Ancient hominid found - older than Lucy and taller too

cicerone imposter wrote:

Quote, "However, there are a number of morphological characteristics that still identify populations from various populations." Still doesn't satisfy my curiosity why there are different "features" that seems to have 'stuck' that we humans call 'race.'

Unless I'm mistaken, the differences we see in human "races" are not representative of differences in genetic structure, but differences in the proportion of "expression" of genetic structure.

There are probably very few genetic components which represent what we call "race" which don't exist within all of us. Skin color, hair color, body shape, etc, are all part of the genetic structure of all humans. It's just that certain populations have a higher proportion of expression of particular characteristics.

I'm not sure I can think of any genetic characteristic which are unique to one race, and no other. Except maybe cicle-cell. Does anyone know about this? Are there others?

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In addition to cycle cell anemia, it seems some drugs react differently in different races. We may be genetically the same, but still different in some ways that can't be explained by DNA.

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Genes, Race and Medicine in the March, 2005, issue of Discover: http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-05/features/human-study-thyself/

Longish, but well worth reading.

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sozobe wrote:

Stilly's point is close to the one I was going to make -- it seems possible that the hominids from each pool (Lucy's time, this new one's time) varied in height, and Lucy happened to be a short one and the new one happened to be a tall one. Could still be that, on average, the hominids from the new one's time could have been shorter than the hominids from Lucy's time. (Especially given that Lucy's female and they don't seem to know whether the new one is a male yet, since males are usually taller.)

There can be sexual differences in some ape species, the most obvious is that of gorillas, where the male is much larger than the female. In chimps/bonobos it is not so important as they do not have harems under the control of one alpha male. In humans the whole thing is skewed because we abandoned oestrus and more than often (!) partner. I'd say that any fossil homonids would probably not exhibit a gross difference in size between sexes. From that you can also deduce a number of other facets, like pelvis size and thus relative brain size. Clever lads, anthropologists.

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Ancient hominid found - older than Lucy and taller too

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