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The Shallow Roots of the Human Family Tree
An anonymous reader writes to mention an AP story about research discussing the relatively recent origins of every human on earth. Despite the age of our species, every human on earth can trace their ancestry back to someone who may have lived as recently as the Golden Age of Greece (around 500 BC). From the article: "It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors -- who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence. But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived."
The test is probably real, it's just that there isn't really set "race genes."
That's because "race" is far more of a social phenomenon than a biological phenomenon, and the obsession with defining or determining which race a person belongs to is something that does not stem from anything other than politics and sociology. It is a question that no biologist would ever think to ask, because race is not a useful or interesting biological category. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that few if any racial characteristics show any significant discontinuity in the population at large--the lightest-skinned "black" person is lighter than the darkest-skinned "white" person. Without such discontinuities the idea of race becomes entirely arbitrary, based on a line drawn for purely political purposes.
The second is that insofar as there are relatively-disconnected pools of genes in the human population, they are small and don't last very long because of our aggressive pursuit of exogamy (breeding outside our kin-group). Most primate species practice inbreeding more than outbreeding. In humans it is rather the opposite. In simple terms, most of us are of mixed race. This is especially true of North Americans with regard to mixing of blacks and whites, for well-known reasons.
Anyone who believes that "racial purity" is either possible or desirable is merely proclaiming their ignorance of human biology.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Offtopic, but I feel it is important to point out that there is a great deal of difference between matrilineal organization and matriarchy. Matriarchy is where the women hold political, social, and/or religious power. In a matriarchy, the women are the primary owners of private property, and make the decisions that affect what the group will do. There are almost no examples of matriarchal societies in human history. That is not to say that a few have not popped up, but they are very rare and far between. On the other hand, a matrilineal society is one in which inheritence (of name, property, clan association, moity association, position, &c.) is passed through the female line. Generally, men are still in charge, but relationships are tracked by way of the female line.
Rhapsody in Numbers
The article fails to consider the Australian Aborigines, who crossed into Australia via a land bridge from Asia around 40,000 - 50,000 years ago. It's an interesting mathematical trick, but their result is so obviously empirically false, so I doubt their research even after excluding the Aborigines and other populations known to have been isolated from the rest of the world for many thousands of years. The parent gets the time period for the arrival of Aborigines in Australia correct, but is incorrect in asserting that they walked there over a land bridge. A no time during hominid history would you have been able to walk to Australia. The deep water trench between Bali and Lombock and between Borneo and Sulawesi (the so-called Wallace Line) marks fartherest you could have walked from Asia. Given there's generally been deep water between Timor and the rest of the eastern Indonesia archepelago and between Timor and Australia, the original Aborginies probably had to make three pretty sizeable water-borne leaps at a long before there is any archelogical evidence anywhere that people are using boats. This makes the mere existence of Aborigines in the Australia for that length of time is pretty astounding.