Ok, perhaps I’ll get the 7 thematic days or perhaps my title is simply lazy, either way, a collection of interesting and useful links on China:
- The Chinese might not have come “out of Africa” from the People’s Daily Online.
CAS academician Wu Xinzhi said the new findings show that the archaic humans of China were not totally replaced by the modern humans from Africa. Other scientists also disagree with the “out of Africa” theory. They insist on a multi-regional evolution model which holds that modern man descended from several indigenous archaic human populations in the Old World.
- Thomas Barnett comments on a WSJ story on tariffs against China (Barnett is a great filter for stories on China from the financial press)
- And Op-For relays a Weekly Standard report last week on Chinese carriers.
REQUEST: This is not on China but on Indonesia, Barnett commented on a WSJ article about FDI in Aceh. I am doing a project on FDI in Aceh, if anyone has sources they’d recommend on this, I’d appreciate any information you could offer or direct me to. Email or post as comment please.
The out of Africa / multiregional debate has been sadly overshadowed in pop culture by two, PC, simplications of themOut of Africa: We’re all Africans! (And by extension, our opponents are racists.)
Multiregional: Intermarriage meant humanity is defined by love, not war! (And by extension, our opponents are warmongers).
China is happily free from such nonsense, and resides more happily in 19th century nationalism. So the idea that the Chinese may be descendents of homo erectus allows them to believe they are somewhat of a different species than the rest of us — that teh Chinese mind is truly different from the mere human one.
The most probably multiregional hypothesis argues that Neanderthals in Europe, Homo Erectus in Asia, and ancient Homp Sapiens in Africa interbred to create either a genetically uniform population or else the three major races we see today.
As far as I understand the current science, there is no direct evidence of non-Sapien DNA. If erectus and neanderthal did contribute to our genome, they didn’t doo much.
On the other hand, there is some good circumstantial evidence for non-Sapien blood. ADD appears to be both very old as a genetic mutation but very recent in the human population, which implies that the ADD mutation originated in neadnerthals and was passed on to humans through transpecies miscegenation.