CHALLENGES 'OUT OF AFRICA' THEORY

CHALLENGES 'OUT OF AFRICA' THEORY


Blacks, whites and Asians
evolved separately: scientist

Blacks, whites and Asians have different ancestors —
and did not come from Africa, claims scientist
Geographer claims the races evolved from different ancestors

Article Safari Sunday, 12 September 2010

LONDON — A public claim by a fellow of the prestigious Royal Geographic
Society that humans did not all come from Africa — and that blacks,
whites and Asians have different ancestors — has been dismissed by
world experts as “dangerous,” “wrong” and “racist.”

In a paper widely trumpeted and due for release in book form, Akhil Bakshi,
the leader of a recent major scientific expedition supported by India’s prime
minister, claims that “Negroid”, “Caucasian” and “Mongoloid” peoples are
not only separate races but separate species, having evolved on different
continents.

Responding to the claims — developed while Bakshi led the Gondwanaland
expedition from India to South Africa — Professor Lee Berger, a leading
paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, immediately
insisted that, there were no fundamental differences between the races
and that all humans had the same genetic and physical roots in Africa.


ARE THERE RACIAL DIFFERENCES? — Shown clockwise here from the upper left:
An Aryan (Europid); Negroid; Levantine (Eastern Mediterranean); and Mongoloid.

The prevalent scientific theory of modern humans — the “Out of Africa”
model — is that they left Africa just 55,000 years ago and replaced
the last remnants of other ancient hominids living in Europe, Asia and
elsewhere. The old biological racial distinctions of “Caucasian,” “Negroid”
and “Mongoloid” have recently been abandoned by mainstream scientists
— removed, for instance, from the US National Library of Medicine in 2003.

Bakshi has become a self-declared champion of a minority scientific view
called “multiregionalism,” which claims that modern humans evolved from
separate hominid populations. Hominids encompass all humans and the
ancient family of human-like ancestors, including large-brained ancient
ancestors and unsuccessful species such as Neanderthals.

However, Bakshi — who has no training as an anthropologist — has linked
to this model a theory that these populations evolved according to the
genetic material left behind when the prehistoric supercontinents, the
northern Laurasia and the southern Gondwanaland, broke up. An influential
figure in India, Bakshi is also a filmmaker and author who has led four major
scientific expeditions since 1994. Bakshi admitted to the Sunday Times
that “some of my points may prove to be wrong, and may be seen as
Politically Incorrect.
He claims indigenous “Negroid” populations occur in places like Australia,
India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and the Andaman Islands not because they
moved there from Africa, but because all these land masses were once part
of Gondwanaland — and that all evolved separately. Whites, according to
Bakshi, are from Laurasia and blacks are from Gondwanaland. He argues
that, 60,000 years ago, humans could not have crossed vast oceans and
deserts to reach remote places like Australia and North America, and they
must therefore have evolved there.

http://www.articlesafari.com/2010/09/whites-asians-did-not-come-from-africa/