods and small game that male provisioning and detection of mate deception would be unimportant. This is as much a caricature of African environments as are the related theories of Lynn and Rushton. Let's leave aside one unsupported assumption in this: that Asian populations evolved in cold-temperate conditions. (There is a big chunk of Asia that is tropical to sub-tropical.) Beyond that, this model is critically dependent upon appeals to the ethnography of limited African forager populations, and Robert Foley for example has pointed out that African forager groups have been systematically excluded over the last 2000 years from grassland areas where herbivore biomass is high and the availability of edible (ie, non-grass) plant foods is relatively low. Basically, those areas are attractive to herders. Now the recent sample of temperate foragers contains a number of groups living in just those kinds of environments -- in North America, for example, where the end of such a foraging lifeway was the late 19th century. Those groups had not been systematically excluded from those environments, because agriculture came late to temperate North America and indigenous herding never existed at all. So we see the _historical_ background for the development and extinction of certain forms of economic and social activity in Africa and elsewhere... but this does not accord with Miller's _evolutionary_ model. Similar exceptions exist with for example the development of fishing adaptations. > He does argue that colder climates require food storage (which he > documents) and that this likely would have an effect on selection for > intelligence, both directly and via mate selection. This seems very > plausible, although not proven. ... There are a lot of ways of doing food storage. I've done some survey work on this in Africa, and can attest that physical storage of both meat and plant food is considerably more common among modern African foragers than Miller thinks. (It sometimes requires a strong stomach, but so does eg Inuit food storage.) Besides storage, archaeologists also take as an indicator of modernity the 'social storage' that occurs through cultivation of widespread social and economic exchange networks. Those networks are very characteristic of Africa (as they are for example of Europe in the Neandertal to AMH transition) and I can think of no reason why the maintenance of such networks should not select for/reflect intelligence. They certainly involve the sorts of social skills that Miller privileges when he talks about the detection of deception. > > If you have a source which documents comparable development in > (sub-Saharan) Africa compared with Europe and Asia, I'd be very interested > to read it. ... > Do other archeologists reading this agree that development in the last > 10,000 has been equal? .. Read a basic textbook in archaeology. For Africa itself, good basic texts are Graham Connah's _African civilizations_ and David Phillipson's _African archaeology_. Perhaps I'll do a poll of some other listservs... but I warn you, I don'tthink that you'll find much support for your position. > I am not aware of any tests of intellectual ability on which Africans do > as well as Europeans and Asians. Can you enlighten us? Certainly. As I noted... the archaeological and historical record. The intelligence differences often imputed to Africans by modern IQ researchers would presumably have rendered them incapable of any significant cultural attainment at all. If, for example, an IQ of 70 indicates borderline retardation, straight, unmediated, no questions asked, and if that IQ is characteristic of Africans, then why do we see the cultural advances that Africans have undertaken over the last 10 millennia? Why do we see indigenous African domestication of a wider variety of species than Europeans ever managed? Why do we see the development of indigenous African states, and political, ideological and technologiccal systems of a high degree of coomplexity? Where does all of this come from? > I know that assertions of problems are often made but the only evidence > given is that African do poorly, a circular argument. I was thinking here, for example, of Richard Lynn's appropriation of Kenneth Owen's study of South African school children, where the student's knowledge of English was so poor that test administrators had to communicate with gestures, for a derivation of African IQs. Other such cases exist. Or, in a similar vein, Miller's appropriation Piagetian tests as a substitute for IQ tests for Australian groups. One would expect that, if researchers are going to make sweeping generalizations about that most fundamental of human qualities, intelligence, they would at very least make sure that their data are of some minimal standard. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Scott ________________________________________________ Scott MacEachern Department of Sociology and Anthropology Bowdoin College 7000 College Station Brunswick, ME 04011 USA From: "Gregory M. Cochran" I think there is reason to believe that geographic variation in intelligence doesn't have much to do with the ice age; that reason being that evolution works more rapidly than that. The narrow-sense heritability of IQ is what, 0.4? That's enough that we expect an IQ drop on the order of one point per generation, as long as forgetting birth controls pills increases fitness. At that rate, the largest reported differences could be be generated in less than five hundred years. And, I think, we really do understand the cause of some ethnic differences in IQ, and they didn't take very long to come into existence. For examples, nothing is likely to cause faster evolution than a reproductively isolated group that falls into a particular social niche that rewards high ( or low) IQ; the Ashkenazi can't have been smarter-than-the-average-bear for more than about 2k years. The Parsees have had less than 1500 years to get smart, but as a reproductively isolated merchant caste, they managed... But this is exactly what quantitative genetics tells us - response can be this fast. So, whatever pattern we see should be a function of the ecological circumstances over the past few thousand years. The average IQ should be pretty close to the local optimum over that span. You can forget the Ice Age, in fact, the Roman Empire probably made more of a difference, because it happened more recently. In fact, we know that it did, since it caused the Diaspora. I am not saying that the existing geographic IQ distribution is optimal for 1999: there have been big post-Columbian movements of peoples By the way, this means that for all we know, the geographic distribution of IQ was different 20,000 years ago - bottom rail may be on top now. Next, on the topic of African IQ; we're not restricted to using Raven's progressive matrices or Stanford-Binet, you know. Modern life contains a zillion tests of intelligence; the sum of those tests is more important than any possible result from an IQ test. IQ tests are just convenient; they're on;ly useful insofar as they predict performance on real-life tests, which they do fairly well in most places. Do Africans perform better on complex, machine-civilization tasks than reported IQ tests would predict? In other words, are they good poker players? How do they do at contract bridge? Do they shine at billiards, an excellent test of spatial visualization? How fast do they solve Rubik's cube? Do they produce good chess players? Are they good accountants? Are they good practical mechanics - can they keep those Mercedes-Benzes in the capital cities running? Can they make AK-47s from scrap metal, like the dudes in Peshawar? [ What _is_ manufactured in sub-Saharan Africsa nowadays? ] At the high end, do they produce the occasional creative eningeer, mathematician or theoretical physicist? Can they run a good war? Now I know that some of these questions are not going to tell us exactly what we want to know, since opportunities can be scarce in a poor country.. But poker is, or could be, universal. There's lots more technology loose in Africa than Europe had in 1800- what are they doing with it? Is there a government in sub-Saharan Africa that runs things as well as, say, Czarist Russia? I understand that there were cities of half a million in pre-war Zaire that had electricity in exactly two buildings, both bars. Why is that? China did better than that during wardlordism and Japanese occupation; Dresden probably did better than that ten days after the firestorm. What's going on? I'm pretty sure that people in the horn of Africa can run a good war, particularly the Eritreans. Anybody who can create and maintain tank divisions, purely from captured vehicles, doing maintenance at night in caves to avoid jet bombers, has what it takes. Then again, most of sub-Saharan Africa is Bantu - that's where the main story is, that's where the ancestors of American blacks come from. What about them? I understand rural Africans often ask why Europeans are so much cleverer than they are - are they right or wrong? Gregory Cochran On 25 Nov 99, at 14:21, Peter Frost wrote: > I was going to write a rebuttal to Ed's initial post. I'd be interested in hearing it. > If we confine ourselves to East Asia, that region has seen, even > in historic times, a southward expansion of agricultural populations at > the expense of hunter-gatherers similar to the aboriginal inhabitants of > Australia and New Guinea. Quite true. On the other hand, in Africa I don't use the Bantu Expansion as an indication of where, say, sub-Saharan Africans or before that anatomically modern humans originated. Why should we attempt to link two processes, one real and one hypothetical, that are according to these racialist models separated by multiple tens of thousands of years? What does the expansion of Austronesians from the South China coast after perhaps 6000 years ago have to do with the putative expansion of 'proto- Mongoloid' peoples from Siberia after perhaps 40,000 years ago? Now, if you wish to situate the origins of 'Mongoloid' populations at some time in the Holocene, so that we could actually connect up these historical processes... fine, we could argue about that, but in that case you have just removed the evolutionary pressures that Rushton, Miller et al claim to have resulted in elevated intelligence among modern Asians. > The Mongoloid populations > that now inhabit East Asia almost certainly originated in what is now > Siberia and Mongolia. And for _that_ contention, we need specific data. Where are such data? Probably most directly relevant are the data from skeletal material recovered from Asian late Pleistocene and early Holocene sites. Interpretation of such data are complicated by three sets of factors: (1) the general difficulties of deriving population affinities from isolated and often fragmentary samples, (2) the very generalized sketal affiliations associated with 'races' and (3) the emphasis that Chinese archaeologists place up continuity from pre-Homo sapiens to modern Asian morphologies from that region. In any case, when we look at the skeletal material for which 'proto-Mongoloid' affinities have been posited (or similarities to modern East Asians identified), we find material in China from Mongolia to Zhoukoudian Upper Cave to Liujiang and Ziyang in the south. We find similar material from Okinawa (Minatogawa) and from mainland Japan (Mikkabi-Hamakita), from the Phillipines (Tabon) and from Indochina (Lang Cuom). We emphatically do _not_ have enough data to say that 'proto-Mongoloids' originated from one particular part of that distribution, and that includes Siberia and Mongolia. The other directly relevant data are of course genetic. Again, we see a very complex picture. What that indicates (from Cavalli- Sforza et al 1994:225) is affinities of Chinese populations with both groups to the north (Tibetans, Japanese, Koreans) and south (Thai, Vietnamese). I would refer you as well to Chu et al (1998), Genetic relationship of populations in China, _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 95 (20):11763-11768. This primarily critiques the attitude of Chinese archaeologists noted above, and I quote " The phylogeny also suggested that it is more likely that ancestors of the populations currently residing in East Asia entered from Southeast Asia." Archaeologically, the late Pleistocene materials from Siberia show affinities with both Asian samples to the south and with Upper Palaeolithic materials from Europe -- frequently, more strongly with the latter. Again, a Siberia/periglacial origin for modern Asian populations is not indicated. > Yes, surviving African hunter-gatherers now live largely in marginal > environments (e.g., the Kalahari). Does this invalidate the idea that > female food gathering contributed more than male hunting to the family > food supply? Hardly. Opportunities for food gathering are usually much, > much better in non-desert environments. So women would have been even > more important than men in food provisioning. .... > The reference to North American hunter-gatherers is irrelevant to > understanding the African situation. Most of North America has a cold > season (i.e., winter) that would have severely restricted the food > gathering opportunities of North American native peoples. On the contrary, it is directly relevant to an understanding of the provisioning models that Miller has advanced. He assumes that tropical areas in general are so replete with gathered foods that a priori women can provision themselves without recourse to men. Foley's work indicates that that cannnot be assumed, and that foraging strategies in tropical savanna environments could be much different than in those environments where we find tropical foragers in Africa today. In addition, we do see considerable seasonality (dispersal/concentration, differential availabilities) in the availability of both plant and animal resources in African environments, and it is not clear to me why those differences should be treated differently than temperate seasonalities. Scott ________________________________________________ Scott MacEachern Department of Sociology and Anthropology Bowdoin College From: "Peter Frost" > On 25 Nov 99, at 14:21, Peter Frost wrote: > > I was going to write a rebuttal to Ed's initial post. > > I'd be interested in hearing it. Unfortunately, this post has eaten up the time I had allotted to the rebuttal :-) > > If we confine ourselves to East Asia, that region has seen, even > > in historic times, a southward expansion of agricultural populations at > > the expense of hunter-gatherers similar to the aboriginal inhabitants of > > Australia and New Guinea. > > Quite true. On the other hand, in Africa I don't use the Bantu > Expansion as an indication of where, say, sub-Saharan Africans or > before that anatomically modern humans originated. It would be one line of evidence. Perhaps I should post my article in preparation on that subject. Why should > we attempt to link two processes, one real and one hypothetical, > that are according to these racialist models separated by multiple > tens of thousands of years? Skip the adjective "racialist" please. The notion that some human populations have expanded at the expense of others is generally accepted in anthropology. If you want to argue over the validity of the race concept, fine, but that would be another debate ... and, as I've said before, the time I allot to e-mail posts is limited. What does the expansion of > Austronesians from the South China coast after perhaps 6000 > years ago have to do with the putative expansion of 'proto- > Mongoloid' peoples from Siberia after perhaps 40,000 years ago? The end of the Holocene, 10-12 thousand years ago, would probably be more accurate. Neves, Powell and Ozolins (1999) have proposed that modern humans expanded out of Africa along a migration route that hugged the coastline of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia (and eventually even into the Americas). The descendents of this first wave would correspond to the indigenous inhabitants of Australia and New Guinea, the Andaman Islanders and isolated pockets of foragers in Malaya and the Philippines. These Australoid-like populations have gradually retreated southwards under the pressure of agriculturalist populations from the north. The Malay (or Austronesian) expansion would be one of the more recent manifestations of this southward expansion. Neves, W.A., J.F. Powell, and E.G. Ozolins. 1999. "Modern human origins as seen from the peripheries," Journal of Human Evolution. 37:129-133. > Now, if you wish to situate the origins of 'Mongoloid' populations at > some time in the Holocene, so that we could actually connect up > these historical processes... fine, we could argue about that, but in > that case you have just removed the evolutionary pressures that > Rushton, Miller et al claim to have resulted in elevated intelligence > among modern Asians. The origins would have been before the Holocene, during the glacial maximum (about 15,000 to 20,000 B.P.). Incidentally, I don't subscribe to either Rushton's or Miller's model. > And for _that_ contention, we need specific data. Where are such > data? Cold adaptations. The epicanthic eyefold, for one. A lot of studies have also been done on resistance to cold stress. Szathmary reviewed the literature on this topic in 1984. Her conclusion: "Every extremity cooling test that has compared responses of adult Eskimos and Indians with adult Europeans shows that native Americans have superior responses to cold stress. ... Some of these responses, particularly the reduction of cold-induced pain, are probably due to acclimatization; however, genetic factors must also be involved , for Eskimos who had spent 9 months in the warmer state of Oregon still did better on extremity cooling tests than Caucasian mountaineers acclimatized to Alaska" Szathmary, E.J.E. 1984. "Human biology of the Arctic," in Sturtevant, W.C. (ed.) Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 5, Washington: Smithsonian, pp. 64-71. In all fairness, no experimental evidence has confirmed that Mongoloid body form and facial morphology are cold adaptations. This is simply a prediction based on Bergmann's Rule and Allen's Rule. > Probably most directly relevant are the data from skeletal material > recovered from Asian late Pleistocene and early Holocene sites. > Interpretation of such data are complicated by three sets of factors: > (1) the general difficulties of deriving population affinities from > isolated and often fragmentary samples, (2) the very generalized > sketal affiliations associated with 'races' and (3) the emphasis that > Chinese archaeologists place up continuity from pre-Homo sapiens > to modern Asian morphologies from that region. In any case, when > we look at the skeletal material for which 'proto-Mongoloid' affinities > have been posited (or similarities to modern East Asians > identified), we find material in China from Mongolia to Zhoukoudian > Upper Cave to Liujiang and Ziyang in the south. We find similar > material from Okinawa (Minatogawa) and from mainland Japan > (Mikkabi-Hamakita), from the Phillipines (Tabon) and from > Indochina (Lang Cuom). You're wrong about Zhoukoudian Upper Cave. It clusters much more closely with modern Australian aborigines (cf. Neves et al, 1999). Mesolithic remains from Indochina similarly cluster with modern Negrito or Papuan/Australian populations. I agree that the skeletal record is incomplete, but it does support the north-to-south expansion model. > The other directly relevant data are of course genetic. Again, we > see a very complex picture. What that indicates (from Cavalli- > Sforza et al 1994:225) is affinities of Chinese populations with both > groups to the north (Tibetans, Japanese, Koreans) and south (Thai, > Vietnamese). I would refer you as well to Chu et al (1998), Genetic > relationship of populations in China, _Proceedings of the National > Academy of Sciences_ 95 (20):11763-11768. This primarily > critiques the attitude of Chinese archaeologists noted above, and I > quote " The phylogeny also suggested that it is more likely that > ancestors of the populations currently residing in East Asia entered > from Southeast Asia." Cavalli-Sforza sees the Caucasoid/Mongoloid split as taking place in the Middle East when modern humans expanded out of Africa, with one stream pushing into Europe and the other following the Asian coastline across South Asia and into East Asia. I disagree with this scenario for several reasons: 1. There is much more linguistic convergence across northern Asia than southern Asia. Moreover, these linguistic affinities include similarities in structure and not simply vocabulary (which might result from word borrowing). 2. A Y-chromosome study indicates that the Caucasoid/Mongoloid split could not have occurred much earlier than 10,000 years ago (Zerjal et al. 1997. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 60:1174-1183). The latest date for the entry of modern humans into the Middle East is 50,000 years ago and the latest evidence from Australia suggests an earlier date. 3. Before the Malay Expansion began 5,000 years ago, Southeast Asia was inhabited by populations similar to the native inhabitants of Australia and New Guinea. There are still pockets of them in southeast Asia (Andaman Islands, interior of Malaya, the Philippines). If we go back further in time, this same population seems to have occupied East Asia. The Zhoukoudian Upper Cave skeletons of China cluster with both early and modern Australian aborigines, as well as the first modern humans from the Middle East (Skhul, Qafzeh) and the earliest skeletons from North and South America (Spirit Cave, Wizard's Beach, Santana do Riacho) (Neves et al. 1999, J. Human Evolution 37:129-133). The Asian coastline route thus seems to have involved an Australoid-like population, which has since been eclipsed by a later Mongoloid expansion. In my opinion, Cavalli-Sforza is right to see a genetic division between north and south Chinese. I think he is wrong when he interprets this as being the result of two different streams, one pushing up from the south and the other pushing down from the north. My interpretation would be that the south Chinese and other southeast Asians have more admixture from earlier inhabitants. Typically, whenever a demographic expansion takes place, the "front line" is more likely to intermix with the indigenous populations it encounters. The peoples of southeast Asia and south China would thus represent the periphery of an expansion centered in north Asia. > Archaeologically, the late Pleistocene materials from Siberia show > affinities with both Asian samples to the south and with Upper > Palaeolithic materials from Europe -- frequently, more strongly with > the latter. Again, a Siberia/periglacial origin for modern Asian > populations is not indicated. There's no inconsistency here. Mongoloid and Caucasoid populations share a common ancestry. My thinking is that when modern humans first penetrated the Eurasian tundra belt in southwestern France, they rapidly colonized this entire ecological zone from Europe to Beringia. The split between what would become Caucasoids and Mongoloids (sorry for the racialist terminology ;-) occurred at the height of the glacial maximum when a series of glaciers and ice-dammed lakes blocked east-west gene flow in northern Eurasia. > On the contrary, it is directly relevant to an understanding of the > provisioning models that Miller has advanced. He assumes that > tropical areas in general are so replete with gathered foods that a > priori women can provision themselves without recourse to men. > Foley's work indicates that that cannnot be assumed, and that > foraging strategies in tropical savanna environments could be much > different than in those environments where we find tropical foragers > in Africa today. In addition, we do see considerable seasonality > (dispersal/concentration, differential availabilities) in the availability > of both plant and animal resources in African environments, and it > is not clear to me why those differences should be treated > differently than temperate seasonalities. The notion that food gathering is more important in tropical hunter-gatherers than in non-tropical ones is not Ed's theory. It's been around for some time (see the 'Man the Hunter' symposium). In North America, winter effectively put an end to most food gathering activities. In Africa, the dry season led to a reorientation of food gathering to other sources. I agree that food gathering was probably different in savanna environments than in the desert and semi-desert environments where we find most African hunter-gatherers today. I don't see why the savanna (or any of the other ecological zones) would be poorer in food-gathering opportunities. You're losing me here. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Peter Frost From: "Scott MacEachern" On 24 Nov 99, at 17:59, J. P. Rushton wrote: > All the (outraged) attention is focused on low African IQs of about 70. Outrage only for the caricatures that this will bring to mind in people who don't know the continent. As far as I know, the problem that these results pose for racial scientists has only really been noticed by Arthur Jensen -- no surprise there, I suppose. Briefly, the picture of a continent peopled by humans with such drastic mental deficit is so at variance with what we actually know of the continent of Africa itself, its people and its history, that there is obviously something very wrong with the measuring instruments being used. No surprise there, either. >Yet surely the scientific goal must be to understand the >remarkable consistency of the East Asian-White-Black pattern not only for I Q scores but for barin size, crime rates, reproductive effort, marital stability, lo ngevity, personality > and temperament. When I read _Race, evolution and behavior_, I see a potpourri of poorly-controlled or uncontrolled variables of different sorts, thrown together with basically no serious attempt to correct for the varying influences of history or social relations on your data. If it fits the preconceived model, then hey, presto!, it's biology. > The theory of r-K selection that I have proposed based on > climatic predictability as well as on selection by cold climate > fits all three population groups and explains about 60 variables > and also apparently fits with the sequence of racial > divergence in human evolution. Sorry, but it doesn't. It relies upon caricatures of environments, African and non-African -- you appear to think that the only environments in Africa are either forest or drought-prone semi- desert, for example. 'Devastating droughts' are no more characteristic of Guinean-Sudanic wooded grasslands than are chinooks in Alberta or ice storms in Maine -- and all three can disrupt forager lifeways. I really don't understand what you are thinking of here at all. The model relies on a comprehensive ignorance of modern archaeological data on actual African and Eurasian adaptations; the Europe-centric view that you put forward had been out of date for 40 years. I have in other posts noted the evidence for precocious African technological developments over the last 100,000 years; I would note as well your assertion (p. 226) that more 'Cro-Magnon' (European Upper Palaeolithic) sites than African Middle Stone Age sites are known, which indicates a serious lack of understanding of the archaeology of the two areas. It relies upon a lack of understanding of data on skeletal biology, as I note below. It begs the question of why equivalent K-selection never took place among those big-brained, tool-using, cold-adapted Neandertals, and why modern humans originated in Africa in the first place. The historical grounding of your model is really extraordinarily weak. > East Asians evolved in harsh winter climates about 40,000 years ago. As I've noted in my posts to Peter Frost, this assertion is entirely unsupported. (1) We do not know when East Asian populations originated. The half a dozen genetic estimates that I know of yield divergence times from ca 100 KYr to (estimate given in Frosts post) ca 10 KYr... and there are large uncertainties in all such estimates. The available skeletal evidence is _entirely_ insufficient to support any chronological estimates of such divergence. (2) We do not know where this population originated. As I noted in earlier posts, skeletal material with putative 'proto-Mongoloid' affinities has been identified between Mongolia and the Phillipines, and we do not have enough data to identify region of origin within East Asia. Genetic data indicate connections for East Asian populations to both north and south, and there is evidence for significant gene flow from Southeast Asia. The available data certainly do not fit your picturesque model of evolving 'Mongoloids' in northeast Asia caught "...between the encroaching ice from the Himalayas in the south and from the Arctic region in the north." (p.230). The epicanthic fold is an adaptation against the glare of the sun on ice. The "yellow" skin is due to an extra layer of fat as an adaptation again col d. This is going to surprise a lot of San people in southern Africa, where we also find elevated frequencies of epicanthic folds. Where are the ice-fields that they've had to survey? These people tend to have, as well, slightly lighter skins and a higher incidence of steatopygia than do surrounding African populations. Should we then come up with some model that explains these latter characteristics as adaptations to Arctic conditions? This is an excellent illustration of the emptiness of these ad hoc explanations for isolated physical characteristics. And, sorry, but I am reasonably well-informed on these topics. > REPLY: Richard Lynn did not "appropriate" anyone's research showing Afric an IQs = 70. Quite right; he converted test results into IQ scores even when Owen (the ac tual researcher) didn't believe that the data were suitable for such a conversion. > FINALLY, I don't see how the system of storage and domestication > in Africa can be remotely compared to those operating in > Eurasia. MacEachern should give point by point evidence if he wishes to h old this position. Note my posts to Peter Frost. For domestication systems, we probably have a higher diversity of indigenous agricultural systems - - with the experimentation, trial and error and adaptations to local environments that this indicates -- in sub-Saharan Africa than in any comparable area of Eurasia. African indigenous staple domesticates include African rice, sorghum, a variety of millets, a variety of yams, teff and ensete, and this group of staples is accompanied by a much larger groups of secondary plant domesticates. The best reference on this is still probably _Origins of African plant domestication_, edited by Jack Harlan, Jan de Wet and Ann Stemler (Mouton, The Hague, 1976). I would recommend it to you. If those agricultural systems had been developed in Eurasia, I would anticipate finding them included in your book as proof of in the intellectual superiority of their developers. Not with Africans, of course. As for storage, (1) storage of gathered foods in sub-Saharan Africa is more common than you, Lynn and Miller believe (if storage wasn't possible, how would agriculture exist?), and (2) there are in any case a number of different ways of handling seasonal variations in resources. One is storage; another is the development of a sophisticated seasonal round, one that allows you to map on to different resources at different times of the year and in different places. In addition, one develops and maintains an extensive social network (often reinforcing it materially, as with the hxaro network among some San populations), which provides fallback options if resources do fail. The maintenance of such networks requires constant work and planning. Archaeologists use _all_ of these elements to evaluate the behvioural modernity of human populations; why should we privilege any of them when evaluating the behavioural sophistication of modern foragers? Scott ______________________________________________ Scott MacEachern Department of Sociology and Anthropology 7000 College Station Bowdoin College Brunswick, ME 04011-8470 From: "Peter Frost" Date sent: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 15:57:52 -0500 Subject: [h-bd] Re: [hbe-l] Evolution of human intelligence [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] From: Scott MacEachern > On 26 Nov 99, at 14:23, Peter Frost wrote: > > > It would be one line of evidence. Perhaps I should post my article in > > preparation on that subject. > > I would be interested in seeing it. I will note at this point that the population > movements we are now arguing over are of a considerably different period > (and would probably have involved considerably different environments) than > those in the various models of Rushton, Miller et al. If, as you said > later in your post, you are positing that the Austronesian expansion > is simply the last leg of a generalized southern expansion of > Asians out of Siberia... well, have at it. But you will need some > pretty good data (skeletal? genetic? archaeological?) to make that > convincing. The article runs to almost 3,500 words. If Steve has no problems with the length, I'll post it. The skeletal evidence from East Asia can never be more than suggestive, given its patchiness. The strongest evidence is inferential. If the ancestors of the Australian aborigines reached Australia by 60,000-40,000 B.P., it follows that related populations inhabited Southeast Asia at that time. Similarly, if the ancestors of the Amerindians penetrated North America ca. 15,000-12,000 B.P., it follows that related populations inhabited northern Asia at that time. Since this time frame corresponds to the last ice age, I don't see how Philippe's model is invalidated. (My disagreement with his model centers on the evidence for frequent population crashes and rebounds in northern Eurasia, which would fit an r-type reproductive pattern). > if you > want to use different definitions (of race and of the interactions > between races, for example), that's fine, but I want to know what > you mean by such terminologies. By definition, a race is open to gene flow from other populations. If it weren't, it would be a species. > > Cold adaptations. The epicanthic eyefold, for one. A lot of studies have > > also been done on resistance to cold stress. > > ? San populations have epicanthic folds as well, but I've never > heard anyone claiming a cold-weather origin for them! The San eyefold is usually explained as a protection from solar glare in an open desert environment. The epicanthic eyefold is similarly said to provide protection from ice and snow glare, as well as wind chill and abrasion. The point is not so important, since it's pretty clear that Mongoloid populations inhabited northern Asia at the time of the last glacial maximum (see above). > Incidentally, given the common evolutionary > trajectory and similar environments that you see for early > Caucasian and Mongoloid populations... why are only the latter > supposed to be cold-adapted?) The Eurasian tundra belt ran much further north in Asia. In Europe, it was pushed south by the ice cap over Scandinavia and the British Isles. Ancestral Europeans had to adapt to low-latitude tundras whose characteristics were significantly different from the environments of northern Asia. > ? Yu Xinzhi's cluster analyses place Upper Cave 102 and 103 with > Liujiang and Minatogawa, I think, and Dennis Etler seems to agree > with that general grouping, so something is going on here. (Neves > also talks about the 'African' affinities of Luzia, that skull from > Brazil, which seems rather enthusiastic to me.) There's more than > just Neves et al on this. We all have African affinities if you go far enough back. Neves' model is that "Australoids" entered North America before the last ice age (via a south and east Asian route) and thus were not subjected to the modifications that humans in northern Eurasia underwent. I use the word "Australoid" between quotation marks, because we're dealing with people who were ancestral not only to the Australian aborigines, but also to the Andaman Islanders and a lot of other extinct populations. They probably looked like something between modern Khoisans and Aborigines. > (FWIW, I can more easily envisage a less directed model, with a > good deal of microevolution of populations going on in place and > eventually the attendant effects of agriculture upon skeletal > morphologies -- the sort of thing that Loring Brace talks about. This > seems more likely than this hydraulic model of populations > washing all over the place.) Loring Brace entered anthropology at a time when all human variation was seen as being necessarily adaptive and resulting from different migrations of one sort or another. In my opinion, the pendulum has now swung too far in the other direction. Founder effects, genetic drift, and "easy evolution" have become almost a default option for explanations of human variation. > What I can't figure out is why the strategies > that temperate foragers use are supposed to Make You Smart, > while the ones that tropical foragers use are supposed to Not Make > You Smart. The latter have a sophisticated knowledge of different > kinds of resources and of seasonal variability of those resources, > they use complex artefact sets in obtaining those resources, and > they establish widespread social networks for risk minimization > and obtaining environmental information. These are all, interestingly > enough, characteristics that we associate with behavioural > modernity in anatomically modern humans, in Africa and outside it. > So, my question is... just where in the calculus of intelligence are > Africans supposed to be short-changed? Keep in mind that the models of Ed Miller and Phil Rushton have not been developed in a normal academic environment. If you had to live through what their authors had to live through, you would become less receptive to criticism and less likely to change your views. Again, I don't agree with either of their models, largely because data from the oldest living populations in Africa (Khoisans and Pygmies) show them to be very "K" in their reproductive strategy. Similarly, evidence of population crashes (an "r" characteristic) is much stronger for arctic and subarctic human populations. > The issue in that case was not the poverty of savanna resources, > but (according to Miller's model) the relative availability of large > game and plant resources there. Miller assumes that all tropical > environments are so rich in that latter than provisioning by males > will not be important for women; that assumption cannot be made. As I understand it, the relevant factor is not the overall richness of the environment, but the relative balance between opportunites for hunting and food gathering. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Peter Frost Group d'études Inuit et circumpolaires Université Laval Sainte-Foy (Québec) Website: http://www.globetrotter.net/gt/usagers/pfrost ------------------------------------------------------------------------How to contribute to H-Bd: 1. 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