Modern anthropology no longer classifies humans into four races, as we studied in school: black, white, yellow and red. The term “race” is no longer used to differentiate human groups but to differentiate the human race from the rest of the living beings that inhabit this planet. Today most anthropologists use the term “ethnic group” instead of “race”, and divide the human race into three major ethnic groups: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid. There are also those who classify the inhabitants of Oceania as Australoid, but we think that they belong to a subgroup.
Even at the risk of being misunderstood, we will use these terms in the original sense, without any racist connotation because this article wants to prove precisely that the human race had a common cradle in Africa, and that the physiological differences we exhibit today stem from the long adaptation to the different environments of that unique human ethnic group’s migration.
The Rift Valley, the Cradle of Humanity and Its Saviour
A valley is a land depression surrounded by mountains or hills. There are valleys which are formed by the flowing waters of rivers that carved the land for thousands or millions of years, as is the case of the Grand Canyon in the United States which was carved by the Colorado River.
The first great civilizations in the world were formed along the banks of great rivers: the Egyptian civilization, on the banks of the Nile River; the Mesopotamian civilization, on the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; the Hindu or Vedic civilization, on the banks of the Ganges River; the Chinese civilization, on the banks of the Yellow River (Huang He); the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas in Central America.
These rivers provided not only a constant and inexhaustible source of drinking water, but also fish for food, water for agriculture and enriched the land they passed through with their sediments – the most fertile lands on our planet are without question the valleys crossed by these great rivers. Rivers were also channels of communication between peoples and facilitated trade.
There are other valleys that are formed by the slow movement of glaciers that erodes the land into a U-shape, and still others are formed when two adjacent tectonic plates separate, creating a rift between them; the earth above this cleft collapses and sinks. When the Arabian plate separated from the African plate, the Rift Valley was formed, the longest and deepest on the planet. In fact, on each side of the Rift Valley there are no mountains, as seen around the valleys formed by rivers and glaciers, but plateaus.
It begins at the source of the Jordan River in Israel, between Lebanon and Syria, forms the Jordan River valley to the Sea of Galilee, continues into the Jordan Valley to the Dead Sea, then to the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea, proceeds south to enter Africa through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and ends in the middle of Mozambique in the Indian Ocean, after travelling more than 3000 kilometers and descending to 500 meters below the sea level.
The Rift Valley is a chain of great lakes such as Lake Victoria which gives rise to the Nile River, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Turkana, Lake Niassa, and many other smaller lakes and rivers. It is known for its year-round temperate climate and fertile land. The biodiversity in the Rift Valley is far superior to the rest of Africa and one of the most bio-diverse in the world.
This valley is the birth place of humanity and its development during the Paleolithic period. It is also where the Saviour of the mankind was born and, precisely at the source of the Jordan River in Caesarea Philippi, where the Apostle Peter recognized in Jesus someone more than a prophet – the Messiah, the Son of God (Mark 8:27-30). Whenever a pot is made, a lid is made to go along with it: the pot is humanity, and the lid is Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life for humanity.
From Primate to Human Being
‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it…’ Genesis 1:28
Sixty-six million years ago a 10-kilometer in diameter meteorite crashed into our planet and provoked a winter night that lasted several years, during which 75% of the living beings on Earth died, among them the dinosaurs. The small rodents survived because they lived underground and were able to hibernate for a long time.
Many years passed and the conditions on the planet became favorable again, these rodents evolved into orangutans living in trees, where it was easier to protect themselves and find food, and from these to monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas and primates. Chimpanzees, bonobos (or pygmy chimps), and humans descended from a primate that lived 6 million years ago. From this primate, a branch evolved into humans and another into chimpanzees; today’s chimpanzees and bonobos are the last species from this latter branch.
For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. Humane Generis of Pius XII, #36
As Humane Generis says, the book of Genesis does not contradict the theory of evolution. It tells the truth of faith, not the truth of science. The fact that human beings have evolved from other living beings and life on the planet comes from a common stock do not constitute a problem to our faith, as long as it is acknowledged that God the Creator of everything and everyone gave the kick start by creating the life that He already knew would flow into a human being. Science cannot really explain in scientific terms how we passed from being a monkey to being a human being.
As the link between us and the monkeys has not yet been found, no one knows how or why humans have evolved while our chimpanzee siblings have not… Was it God who willed this, or genetic mutations, change of climate, food, or all of the above? It may have been a chain of events that occurred like the domino effect: one thing led to another and so on. Some of these factors are the bipedalism that freed the hands, the increase of the cranial capacity that creatively arranges tasks for the hands to perform, tools, the opposable thumb, genetic changes, climate and geological changes that have forced human beings to adapt to the new conditions, etc.
From this highly variable scenario and with many other variables, a monkey emerged smart enough to question its own existence. As an evolutionary chronology of the bipedal human species who have appeared and disappeared in the Rift Valley for 6 million years, anthropology establishes the following species:
• Ardipithecus ramidus – 4.4 million years
• Australopithecus afarensis – 3.5 million years
• Homo habilis – from 2 to 1.4 million years
• Homo ergaster – from 1.8 to 1.2 million years
• Homo erectus – from 1.6 million to 150 thousand years
• Homo neanderthalensis – 150 thousand to 30 thousand years
• Homo sapiens – from 130 thousand years to date
With the exception of the last one, which is our species, all the others are extinct.
Migration and Miscegenation
The Homo habilis, which is considered to be the first member of the genus Homo, gave rise to Homo ergaster. Some H. ergaster migrated to Asia, where they are called Homo erectus and others to Europe as Homo georgicus, a subspecies of H. erectus. The H. ergaster in Africa and H. erectus in Eurasia evolved separately for almost two million years and presumably separated into two different species.
Homo rhodesiensis, which was descended from H. ergaster, migrated from Africa to Europe and became Homo heidelbergensis and later (about 250,000 years ago) Homo neanderthalensis and Denisova hominins in Asia. The first Homo sapiens, a descendant of H. rhodesiensis, emerged in Africa about 250,000 years ago. Furthermore, around 100,000 years ago, some H. sapiens migrated from Africa to the Levant and joined the Neanderthals living there, with some genetic miscegenation or interbreeding.
Later, some 70,000 years ago, perhaps after the Toba catastrophe, the largest volcanic eruption in 2.6 million years, a small group left the Levant to fill Eurasia, Australia and, later the Americas. A subgroup of them encountered the Denisovans and, after some miscegenation, migrated to fill Melanesia.
In this scenario, most of today’s non-African people are of African origin (“the single-origin hypothesis”, also known as the “Out of Africa” hypothesis). However, there has also been some interbreeding between the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, who evolved locally (“the multiregional evolution hypothesis”). The recent genomic results from Svante Pääbo's group also show that 30,000 years ago at least three main subspecies coexisted: the Denisovans, the Neanderthals, and the Cro-Magnons. Today only the Homo sapiens survived, without the existence of the other species or subspecies.
The Three Wise Men/Magi and the Three Human Groups
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. Isaiah 25:6
The three major ethnic groups are subdivided into several other groups that can also be further subdivided into as many as 5,000 ethnic groups. However, they all descend from Homo sapiens because, as we have seen, all other human species have either merged with the Homo sapiens or disappeared and became extinct. There is therefore no scientific reason for racism, that is, the rivalry between different human groups, since we are entirely and exclusively ALL Homo sapiens who have emigrated from Africa.
- Caucasoid – Aryans, Hamites, Semites
- Mongoloid – Mongolians, Chinese, Indo-Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Tibetans, Malaysians, Polynesians, Maoris, Micronesians, Eskimos or Inuit, American Indians
- Negroid – Africans, Hottentots, Melanesians/Papua, Negritos, Australian Aborigines
From here the #HomoSapiens started their migration that took them to all corners of the earth. As they went from place to place in order to survive, their bodies and physiology adapted to the environments they came to colonize, branching into the three main ethnic groups that exist today: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid. Once again, in as much as God is one and three, so humans are also at the same time one and three; three in one, one in three.
Representing each of the three ethnic groups that humanity had branched into, the three wise men returned to the Rift Valley from where their common ancestor the Homo sapiens originated, to pay homage to the ONE who is the exemplar of Humanity, Jesus Christ, who was also born on the slopes of that valley. Jesus came to bring the fullness of physical, moral, spiritual and psychological health to humanity, and especially to be the great model for all to follow as the way, the truth, and the life. (John 14:6)
Cereals and Civilization
Agriculture and the domestication of animals were already important in the Paleolithic period for the survival of the human species and especially to overcome the symbiosis and dependence man lived in relation to Nature. Before the discovery of agriculture and domestication of animals, human beings, like wild animals, spent most of their day searching for food.
Of all the agricultural products, cereals were the most responsible for establishing a total independence from Nature. A human being is considered an omnivore, but from the point of civilization, he is mainly a cereal eater. Cereals are still today the staple food of man’s diet, they are the base of the well-known food pyramid, from the base to the tip: cereals, vegetables and fruits, meat and fish, and finally, vegetable fats and animal fats.
Why cereals? From the point of view of our diet, cereals, composed of carbohydrates, are energy-rich food that can supply energy for a long time. Vegetables and fruits supply quick but short-lasting energy. Furthermore, of all the foods that we know, cereals take the longest to spoil or degrade: at zero humidity they can last for millennia. In fact, archaeologists have found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen, the Egyptian pharaoh, 5,000-year-old wheat grains that had germinated after sowing.
Where there was no grain there was no civilization because grains, as the story of Joseph in Egypt describes in the book of Genesis 37, and the parable of the rich fool in Luke (12:16-20) indicates, unlike other foods, could be stored and preserved for a long time. This frees human beings from the constant need to search for food thus allowing them to devote themselves to other tasks, forming culture and civilization.
Let us take as an example the Indians of the entire American continent; both the North American Indians, as well as the South American Indians, did not build civilizations because they had no cereal. While the Central American Indians, the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas built a highly developed civilization. There were three great civilizations in the ancient world and all of them were based on one or more cereals:
The Wheat Civilization: North Africa and Europe – Egypt flourished thanks to the abundance of grains grown along the banks of the Nile River. Wheat, barley, sorghum, and oats were the first grains with the greatest mastery of cultivation techniques. The pharaohs used wheat as currency. The peasants were paid three loaves of bread and two jugs of beer as payment for a day’s work. In the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, pasta, honey, fruits, meat, breads and beer have been found.
The Rice Civilization: Asia and Oceania – Rice is the main staple food of approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, and is the most important crop in many countries, especially in Asia and Oceania. Rice cultivation is as old as civilization. Historians believe that this cereal grain originated in China, India and Oceania. Archaeological discoveries in China and India indicate that rice has existed for 7,000 years. Its use in ceremonies, where the Emperor sowed rice, dates back to 2822 B.C. and represents the most concrete reference of its existence.
The Maize/Corn Civilization: the Americas – Maize was known by pre-Colombian civilization as the food of men and gods. It is the third most important cereal in the world, after wheat and rice, and it has ensured the survival of large populations because of its nutritional value. The men who grew corn needed only to work 50 days a year, which allowed these people to work on the construction of great architectural works.
The Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas used corn in the form of flour in their diet, in porridge, breads, cakes, tamales. These peoples had a mystical and intense relationship with this cereal. Even in the leaders’ luxurious meals, corn was a must. The preparation of corn included the use of salt and pepper, as well as fermented beverages produced from corn, which are still made today by the Andean peoples. The long-lasting and easy storage for transport of corn contributed to Columbus bringing this staple food from America to Europe.
The African Profile (Negroid)
The physical characteristics of Africans are the following: round skull, very dark skin pigmentation, and black frizzy or curly hair; round black eyes, wide flat nose, large mouth with prominent and thick lips, short and broad chest, sparse body hair and a thin beard.
The main nucleus of this group is located in the African continent. However, there is an eastern branch of this group which is made up of the Australoids, who are the aboriginal people of Australia, India, Melanesia, and parts of Southeast Asia and East Asia, they are also called the Oceanians. The ones from the Solomon Islands in Oceania are so similar to the black Africans that anthropologists cannot distinguish between the two groups. In general, they have dark skin, wavy black hair, short and narrow face with developed body hair, dark brown eyes, large nose, thick lips, elongated head, taller than the average height and some even considered tall.
The European Profile (Caucasoid)
The physical characteristics of Europeans are as follows: broad and round skull, light skin pigmentation, and light hair colour with texture ranging from straight to wavy, wide deep-set eyes, thin lips, broad chest, abundant body hair, full beard. They make up 50% of humanity. The main nucleus of Caucasoids is found in the Old World: Europe, Asia and North Africa. It is subdivided into southern or Indo-Mediterranean and northern or Atlantic-Baltic. The southern race has darker skin, hair and eyes, while the northern race presents with lighter skin, hair and eyes.
Those who represent the southern or Indo-Mediterranean race are: Hindus, Tajiks, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Italians and Spaniards, which are characterized by wavy black hair, brown eyes, narrow and slightly curved nose with a prominent bridge, narrow face and head in a dolichocephalic and mesocephalic form.
The northern or Atlantic-Baltic race is represented by the Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Norwegians, Germans, English and peoples who live further north; their physical characteristics are: light skin, blond or red hair, gray or blue eyes, long straight nose and tall stature.
The Asian Profile (Mongoloid)
The physical characteristics of Asians are the following: broad skull, medium skin pigmentation between white and yellow, straight black hair, slanted and oblique eyes, prominent cheekbones, straight nose, thin lips, short and broad thorax, sparse body hair.
The Mongoloid ethnic group makes up about 40% of world population and half are Chinese. They live in Asia, in the northern, eastern, central, and southeastern regions, and extend across Oceania and the American continent. Many members of this group are part of the population in the Asian regions that belonged to the former Soviet Union: Yakut, Buryat, Tunguses, Tchuquetches, Tuvinos, Altaios, Ilacos, Aleuts, and Asian Eskimos.
The Mongoloid race is divided into three subgroups:
The Northern or Asian-Continental – also called Central Asian and to which the Buryat and the Mongolians belong. They are known to have lighter skin, hair and eyes, finer hair, thin lips and large flat face.
The Southern or Asian-Pacific – they are represented by the Malays, Javanese, and inhabitants of the Sunda Islands. Their physical characteristics are: tanned skin, narrow and short face, thick lips, wide nose, sometimes wavy hair, shorter stature than the northerners and the Chinese.
The Native American Indians – Their physical characteristics are: straight thick black hair, underdeveloped body hair system, yellowish-white skin, dark brown eyes and broad face.
Physiological Variables
The most notable physiological variables among the three human groups are the skin colour, the type and colour of hair, the shape and size of the nose, the eye shape and colour, and to a lesser extent, the prominence of the cheekbones.
The Skin – From the white of a Scandinavian to the black of a Congolese, the only difference is the latitude at which these two people live. The further north of the equator, the whiter the person becomes, and the closer to the equator, the darker the person becomes. Our bodies need vitamin D which is synthesized by exposing the naked skin to the sunlight. Where the sun is abundant, the skin, acting like a curtain, closes to let in only the amount it needs, and where the is sun is scarce, the skin opens up completely to soak in as much sunlight as is available.
The Nose – In addition to filtering the air of dust and fumes, thus preventing them from reaching the lungs, the nose also regulates the air temperature. Long nose with small nostrils corresponds to cold climates, and small flat nose with wide nostrils corresponds to warm climates.
The Eyes – The greater or lesser concentration of melanin in the skin is responsible for its colour, and this is the same with the colour of the eyes – the darker the colour the more melanin, and the lighter the colour the less melanin. Current studies show that people with blue eyes all descended from the same individual who lived 6,000 years ago in Scandinavia where 89% of people have blue eyes. This percentage goes down as we head south, and changes from blue to green, from green to brown, and then to black, as we move further south. Like the skin and hair colour, the amount of melanin is responsible for this feature.
As for the shape of the eyes, the most distinct difference is between Chinese or Asian eyes and the rest of the world. Studies show that this feature is the result of adaptation to the environment and climate. In the Asian steppes, the constant strong winds, the dust that they raise, the cold, as well as the need to see far, have led the eyes to adapt over the centuries to how they are today.
The Hair – The same melanin that is responsible for the colour of the iris of the eyes and the colour of the skin, is also responsible for the hair colour. The hair texture is related to the temperature of the environment: straight hair is typical of cold climates, curly and frizzy hair like those of the Africans, are typical of hot climates – by turning a thousand and one times, curly hair allows a cushion or air chamber to form between the scalp and the air, thus protecting the head from sunstroke; Africans have what it seems to be an air conditioner on their head.
The Essence of Racism
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3:28
The affirmation and defense of the thesis of the biological inequality of the human races constitute the essence of racism. Racists consider the white race as superior and all other races, like the black and yellow, as inferior. They confuse the concepts of race and nation. What they don’t realize is that race is a biological concept while nation is a sociological concept.
Cultural level does not depend on physiological characteristics, but is determined by economic and social factors. Racist thinking has no scientific basis, instead it shows gross errors in logic and in facts. As the result, it confuses race with nation, people, culture or linguistic group, attributing to social factors, and therefore hereditary, behaviours which have nothing to do with race but are conditioned by culture, the social environment and economic conditions.
Beauty Standards
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, the standard of beauty is conventional; in Africa, there are tribes that like women with long necks; in southern Ethiopia, women cut a slit in their lips to place within this space a small clay disk that they say makes the woman more beautiful; in China and Japan, women with small feet are considered beautiful.
However, Western civilization has inflicted and imposed its beauty standards across the four corners of the globe in such a way that it seems that everyone thinks and perceives what is beautiful like an European or North American. I noticed this during my years in Ethiopia when I tested a group of young people on what they viewed as beautiful. In the mission there was a local nun, young and beautiful, and another Italian nun not as young nor as beautiful; I was astonished to hear the young people when asked which of the two was more beautiful, that they chose the Italian one. I suppose this is the reason why the singer Michael Jackson never accepted his skin colour and sought through several plastic surgeries to make himself white.
It took time for non-Caucasian models to appear on catwalks in fashion shows. Naomi Campbell was the first African supermodel and in some way shocked certain standards and customs of the fashion world. The point is that the beauty standard is not at all scientific, but is purely conventional, arbitrary and circumstantial. If Africa was as successful as Europe and America, the concept of beauty standard would likely be African.
The Irrationality of Racism
There are no Asian, no African, no Caucasian man, because all men came from the African continent from a common stock. Despite having other species of Homo like the Neanderthals who also left Africa, the only Homo species that survived is the Homo sapiens. All others died out or were absorbed into the Homo sapiens pool, so that since 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, there has only been one species of Homo.
The physiological differences of the three main ethnic groups are the result of an adaptation to the environment and are all reversible in the sense that if we moved a tribe from the Congo to Norway, in less than 25,000 years, its members would become blonde with straight hair, blue eyes and white skin. This is why what Martin Luther King said on the day before his murder makes a whole lot of sense, “I dream of the day when men will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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