Punctuationism, cladistics and the legacy of medieval neoplatonism

Single (sub)species then and now: An examination of the nonracial perspective of C. Loring Brace

C. Loring Brace's writings on the concept of race have been among the most influential within anthropology. A review of the development of Brace's perspective on race shows that his philosophical approaches to fossil and modern human variation are consistent and integrated. Brace's views on race are compared with those of Ashley Montagu and Frank Livingstone, who also proposed eliminating "race" from anthropology, and with those of Stanley Garn and Alice Brues, who accepted "racial" subdivisions of humans. Carleton Coon's writings are more divergent; the aftermath of the publication of his Origin of Races highlights significant political tensions of the 1960s that intersected with scientific changes in anthropology emanating from the Evolutionary Synthesis. Recent forensic and "no race" positions are compared to explore their differences and the possibility of reconciliation, and the role of Brace and others in combating proposals of intellectual differences among human groups is discussed. While a spectrum of anthropological opinion regarding race exists, the commonalities are sufficient to allow valuable, united commentary emphasizing the complexity of modern human cultural and biological variation.

Old World sources of the first New World human inhabitants: a comparative craniofacial view

Human craniofacial data were used to assess the similarities and differences between recent and prehistoric Old World samples, and between these samples and a similar representation of samples from the New World. The data were analyzed by the neighbor-joining clustering procedure, assisted by bootstrapping and by canonical discriminant analysis score plots. The first entrants to the Western Hemisphere of maybe 15,000 years ago gave rise to the continuing native inhabitants south of the U.S.-Canadian border. These show no close association with any known mainland Asian population. Instead they show ties to the Ainu of Hokkaido and their Jomon predecessors in prehistoric Japan and to the Polynesians of remote Oceania. All of these also have ties to the Pleistocene and recent inhabitants of Europe and may represent an extension from a Late Pleistocene continuum of people across the northern fringe of the Old World. With roots in both the northwest and the northeast, these people can be described as Eurasian. The route of entry to the New World was at the northwestern edge. In contrast, the Inuit (Eskimo), the Aleut, and the Na-Dene speakers who had penetrated as far as the American Southwest within the last 1,000 years show more similarities to the mainland populations of East Asia. Although both the earlier and later arrivals in the New World show a mixture of traits characteristic of the northern edge of Old World occupation and the Chinese core of mainland Asia, the proportion of the latter is greater for the more recent entrants.

A nonracial craniofacial perspective on human variation: A(ustralia) to Z(uni)

Dental and craniofacial measurements were collected for 57 samples from Asia, the Pacific, the aboriginal western hemisphere, and Europe. The craniofacial dimensions include many that are not obviously under the control of specific selective forces. Similar configurations for these in different samples should yield indications of recency of common ancestry according to the logic expressed by Darwin and evident in the relationships indicated by nuclear DNA comparisons. Dental dimensions, however, vary according to the length of time that different intensities in selective forces have been in operation. The craniofacial measurements were transformed into C scores and used to generate Euclidean distance dendrograms. When all the material was used to generate a single dendrogram, the European and Amerindian samples sorted into two regionally identifiable clusters, and the Asian and Pacific material sorted into the three clusters identified in separate previous studies: a Mainland Asian cluster, a Jomon-Pacific cluster and an Australo-Melanesian cluster. Since these clusters are based on variation in traits that are basically nonadaptive in nature, no hierarchical ranking is possible. The clusters simply reflect degree of relationship. This technique holds forth the promise of producing a nonracial assessment of the relationships of all the peoples of the world, past and present.