Chinese Apes and cavemen?

Question

I know this sounds weird but I often wonder wether when we started evolving from apes to neanderthals at which point we started to get geographical physical differences? I mean different continents have obvious physical traits. Did ancient apes have different coloured skin under their fur in different continents? Did they have different shaped eyes in China to Europe? Or did they all look similar and did evolution decide on the physical features we now carry What do you think? No racist nonsense please.

Keep the great answers coming in guys, still undecided as so much conflicting info coming throught. Keep up the good work.

Answer 1

All humans evolved in Africa and spread out around the world from there. Neanderthals were a different species from Homo sapiens and although the two overlapped, eventually Neanderthals became extinct, maybe because Homo sapiens out-competed them, or for other unknown reasons.

Early humans would have been in small isolated populations and evolutionary change can be very rapid in small populations. There were probably two processes which shaped the way that physical characteristics developed.

The first is through natural selection - for example for populations living close to the equator, darker skin would help to protect them from high UV there.

The other process is called sexual selection, which means that one sex prefers to mate with another carrying certain physical attributes. For example peahens will always try to mate to peacocks with the showiest tails. Physical attributes such as eye shape, height, body shape - just about anything you can think of that is not directly linked to survival probably came about because of different preferences in different populations/societies.

I recommend that you read 'The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee' by Jared Diamond which explains all of this and more and is a brilliant read.

Answer 2

We did not evolve from Neanderthals, but recent work on DNA suggests that there was some interbreeding between modern humans coming from Africa and Neanderthals. All modern humans though come from a small population in Africa some 70-100 thousand years ago. It looks like these people may have acquired a gene for increased intelligence from Neanderthals which is now carried by 70% of humans. Light coloured skin evolved by mutation in northern Europe and was heavily selected for in populations of farmers with a largely cereal diet because it increases vitamin D production. An independent version of light pigmented skin arose in Chinese and Japanese peoples for the same reason. Eskimos get little sunlight but can be brown skinned because they get plenty of Vitamin D in their meat and fish diet. These changes occurred in the last few thousand years and are nothing to do with our distant ape ancestors.

Answer 3

You need to check out some factual information about apes and about people.

For a start we did not evolve from apes or from any ape-like creature. All hominid fossils are either clearly man or clearly ape.
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3048/

Neanderthals were fully human and certainly are no 'missing link'.
http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/creationontheweb?q=neanderthal&hl=en&lr=

As for the different features of humans, these are explained by natural selection - nothing to do with 'goo-to-you' evolution whatsoever.
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3031/

For example - we all have the same colour skin - brown. The darkness of the brown is determined by how much melanin is in your skin.
All you need for the minor differences between people groups is 2 original people with the genetic information in the first place.

Answer 4

You seem to be assuming that different groups of apes evolved into different races. However, only one hominid evolved into humans, and that happened in Africa. Neanderthals are not our ancestors. Neanderthals and humans evolved separately, but the Neanderthals died out. They didn't evolve into us. But they did coexist. The regional difference occured when groups of humans spread out across the world. The different environments resulted in those with certain traits being better suited for those environments. Closer to the equator, you get darker skin. Darker skin is better able to handle a stronger sun. Also, closer to the equator, short, curly hair is quite common. The longer straighter hair of more northern people would be too hot in the tropics. These traits all developed to better cope with the environment that the people lived in.

Answer 5

homosapiens is all the one species so no matter that you are chinese ,indian or latvian. we all came from the one common ancestor, generally accepted as being african from the eastern rift valley . Any differences between the races have occurred after individual bands wandered their merry way across the globe and reproducing from isolated pockets of human DNA.
You can see the same effect with dogs, all have the same common ancestor, but selective breeding has resulted in many shapes and sizes, but still the one species. i.e. can breed to produce fertile offspring.

Answer 6

Racial differences are MUCH more recent than our development as humans.

If you want to read up on human evolution, you could go to UC Berkeley's website
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/

Or to New Scientist's Human Evolution page (it's a UK science news publication)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/evolution

It's a great site, though some of the links you'll see are for subscribers only -- but there's a lot of high-quality freebie information.

It's a fascinating topic, I highly recommend your getting a bit clearer on it, as you've got some misunderstandings (easy enough to get, few people understand this stuff well).

Answer 7

We got the geographical differences long after we were already Homo sapiens sapiens. Our racial differences don't come from apes. They come from mutation, chromosomal events, genetic drift, and selection among (mostly) isolated populations of human beings.

Answer 8

What science doesn't say -- and people like you/me don't understand... is TWO big, big, big things:

#1 - humans ate, hunted, exterminated neighboring humans... and of course, captured, enslaved and impregnated them (interbreeding didn't happen, by dating & asking for daddy's permission). Humans are brutal and horrible to natural and each other, without law/rules of governance (if japan still whales, if tigers/rhinos are being poached to extinction NOW, you think 50,000 years ago groups of hungry humans would beset of small groups of gatherers that couldn't defend themselves?). Humans will eat anything when hungry. There's 0 accounts for marauding bands of humans simply attacking eating others as they "migrated". But, yet ALL we have to do is refect on the 100s of shows on cable-TV about how BRUTAL people were to each other, in Europe say.. from 1-1000 A.D. in attacking, sweeping over and doing everything & more to each other. That's why a common demoninator in appearance happened, over 10,000s of years.

#2 - the land-areas weren't nearly like they are now, but in the shape of continents & the amount of land vs. water, and the temperatures. No source easily shows what temperatures were and where, and the shapes of land. (ex: have YOU seen the Beiring Strait as a solid land-mass? and Africa/Middle East connected? how about the English Channel, without water?) ...when the polarity changes, meaning that WHERE our north & south poles are now -- might have been very, very different... with the north pole being in China for all we know, and the earth flip-flopping, with its crust shifting & reshifting like PLATEs on a table-cloth. Wonder where life (and we mammoths, sabre-tooths, sloths, and FERNS & trees, went?)

Answer 9

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