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Homo sapiens first appeared less than 200,000 years ago, likewise in equatorial Africa. This earliest incarnation we might call Proto-Negroid. One part then moved to North Africa and the Middle East sometime in the period 100,000 to 70,000 B.P. For a long time this new "sapient" form, our ancestors, co-existed with Neanderthals, Homo erectus and perhaps yet other human sub-groups until finally, probably about 45,000 years ago, Homo sapiens alone developed the intellectual tool of language, which enabled him to out-compete and exterminate the other types. (Cf. Ian Tattersall's article in the January 2000, Volume 282, Number 1 edition of Scientific American, referred to in the table above.)
With this first move northward, the first split also occurred: those that remained in equatorial Africa became the ancestors to modern African Negroes or Blacks; the emigrants, on the other hand, gave rise to the rest of humanity.
One strand of the emigrants (still Proto-Negroid) kept to the southernmost portions of Asia and, migrating eastward, gave rise to the Proto-Negroid peoples of Australia and the Melanesian islands north and northeast of it, such as New Guinea, as well as to the subtropical populations of southeast Asia (~40,000 B.P.). Some of this same southern strand continued on even further: sailing up around the Pacific Rim (or perhaps directly eastwards), they eventually colonized South America, thereby becoming the first humans - the true "Native Americans" - in the western hemisphere. All of this happened before the appearance of the Mongoloid type (Amerinds) in the Americas. These early migrants did not spend very much time, if any, in the frigid vicinity of Ice-Age glaciers, and were not subjected to the fierce evolutionary pressures that awaited those who took a glacially slow route through the north. Thus these first South Americans changed little from the earliest Homo sapiens prototype and retained much of the Proto-Negroid nature of their ancestors.
In contrast to this southern emigrant stream, the northernmost portions of the Middle Eastern remainder of the African emigrés spread out to the northwest, north and northeast, losing their dark skin pigmentation in proportion to their northward advance and becoming Proto-Caucasoid (~70,000-50,000). The groups farthest east took to boats and reached (~25,000-15,000 B.P.) Japan, Polynesia and, finally, North America, where they became the ancestors of Kennewick Man, Stick Man and many other pre-Indians. In north Eurasia in the late Ice-Age period of 40,000 to 20,000 years ago, this Proto-Caucasoid northern branch underwent considerable pressures of natural selection due to the intensely cold winters. Among other things, these pressures selected for increasingly higher intelligence and the larger brains required to support it. During this time and especially over the seven-thousand-year period from about 22,000 to 15,000 years ago, the cold-tolerant Proto-Mongoloid form gradually emerged in the barren, icy wastes north of Lake Baikal. Meanwhile the less severe conditions closer to the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian Seas allowed a more "leisurely" evolution. Thus from the Proto-Caucasoid base emerged the Caucasoids in the west and the Mongoloids in the mid-Siberian east, while the less-pressured, easternmost northerners, who formed the basis of the Jomon culture and the later Ainu, did not change very much at all during this period.
So it came about that the Negroid peoples of Australia and Melanesia, together with the earliest inhabitants of South America, retained more of the traits of the earliest, Proto-Negroid forms of Homo sapiens, and are most closely related to African Negroes.
In a parallel manner, the White peoples of Europe retain somewhat more of the traits of the early, northern group of humans (Proto-Caucasoids) before the emergence of the Mongoloid type in the east, than do the Mongoloids. This explains why the Kennewick Man, Stick Man and other pre-Amerind North American relatives (as well as the Ainu of Japan) give an initial impression of being Caucasoid, since Whites are generally closer to the pre-split (and pre-Mongoloid) northern prototype, than are the Orientals who have diverged more strongly from it. (On this, see also "RACE, EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOR: A Life History Perspective," 2nd Special Abridged Edition, Professor J. Philippe Rushton, U. of Western Ontario.)
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