George - 26 February 2011 09:06 AM

Phi- - 26 February 2011 09:00 AM

am curious to know how the three theories (Leaky Replacement,Multiregionalism and Out of Africa) can explain the racial differences between races (hair color , skin color and eyes color).

The differences are not difficult to explain: they reflect the geographic regions of the peoples. What is less clear is why people are so similar.

I believe you answered that yourself. There never was a real split and interbreeding happened at an early stage. Perhaps continental drift seperated groups, which then went on to develop their own identity, but IMO the differences in our DNA are superficial and the fundamental mix was already established very early in the development of humans.

i.e. the dough mixture can be baked to a cake, a bread, or a cookie…..

Continental drift operates on a much slower time scale than human evolution; the map of the globe 100,000 years ago is almost indistinguishable from that of today (except for differences in sea level).

I was going to make the same comment but then I thought that perhaps Write4U was referring to the different sea levels of the past that indeed made the world map look much different from today. During the Pleistocene, for example, one could practically walk from Papua New Guinea all the way to Tasmania. Once the sea levels rose, the isolation of the peoples certainly had a huge impact (in most cases a negative one*) on their future evolution.

*The people of Tasmania supposedly forgot how to make fire, for example.

George - 14 July 2011 10:33 AM

I was going to make the same comment but then I thought that perhaps Write4U was referring to the different sea levels of the past that indeed made the world map look much different from today. During the Pleistocene, for example, one could practically walk from Papua New Guinea all the way to Tasmania. Once the sea levels rose, the isolation of the peoples certainly had a huge impact (in most cases a negative one*) on their future evolution.

*The people of Tasmania supposedly forgot how to make fire, for example.

Thank you Chris and George for correcting me.  The main point was separation of groups by natural causes, which then evolved in divergent ways. Darwinian.