As a general matter it should be no surprise that people in Indonesia and other areas tend to have darker skin because dark skin, smaller torsos and longer limbs tend to always be common near the equator whereas lighter skin, larger torsos and shorter limbs tend to be common further from the equator. The reason being that darker skin offers more sun protection, and lighter skin allows more sunlight in, which helps with vitamin D absorbtion. Also, having less torso mass as and longer limbs allows for more efficient cooling while larger torsos and shorter limbs helps maintain heat. There are of course exceptions, for example the inuits of Northern Canada and Alaska, but thats the general rule.
Silly!
Most Taiwanese are mixed with aborigines, roughly 80% or the current population. Genetic mixing has gone on between all kinds of people from all over. In Taiwan the people who immigrated in the 17-20th centuries, who this teacher refers to as “Chinese” are also a genetic hodge-podge of tribes and clans on the Asian continent. China is a genetic mixture of all kinds of people.
The teacher makes the assumption that there is some kind of “pure” or “authentic” form of Chinese race that looks a certain way and has looked that way from the beginning of time.
Then you have the problem of ethnicity, which boils down to recognized patterns of difference and sameness between people… The Han people, who are genetically diverse, recognize Han from patterns of behavior, mainly Confucian culturism. It is this characteristic that allowed people who were formerly “barbarians” to become accepted and identify themselves as Han people between the 1000 ACE and the present. The ability for Yi or Man people to acculturate into Han allowed the Qing Empire to spread far beyond the old borders of China (ie the Great Wall).
In Taiwan most of the plains people acculturated and have since become Han.
I was just conducting field work yesterday in Da She (Taichung County) and I interviewed a woman who considers herself a former plains aborigine, but then says she is now Min nan ren.
The concept of Chinese as “race” grew out of the Chinese nationalist movements of the late 19th Century in a nation building effort and thus the concept of the imagined Chinese arose from a government drive to build a nation.
[quote=“Jack Burton”] The author suggests that early Chinese were African. That the Xia or Shang have forensically found to be African, that all martial arts came from Africa, that the I-Ching came from the Akkadians who were black.
No footnotes, no cites naturally. I’d love to see where those forensic results can be found. FYI, Akkad is generally accepted to be Semitic/Sumerian mix.[/quote]
Running a bit with this…
We all come from Africa.
however, assuming that all sub-saharan africans were black originally is a bit rich, to but it mildly, as Africa has not historically been an overwhelming “black” continent.
The Bantu and non-bantu tribes replaced Khoisan people, which are smaller or more yellowish from Kenya and all the way to natal, by means of intermarriage, genocide, and basically squeezing them out. This huge population movement is more recent than you might think, having taken place over the last 2000+ years. In other words, most of the genetic mass which we understand as “black” came from a small area in Western Nigeria/Cameroon some 2-3000 years ago.
Funnily enough, the last part of the bantu drive south in Africa is so recent that it can be documented using written sources. The bantu cultural package did not allow them to live in areas with mediterranean climate, due to seasonal changes and the fact that their crops - IE yams and sorghum don’t handle winter rains very well. Therefore, they were only able to enter and live in the Cape province after the Europeans had colonized the southern tip of Africa, and brought the proper crops, farm animals and technology for that area.