the bottleneck

I'm sorry I meant races as in black,white, red, etc.. etc.., not the prehistorical races of man. besides i think they found that neanderthal man was a different species of man. I suppose cro-magnon man could've been a decendant of modern man but the fossil records still out on that one. I was refering to a more recent yet ancient past

Originally posted by JON
I've heard numerous times of a bottleneck in human history occured. Whether if it was the great flood, a pandemic disease or whatever, some scientists believe there were many more races of man at one time. Then something cataclysmic happens and were left with what we have now. Anyone else hear of this, and if so what is their reason for this theory.

Okay: ANTHROPOLOGIST'S ANSWER (we covered this in my graduate anthropology class last night): "No."

"Race" is primarily a "group identification/social identification" slapped on a bunch of people for a lot of reasons. You're going on the American definition of "race" -- to the Middle Easterners, the Jews and the Arabs are two separate "races" (nevermind that they are indistinguishable from each other.) To the Europeans, the Gypsies were a race. If you lived in old Japan and you were a farmer, "farmer" was a type of race to them. In the early 1900's in America, the Irish were considered a "race."

...and then we get into ethnicities and other confusing terms.

But, basically, it's a concept that allows us to divide socieity into "us" and "them."

Biologically (forensically) we can distinguish three major groupings based on some small skeletal differences in these groups. But there's only three groups, and with modern world contacts (and interbreeding) it's getting awfully hard to tell one from the other.

byrd, couldn't have said it better. did you know during the nixon era, race descriptions were created in order to seperate people and statistically manage races in working class america. the reason being, equal opportunity/affirmative action. how messed up is that! although race descriptions have been around since the early 1900's (someone correct me).