Talk:Southern Mongoloid

Human Species section
Modern biological evidence from the anthropological textbook Human Species (2003) contradicts earlier theories of which groups were more genetically related to other groups. The Human Species(2003) and Physical Anthropology used the genetic clustering of Cavalli-Sforza (2000) in their publication. Humans are all related. Humanity divided itself into the African and the Eurasian/Oceanic branch. The Eurasian and Oceanic branches are the products of this common origin. The Eurasian branch split into the Amerindian and major East Asian branch. The major East Asian branch divided itself into eastern Russian and the East Asian. The Oceanic branch divided itself into the Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders. According to the Human Species (2003), East Asians generally are more genetically similar to the South Asians than to Southeast Asians, because the Far East and the Indian Subcontinent are members of the Eurasian branch while Southeast Asians (including south Chinese) are members or the Oceanic branch. More interestingly, Asians have very local genetic clusters inside these regions, implying different Asian ethnic groups have not historically intermarried with each other. Examples of localized genetic clusters include Japan, Korea, Mongolia and China which form separate genetic clusters from each other.


 * "East Asians generally are more genetically similar to the South Asians than to Southeast Asians" - this is a gross oversimplification of some results about mitochondrial or Y lineages, not the nuclear DNA that codes for most human characteristics. At the least it needs to be qualified by saying many other genetic markers and/or other clustering algorithms give the opposite result, as Cavalli-Sforza's book does at great length, and the earlier text of this article mentions.
 * "Humanity divided itself into..." - Should not imply a strict tree model with no subsequent mixing, which no scientists advocate.
 * "different Asian ethnic groups have not historically intermarried with each other" - definitely not true. Probably the author was making a weaker statement that intermarriage was not enough to erase many traces of bottlenecking / founder effects and genetic drift.
 * "Humans are all related." - goes without saying. JWB 22:13, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
 * "They are a genetically unrelated group, according to Cavalli-Sforza (2000)." - Also an exaggeration and oversimplification. JWB 22:17, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Take a look at the maps at Atlas of the Human Journey - The Genographic Project which show a number of arrows indicating mtDNA and Y interchange between Northeast and Southeast Asia. --JWB 22:24, 14 August 2006 (UTC)