Race Relations

I'm talking about biological race relations, of course. This thread is about common ancestors between different races (I've elaborated on some points in *this* thread).Today while browsing Wikipedia, I saw something that shocked me. According to this page, Japanese are more closely related to Europeans than they are to South Chinese. Indeed, according to the same data, Iranians are more closely related to Native Americans than they are to Malaysians, but I've used Japanese, Europeans and South Chinese as examples to truly convey the bizarreness of the fact to my regrettably Euro centric worldview.Here’s the great human family tree:This picture made me question various things that I'd previously thought to be true, in a number of ways. One, it made me doubt slightly the veracity of Wikipedia, but that's not within the scope of this thread. But more importantly, it made me think about migrations and convergent evolution.First of all, I'd always somewhat naively assumed that humans had migrated from Central Africa and went on to colonise the different continents. Some went on to inhabit the Western, Eastern and Southern reaches of Africa and became Negroids, others went on to inhabit North Africa, Europe and the Middle East and became Caucasoids, while others still ventured further East to become Mongoloids (obviously including Native Americans).But according to this family tree image, there were two separate great migrations to Eastern Asia and Oceania, separated by a difference of several thousand years. The first migration yielded such races as South Chinese, Native Australians and Polynesians. Before the second migration occurred however, two more closely related populations diverged, and one of these populations migrated to Eastern Asia and the Americas and yielded such races as Japanese, Native Americans and Koreans, whereas the other population migrated to Europe and the Middle East, and yielded such races as Indians, Europeans and Iranians.So my questions are:If this is true, why are people content to divide the world’s races into three groups: Negroids, Caucasoids and Mongoloids (sometimes throwing in the somewhat contentious category ”Hispanics’)? A Chinese person is likely to be categorised as being Mongoloid, despite the fact that Chinese are even more distantly related to true Mongols than are Europeans. In view of this, how scientific are the terms ”Negroid’, ”Caucasoid’ and ”Mongoloid’?(I think this thread might work in the Human Origins section. If both of my topics gets promoted, I'll link the *this* in the first paragraph to the other topic).Edited by Zawinul, : Split into 2 postsEdited by Zawinul, : No reason given.

This is being closed for the moment and will be reconsidered based on the outcome of Out of Africa, into Asia thread in the Human Origins

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