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A few points, Keith. One is that it is
always a little dangerous to try to link particular physical characteristics,
like brain size, to intelligence and then assign superior intelligence to a
particular people. It kind of smacks of the kind of thing Phillip Rushton,
a Canadian psychologist (or whatever), tried to do when he argued that the
longer the penis the less intelligent its bearer was likely to be. Some
African groups had long penises, and Rushton therefore deemed then less
intelligent. That they were also much taller than other people
was deemed irrelevant. When it comes to brain size, we mustn't forget
that Neanderthals had larger brains than we do. Were they more
intelligent? I don't think so.
Personally, I think that intelligence is a rather
randomly distributed thing. Based on their performance, the three most
intelligent people I've known or observed were a little black girl in the Sao
Paulo slums, a hotel clerk in Delhi and an Indian in the Yukon. Perhaps
the apparent intelligence of the Asians you mention is more a thing of social
organization than absolute IQ. In terms of social organization, my
three very smart people never had much of a chance, although the little girl I
observed in Sao Paulo did hit the newspapers for the kinds of things she was
into as she matured.
When it comes to the peopling of the Americas,
there is an increasing amount of evidence that early peoples arrived via various
routes and with various gene pools. The best book I've read on the matter
is Elaine Dewar's "Bones". Dewar, a journalist, spent a lot of time
interviewing anthropologists and archeologists on the matter. In addition
to the Bering Straits, routes included across the Atlantic from Europe, across
the Pacific, and even across the Atlantic from Africa. Sites like Monte
Verde in Chile and the footprints in Mexico suggest that man not only came to
the Americas much earlier than was believed a decade or so ago, but
stayed.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 2:53
AM
Subject: [Futurework] The smartest people
became Americans
754. The smartest people became
Americans
In posting No 750." The smartest people on earth" I put
forward the argument held by some evolutionary biologists that the smartest
people on earth come from a comparitively small area of Korea, Japan and
north-east China. Today, people from this region have larger brain sizes and
score higher on (Western authored) intelligence tests than Europeans. These
people are also pretty smart economically and industrially, by far the most of
the engineering innovations of pre-Industrial Revolution Europe having come
from China originally.
They are probably smarter because they are the
descendants of the leading edge of migratory man which left Africa via
Ethiopia about 85,000 years ago and ended about 40-30,000 years ago when it
bumped into the ice cap in north-east Asia. Forced by population pressure from
behind, early man would have passed through a wide variety of environments as
he went along, and then up, the Asian coastline, his mental abilities being
successively refined by the different viscissitudes along the way. Since
30,000BC, the high intelligence of those early migrants has probably become
diffused somewhat when the migration largely stopped, man spread inland and
intermarriage started taking place throughout Asia.
But when the ice
cap had finally retreated to its minimum at about 15,000-10,000BC a further
migratory route opened up. This was between the north-east peninsula of Asia
and Alaska, along the edge of the ice cap across what is now known the Bering
Sea. From there man migrated down the western coast of America and then
inland, populating the whole North American continent. This race of early man
is known as Clovis Man and has been widely believed among anthropologists to
be the first appearance of man in the New World..
It now appears that
the intelligence (and courage) of early man in north-east Asia was such that
he had already made a migration across the Pacific Ocean! This would have been
at about the time further northward progress was blocked by the ice cap
barrier at around 40-30,000BC. Such a suggestion would have been inconceivable
until recently, but evidence is now revealing that there are remains of early
man at around that date living in Mexico. Professor Matthew Bennett's
evidence, briefly described in the The Times article below, remains to
be tested and will no doubt be fiercely debated by those who hold to the
Clovis Man-only lobby.
I only have one comment to make on this. No
evidence of man's presence earlier than about 11,500BC has yet been found on
the broad mass of the North American continent so it seems likely that those
who established themselves in Mexico, very smart though they undoubtedly were,
became extinct through some overwhelming environmental circumstance or other.
Otherwise, they would have spread into America itself. If Professor Bennett's
evidence is more widely accepted -- and it appears to have had some
substantiation already -- then the search will now be on for the fossilised
bones of this Mexican Man. Then, with luck, DNA analysis can add to the
evidence.
Perhaps the heading of this piece is a misnomer. Perhaps it
should have been: "The smartest people became Mexicans" but then, considering
that present-day Mexicans are now migrating -- legally and illegally -- into
America (once again preferentially along a coastline!) at the rate of above
one million a year, and that President Bush has recently persuaded Congress to
accept a free trade treaty with Central American countries, then Mexicans can
be considered Americans. And perhaps even vice versa. Or at least part
of America will when, as seems possible from the higher birth rate of
Hispanics, the United States divides into two distinct cultural regions mainly
speaking Spanish and American respectively.
Keith
Hudson
<<<<
FOOTSTEPS IN TIME THAT ADD 30,000 YEARS TO
HISTORY OF AMERICA
Lewis Smith
Discovery by British
scientists adds 30,000 years to the human history of a continent
The
discovery of human footprints, preserved by volcanic ash, have put back the
likely date that the American continent was colonised by Man by almost 30,000
years, British scientists say.
The prints, found by the scientists at
the edge of a lake in Mexico, are thought to be about 40,000 years old. Their
discovery upsets the widely accepted theory that Man first reached America
across a land bridge, now covered by the Bering Sea, 11,500 years ago. Casts
of the footprints reveal that a community of Homo sapiens lived in the
Valsequillo Basin, near Puebla in central Mexico. Their feet ranged in size
from those of small children, aged about 5 or 6, to adults who would have
fitted size eight shoes.
The prints were found at the bottom of an
abandoned quarry and were preserved in volcanic rock. From the size of the
prints, researchers from Liverpool John Moores University and Bournemouth
University estimated that the adults ranged in height from 3ft 9ins to 6ft.
Almost 270 prints were found at the site, two thirds of them human and the
rest from animals including mammoths, an extinct species of camel, prehistoric
cow and deer. The Liverpool and Bournemouth team discovered the footprints in
September 2003 but have only recently had confirmation of their age from
scientists at Oxford University. Dating techniques included radiocarbon dating
and optical stimulated luminescence.
Until now it was widely believed
that Clovis Man was the first human to set foot on the continent at the end of
the last Ice Age. Previous academic research has suggested, however, that
human occupation of the American continents may have begun several thousand
years earlier.
The footprints are the first evidence of earlier
colonisations and would suggest that the first settlers reached the West Coast
from Japan or other Pacific Ocean communities.
Professor Matthew
Bennett, of Bournemouth University, said yesterday: "Our evidence of humans in
America 40,000 years ago is irrefutable."
He accepted that there would
be resistance to the theory that the original migration was not over the
Bering Sea. It is quite controversial. "They are not very happy in North
America. They are very wedded to the idea of colonisation 11,500 years
ago."
The Times -- 5 July
2005
>>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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