Posted: Aug 16, 2011 10:56 pm
pinkharrier wrote:So races have existed, but not now. Okay-ish. Hmmmm. So why isn't H.nea a "social construct" if he/she was still around?
As usual, I'm confused.
I have the unpleasant feeling that you want to be confused.
There's not certitude about the "taxonomical status" of Neanderthal but the classifications proposed for Neanderthal are mostly not based on social prejudice or "ideal types" but on morphology and even today of phylogenetic reconstruction with the sample of Neanderthal DNA. But to be fair it's true that some social prejudice have involved in some Neanderthal reconsturctions, at least in the past when a lot of people, even scientists, seen Neanderthal as a stupid simian beast. But for the question of modern human populations we have to consider the present data about diversity and its mosaic And the problem with "racial classifications", is that they misrepresent the human diversity.