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What if humans races were infertile with each other before we globalized?

 
 
 
repoman

repoman

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I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes a couple nights ago. What I thought about it what if it took a few more 10s of thousands of years before we really took off.

Therefore humans subgroups were either infertile or made "mules". Filling out further possibilities you could have a "ring species" situation where American human could make with East Asian human but not African humans.

I contend if we had truly speciated populations there would be a massive force for genocide of the other group. Am I wrong?
 
Seyorni is right. This actually happened. There were many human species only a few hundred thousand years ago. Now there is only one. We interbred with a few, and the rest died out. Their dying out coincided with Homo sapiens moving into their territory. It was probably a mix of interbreeding, out-competing, and genocide.
 
No such thing as a race. Understand it already.

If you did a trip around the world, you'd see a blanket of humanity stretching in all directions with only gradual differences from Bretagne to Singapore, and from Moscow to Lesotho. It's enough to render the question in the OP moot, stillborn, in fact.
 
repoman said:
I contend if we had truly speciated populations there would be a massive force for genocide of the other group. Am I wrong?
Click to expand...
Joseph Grinnell's Competitive Exclusion Principle: "Two species of approximately the same food habits are not likely to remain long evenly balanced in numbers in the same region. One will crowd out the other".

So when modern humans arrive on Flores, one of three things is going to happen. The H. sapiens are going to die out, or the H. floresiensis are going to die out, or they're going to evolve to live on different kinds of food. (And with omnivores like us, how likely is the third option?) What this means for your question is that it's pretty much impossible to answer. It's a rule of ecology. It applies to peaceful and murderous species alike. Whether we kill the hobbits or we merely systematically tend to hunt the game and pick the fruit a little bit faster than they do, 13000 years later the observed result will be the same.

Moreover, even if we did kill the hobbits, keep in mind that hunter gatherers murder fellow members of the same tribe at a staggering level. 20% is pretty typical. The humans and hobbits could easily have simply been killing each other at their normal rate for all the same reasons hunter gatherers kill their own, making no special effort to kill off the other type, and if the humans were just a little better at it the hobbits would still end up extinct.
 
Weird coincidence..an issue very close to this is what brought me to this forum

I'm writing a setting for role-playing games based on Bantu mythology. The various pygmies peoples are part of that, so they're included. In Africa, the waTwa/pygmies didn't fair so well. Most Bantu cultures have something called 'bride price' where you basically buy your bride from her father - and they cost a lot. At the same time, slavery is in full swing, especially for captives and prisoners of war. So the waTwa women get the hard end of this - they get abducted and sold as cheap brides, while their men are killed, which leads to the extermination of their culture. I didn't want this in my setting, so I just said "the waTwa are a different species and can't interbreed with Bantus". BOOOM - racism bomb. And a cluster bomb at that - apparently it was racist from every angle. In Rwanda, 1/3 of the total population of the waTwa were murdered, but one guy said I portrayed them as disenfranchised so I could reimagine them in a disingenuous way in order to feel noble.????? So I changed it to some technobabble about incompatible blood types. Which means exactly the same thing, but doesn't say 'race'. News flash folks - it's still up in the air as to whether humans can interbreed with chimpanzees.
 
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