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TanaNari said:
*Looks over at Twilight and Anita Blake*



Yeah... males.



Part of it, but I think it goes a lot deeper than that for our species in particular. You see, as higher order megafauna go, humans are disastrously inbred. Really, almost all the Great Apes are, but humans moreso than most. So much so that it's possible for a Caucasian living in America to have more genetically in common with an Asian living in China than either of them do with their own siblings. And yet there are also significant racial differences creating incredibly robust core phenotypes... also caused by the same inbreeding.



See... there once was a rodent like thing. That rodent jumped around in trees. At some point, some of these rodent traveled from China, where they evolved, to Africa. No one's entirely sure how that happened, since back then there was no land bridge to the continent.



These small number of rodents- no more than a dozen that were probably already a family group- like many invasive species, spread like a wildfire while mostly :red:ing their siblings.



Thousands of generations later, a small colony of their giant mutant incest-baby descendants left Africa and returned back to India and later China. Still not sure how, still no land bridge. Anyhow, this no more than a dozen or so creatures did as invasive creatures do... more incest-fueled expansionism... and eventually became the orangutan and gorilla, and the animal that would one day become both chimp and man.



That animal came from some cluster of the ape that went back to Africa. Though, this time, there was probably a land bridge (thanks to the first of about 50 ice-ages that have happened in the last 3 million years). It's also possible it swam... making it the first species of ape to possess that ability. Guess what happened next? If you guessed 'lots and lots of incest', you win the prize of knowing you have basic pattern recognition.



This animal eventually split- one became a little lighter and a lot taller, while the other became a little lighter and a lot shorter. The birth of Man and Chimp.



Some of this early Man left Africa. Did the usual. Then it got hella :red:in' cold (again), and (some) went back to Africa. With their siblings.



Later, after it got warmer, a small colony left and... did remarkably less incest than usual.



See, the funny thing is... the humans that stayed behind, that braved the Ice Age in its entirety, didn't go extinct. Instead, they became the Neanderthal and the Denisovan and the Floresiensis, and probably some others. The Denisovans are a particularly interesting case... we only know them because one handbone (in the Denisova caves of the Altai range). To save you looking at up... the Altai are a bit north of the Himalayas, found where modern-day China, Mongolia, and Russia (Siberia) share borders. So there were humans, living in (what are effectively) the Himalayas, in Siberia, during the :red:ing Ice Age. Don't ask me how, pretty sure I'd die in the first four seconds.



They were all as inbred as Homo Sapiens.



And when we met, there was no war, no battle for supremacy. Instead, we :red:ed. We :red:ed a lot. We :red:ed a suspicious amount, for species that had such poor genetic compatibility with one another... more than half the human hybrids would have been born sterile, to say nothing of the neurological disorders most hybrid species experience... there must have been some damn good reason we did it so much, probably because we were so disastrously inbred that most of our pureblood offspring were even more defective than the unsuccessful hybrids.



And over many thousands of years, we eventually became the barely less inbred hybrid-species now officially known as Homo Sapiens Sapiens. And something of an "exotic fetishism" firmly entrenched into our lineage, because those were the ancestors whose genes managed to limp this far.



Based on DNA evidence, we (obviously) know the Homo Sapiens. Then the Neanderthal's in there, our second largest overall concentration. We know Denisovans are as well. We know that Denisovans were already a hybrid of Neanderthal and an unidentified fourth species. We also know there's another unidentified fifth species that must have bred in with the African Homo Sapiens which didn't make the trip back to the mainland before a desert the size of the continental USA formed and made travel impossible until pretty recently in history.



As to why our current line is more Sapiens in its genetics than the other species? Probably because we were best adapted for the warming climate... Neanderthal and Denisovan were larger and more powerful, and probably no less intelligent than we were. That size and bulk would work against it as climate warmed, and ultimately their own cold-adapted bodies caused them to overheat and die en masse, as it did to many thousands of other species. Including a species of bear over twice as big as modern Grizzlies (extinction did us a real solid with that one).



But we do carry with us about 80% of the Neanderthal genome, and about 60% of the genome of the other species. And with it, quite a few quirks, including blond hair and blue eyes (both traits that grant significant evolutionary advantages in arctic hellscapes), from our Neanderthal past. And apparently a propensity for nicotine addiction because genetics are weird like that.



Melanesian-people2.jpg




Yes, that's normal. And no, they don't have any European ancestry. Well... some of them do by now, but they've looked more or less like that for tens of thousands of years.



And that is how humans have no less than five major racial lines with highly distinct and long-entrenched phenotypes, but are also one of the most inbred species on Earth.



The only animal that compares to us in this regard are dogs. And we know what happened to dogs.



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Yup
 
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Name: Thoira | Human (variant) | Class Level: 8 | AC: 18 | HP: 48/58 |

Thoira followed behind the group, muttering darkly about the rain and its ancestry, she looked out over the village for a few seconds before following Darric and Kolach inside the church, raising an eyebrow at its dusty interior. "That is quite a worrying amount of dust for a building that in most towns would be visited frequently.

As the rest left the church, she looked around once more and then followed the rest to the graveyard. "Well then, let's see if we can find something interesting here."
[FIELDSET="OOC"][/FIELDSET]
 
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