Anthropology Research: Race

Anthropology Research: Race

Introduction

A group of people having particular common or familiar inherited features and these features distinguish one group of people to another is known as a human race. People of different races, which are defined by anthropologists, are considered as belongings to one species i.e. Homo sapiens (Anonymous, 2011). Differences between the races of human are not good i.e. there should not be any inequity between black and white men or women. All belong to one species thus all are equal. There is around 99.99+% same and identical genetic material between all of the human races (Anonymous, 2011). Thus, all human races can interbreed in the world because of common genetic materials amongst all the races. In order to know the attitude of people about human races, the following table reflects people's idea and attitudes related to human races (Anonymous, 2011).

Discussion

Variations in humans biologically can be classified in a number of ways but eventually all human beings belong to same species. All human are given with different fingerprints because of their minute differences in their DNA (Haviland et.al., 2010). Genetic variations in human are distributed generally all over the globe in a permanent and continuous fashion.

Early scholars of Europe tried to categorize the Homo sapiens into races or subspecies which were based on phenotypic features and geographical location. Phenotypic features included body size, skin color, head shape and texture of hair. In the 18th century, Carolus Linnaeus who was a Swedish naturalist categorized humans in races or subspecies based on their geographical location (Haviland et.al., 2010). He classified all Africans as Black, Europeans as white, Asians as yellow and American Indians as red.

John Blumenbach, a German physician introduced some changes in these races. Blumenbach estimated the skull of women as the most beautiful from the Caucasus Mountain range. Blumenbach found that all white skinned people in Europe and all other adjacent parts of northern Africa and western Asia belonged to the same race (Haviland et.al., 2010). He labeled the race “European” as “Caucasian”. He labeled dark skinned Africans as “Ethiopian”. Those Asians who were not considered Caucasian was classified into two more races Mongolian and Malay. Blumenbach ranked the Caucasians as superior because they were closest to the original and idealized humans. This superior ranking of Caucasians proved to be damaging for the social environment of the world (Haviland et.al., 2010).

How many races are there?

What are ...