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PumpkinPerson STILL doesn’t want to admit that Australasians aren’t Negroid. No matter how many people, studies or books I cite, he still wants to hold on to this Afrocentric belief of a “large pan-African race“. This is not true. I don’t know how many times I need to type it. Maybe if I type it until my fingers become stubs he will get it?

In fact, Friedlaender et al (2008) agree with me:

Our Structure and tree analyses of the combined microsatellite datasets indicate that Melanesians are quite far removed from Africans, in spite of their superficial similarities in hair form and skin pigmentation [38]. In the initial analysis of the HGDP-CEPH dataset, the placement of the two Melanesian (“Oceanic”) groups was different. There, they split from Eurasia before Asians and Native Americans [39]. This also differed from the result of a genome-wide SNP study [40] on a very small world-wide dataset. The extreme positioning of Melanesians in our tree was not due to our over sampling. Rather, our extensive coverage of Melanesian variation has enabled a clearer resolution of their relationships with populations outside the region.

They cluster nowhere near the vicinity of Africans.

To say that Australasians are Negroid based on phenotypic similarity means the one in question is basically treating race as a “social construct“. Just because two genetically isolated populations look similar doesn’t mean that they are of the same racial grouping.

Since Australoids “look African” as PP claims, would he claim that Middle Eastern people such as the Kalash who look European to be European? I’m sure he would.

But I’ve already quoted Razib Khan as saying:

The final issue is that a lot of the phenotypes that we racially code are recent. This probably explains why groups like the Kalash and Nuristanis can look more like Europeans than South Asians, but they’re genetically more like South Asians.

And when asked the three theories that he thinks falls into the unsupportable category:

“that phylogeny and phenotype track closely. just because you can’t tell the physical difference between two pops (e.g., solomon islanders and sub-saharan africans) they must be phylogenetically close. this is not the case.”

Robert Lindsay gets it and says:

We can also do phenotypes, but the Australoid phenotype is not the same as the African phenotype. There are African phenotypes and Australoid phenotypes, and they plot into separate areas on skull charts with no overlap. On a skull chart, a given skull is either obviously Australoid or obviously Negroid, but in both groups or in an unclear group, and it is always clear which group one is in.

Surface similarities are just that; they mean virtually nothing. In terms of selected DNA, Australoids have selected furthest away from Blacks. As it turns out, features that were selected for in Africa such as non-straight hair, wide noses and dark skin were all adaptive in tropical Australasia also, so these meaningless surface traits were retained.

Are you kidding? You look at an Aborigine and a Nigerian, and to you, they are “just a couple of niggers?” Aborigines do not look like Black people at all. In fact, they do not look like anyone.”

There were 5 principal clusters of CA repeats, formed by people living in 5 of the continental regions of Africa, Europe, East Asia, the Americas, and Australasia. (Wade, 2015: 97) Peoples of the Pacific cluster into their own category. Nicholas Wade reported in 2002:

Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas.

The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews.

This ends it right there. If they even still showed a genotypic resemblance to Africans, they’d still cluster in the vicinity of them. They don’t.

PP then goes on to say that Fst is on “neutral DNA, so they are classifying largely on chronological distance, not genetically preserved phenotype. I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong, only that we’re talking about two different types of classification systems.” I challenge him to find a study showing that Australoids and Melanesians are anywhere close to Negroids genotypically.

I asked Professor Greg Cochran, co-author of the book The 10,000 Year Explosion with Henry Harpending if Australoids and Melanesians were Negroid and this is what he said:

They are not closely related to Africans.

East Asians, Europeans and ‘Native Americans’ aren’t closely related to Africans either. Just because they “look African” does not mean they are African!

The Kalash people look European, but are they? No. They show similarity to South Asians. They, like Australasians, look similar to other populations because the phenotypes we code are recent. “Phenotypically similar” people are not genotypically similar nor the same racial/ethnic category. I also covered this here last month. Why doesn’t he get it yet?

Stop saying they are Negroid, they are not. They are Melanesian.