July 18, 2011
Racists now in need of a new set of jokes
If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.
comments
Leave a Reply
So easy, a caveman can do it.
Racists use only the finest offensive jokes that are logically consistent with current scientific data.
Hey, I already came up with a Neandertal/Human joke and I don’t think it’s racist (sexist maybe). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClV4tXOduLM
Wait, what? Neanderthals were like super-humans. Why would racists need new jokes?
Except that is what I was worried was going to be found once they confirmed that there was some interbreeding.
Now we don’t just have different coloured skin, we are actually very slightly different types of human being.
We are all very slightly different types of human being.
I don’t think anything’s changed in that regard; the differences between people don’t suddenly increase just because we know which different ancestors we have. The statistical variations between groups of people are still dwarfed by the individual variation within those groups.
But again, racists, not generally known for their rigorous logic.
I was thinking of the irony, here, that Neanderthals have long been regarded as mere brutes and the loser branch of our ancestry (in spite of having apparently survived a lot longer than “modern” man). This view has made them fodder for the typical pseudoscience that white bigots explore, such as when they suggest that Africans must be “different” because they arose from a different line–that is, you guessed it–the loser line. The findings considered here turn that on its head and suggest that perhaps the ice ages would have killed off our own early branch if not for the robust features brought to us by the now extinct line. This should be a lesson that indicates how unwise it is to assume that genetic heritage may be understood in simple “loser or winner” ways.
As for this finding causing the problem of codifying an actual difference–one that undermines more accurate perspectives regarding our more significant similarities–I can’t imagine that many bigots could bring themselves to embrace a connection to Neanderthals as a means of forming more racist views. It seems more likely that they will simply refuse to believe such a connection exists. They will sit on the car seats on their front porches, gap-toothed and scratching their bellies, and proclaim that “that there can’t be true because those cave men was ugly.