THERE IS ONLY ONE HUMAN SPECIES, TODAY. Archaeology and genetics demonstrate that in the past there were different human species, relatively recently in both biological and geological time there were two or three by that definition. Only our species and what we have chosen to call Neanderthals, some also designating some Neanderthals as being "Denisovians" though by a strict definition of "species" made it to the relatively near past in our species.
Though, since it is clear through genetic analysis that many modern human beings have Neanderthals and Denisovians in their direct lineage, since they share genes with them that could not have been had by any other means than them having had sex together and producing living, even thriving offspring up till today, the idea that they were different species is, itself, open to the idea that it is a superstition. It would certainly be by the definition of "species" I was taught in high school and college biology courses, though as so much of that thoroughly conventional science has been overturned or superseded, I can't state that as a scientific fact. I think it's questionable to use the same word "extinct" to talk about species which died out leaving no living ancestors and those whose descendants are alive and reproducing today, but such sloppy terminology is rampant within evolutionary science. I think to talk of any of our non-human direct ancestors' species as being "extinct" is rather stupid.
All modern human species, as well as Neanderthals and Denisovians, who have not been found to have lived there, have a biological heritage that goes back to Africa - a fact that many an eminent early anthropologist, archeologist, and not a few true believers in natural selection and the early, primitive and naive concept of genetics disliked. Those almost all white men of the privileged class in their countries, hated the fact that humans evolved as Black People and wanted to deny that with science. All of those doing their scientifically and academically done science in the commonly held racist mode of thought. More than one expedition was mounted to find the "true origin of the modern human species" in what 19th and much of 20th century romantic era linguistics lore invented to be the "Aryan" heartland in central Asia. Much of linguistics is even more a result of bullshitting and spinning yarns as is much of Darwinist lore, which, in the end, must depend on making up stories about fossils and artifacts because there is no direct evidence to support what they wish to assert as truth.*
And with the introduction of that infamous"A" word, you can begin to see the real motive in it was entirely racist and stupid and what should have been kept out of the science, such as it was, but which, of course, was not. The motive was the denial of human equality and the elevation of the "white race" over races of color, as so often among such racists, allowing some Asians with a long written culture and powerful, wealthy empires up hear the crown of creation, though the darker the skin, the lower such held the human beings on their scale of value were uniformly held to be.
Some like Charles Darwin were a bit more dainty in some of their racism - though Darwin was as crude as any modern racist in some of his - but which was clearly there in his writing. Darwin's approved most influential continental disciple, colleague and friend, Ernst Haeckel was far more explicit in his racist classification of "races" - both of them predicted and tacitly approved of their theory that the "fitter" races would murder all of the members of the "unfavored" races, we know that because both of them published that idea as the most valid of science, of the time, and approved of each others books asserting that idea. Haeckel outright advocated the killing of those we classified as inferior and, through him, Darwin more discretely advocated the same. And the history of all of the sciences that either were derived from the theory of natural selection or adopted that most ideological of all the major scientific theories shared in that racist history, many of them still saturated with it, such as the inaptly named practice of scientific story telling about the past, "evolutionary psychology."
As I have pointed out any number of times here, those who published the most flagrant of antisemitic science, such as Kevin MacDonald, have flourished in the academic groves of Evolutionary Psychology, with full honors and privileges, even as they spouted junk science worthy of the worst of Nazi and English Language eugenics before the crimes of the Nazis all too temporarily tamped that down. But only somewhat, many of the post-war generation of geneticists, such as both Francis Crick and James Watson were ardent scientific racists and eugenicists, though both of them kept it within confidential letter writing and comment to their scientific colleagues until Watson in his old age said it out loud to the outside world. There were also, especially in the pseudo-social-sciences, those who promoted racism and eugenics such as the psychologist Arthur Jensen who published scientific racism while teaching in the same university system that maintained MacDonald even after Jensen was publicly exposed as an infamous racist, the U. of California System, and the authors of The Bell Curve psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray, Herrnstein teaching and at one time chairing the Harvard Psychology Department and Charles Murray a product of Harvard and MIT (which gave him his degree in the pseudo-social-science, "political science") but who has worked in the world of pseudo-academia, stink thanks and guess pools such as the American Institutes for Research, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, American Enterprise Institute. All of those institutions, from the most august to the most clearly corrupt share in the widespread academic racism that those they educated and hired and maintained, asserted with such authority as is granted to such People from such places.
I will digress to point out that after the scandal of MacDonald being the sole witness that the crypto-Nazi and, before then, eminent British historian, David Irving called him to spew his antisemitic science before the court in his libel action against Deborah Lipstad, one of the founders of Evolutionary Psychology, John Tooby claimed that MacDonald had violated the standards of his science and denied he was an evolutionary psychologist, though if you want to check out how his colleagues felt about that before he became a public scandal but well into his publishing of his antisemitism as science, you can check out MacDonald's CV to see he was a professor at an accredited university, was widely published, was even the head of reviewed professional journals within Evolutionary Psychology, all with his antisemtism comprising a a very large part of his published production. That was AOK with them before the scandal broke, apparently.
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I have repeatedly noted here that that mathematical thought experiment that asserts that virtually all living People of European heritage - which I will point out includes many, many, many People of Color who would seldom be classified as having European heritage - can count the Carolingian Emperor Charlemagne in their direct ancestry had a profound effect on my thinking. The math, though not difficult, is far less clear than just speaking it out, so I'll go that route.
Every human being alive on Earth today has two parents. They have four grandparents. They have eight great-grandparents, the number of their direct ancestors by biological inheritance doubles with every generation into the past, we're not concerned with siblings and cousins, those closer and at some remove, though the same is true for all of them. You can match that fact of the number of direct ancestry with the fact that as you go back in time the size of the human population is ever smaller. You don't have to go that far back in human history before the number of direct ancestors grows to such size that it outstrips the number of human beings alive at that time. One of the consequences of those facts, matched with such complicating factors as the geographical limitations of People and the fact that in many cases you would probably find the same individual great-great. . . grandparents on more than one of your by then many intersecting family lines.* But you will also find that another thing is true, that you would find virtually every named "ethic" group today was, as well, part of your direct ancestral line and you certainly share much of the same genetic materials with those today as those whose unshared genetic material with you is taken as a "marker" for that ethnicity - such as shady "ancestry genetic testing" outfits will assert. They never talk about the common shared material because it wouldn't fit in with their commercial narrative.
And, of course, there is the most disliked fact of all, one that so much of 19th and 20th centuries and, I'm sure still 21st century scientists hate, that you cannot get away from the fact that in very recent biological time, all of us have exactly the same ancestry as those who live in Africa, there is no human being or anyone in our nearly related lines among extinct hominids who is not rooted in Africa and, in fact, are biologically African. There are no real ethnic distinctions that are not a superstitious and, generally racist denial of those facts.
When I read the original paper asserting that virtually all "Europeans" had Charlemagne as a direct "great-great. . . grandfather" the first thing I realized was there was only one of him but there were many, many more of individual People of different "ethic" groupings alive in Europe at the same time and the exact same reasoning meant that every Nazi had Jewish ancestry, Roma ancestry, Slavic ancestry. . . Probably virtually every member of the groups that the Nazis targeted had "Aryan" ancestry - by the Nazi's definition of that. And the opposite is even more certainly true. They wouldn't exist without those ancestors they'd have hated and wanted to kill.
If you take even an unrealistically large number so as to approximate a human "generation" the number of years for one generation of parents to produce the next one, of fifty years - which is far, far older than average human life expectancy even as recently as the early 1900s - and counting powers of 2 to figure out the number of any of our direct ancestors going back 64 generations, you get about the number ( chosen from among those expressed on credible seeming websites because even using scientific notation it would cause most eyes to glaze over) "eighteen quintillion, four hundred fourty-six quadrillion, seven hundred fourty-four trillion, seventy-four billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred sixteen." More than the number of human beings believed to have ever lived or which will probably ever live by an incredibly large number.
But, since measuring the date of when 64 50-year "generations"generations of go would begin, would only require you to multiply 50 by 64, you get the far more understandable 3,200 years ago about 1200 years BC.
I chose 64 generations because it matches the old story of the man who asked the emperor to give him a doubled number of grains of rice on each square of a chessboard and the number 50 because it was larger than the average life expectancy for almost all of the human past but lower than the 70+ years more typical of the most recent modern period. I didn't plan it out so that the start of that would roughly correspond to the time in which Moses is estimated to have received The Law, the start of the Jewish People, according to scripture.
I'd say that except for populations who were geographically remote from the majority of the human population in the Biblical lands whose ancestors never reproduced with those whose ancestors were there, then, everyone else almost certainly has ancestry who would have been considered to have been within the Covenant if their ancestry could be traced that far back. And, today, certainly many and probably most of even those long ago isolated populations of human beings, do have that ancestry, today, though it is lost in time. Even that most venerable and fraught designation of ethnicity is questionable as a scientific category. To maintain stereotypical images based on any ethnic abstraction is about the most dangerous and so immoral and superstitious of superstitions. It is certainly immoral because it violates one of those laws which I have every confidence that Moses received from the divine in his meditative ecstasy, the one against bearing false witness. Just as with so many a white supremacist of Southern heritage, there probably wasn't a Nazi who was not, by their absurd scientism, a member of the group they hated more than all others. I wonder if scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had concentrated on the equality of People instead of so assiduously ranking them in a scheme of economic valuation, Nazism would have ever come into existence. It is a certainty that the eugenics that were the very foundation of Nazi racial theory would never have come into being. But Darwinism started in a Brit aristocrat adapting the entirely artificial, upper class-advancement of Malthusian economics, so it was bound to take that road.
Again arguing that point which can't be stressed too much, the English and Irish almost certainly had far higher common heritage than many a Brit hater of the Irish or Irish resentful of the English would ever want to have pointed out to them. I have not worked it out mathematically but I suspect that virtually all lines of European descent probably, if it were traceable, have someone held to be a covenant member of the Jewish People through having great-grandmothers in the distant past who were fully accepted members of the Jewish People. That would make every one of their direct descendants through the female line and, I'd guess, almost all of the would have those, members of the Jewish People by what The Law says, as I've heard and read that explained. That is certainly far truer for those who have lived in close physical contact for thousands of years, such as the population in Palestine, made up from time immemorial of Jews, Christians and Muslims, I would bet that every Palestinian, those who would be classified as Jews, those whose remote ancestors converted to Christianity, two thousand or fewer years ago or those who converted to Islam more recently in human history all are the product of such ancestry.
Though other definitions of what makes someone a member of this or that group a member of it are far less specific, the same thing is true as a biological fact. There is no such a thing as an ethnic group or a race that has any kind of strict biological classification, nothing that makes any of those groupings a hard and fast physical fact, they are nothing but attitudes and superstitious beliefs. Such beliefs in "ethnic purity" is as pernicious as it is superstitious. While the cultural differences among different human populations carries a great deal to be said for it, as well as some bad. Though far less bad than can be attributed to the kind of inter-breeding that Darwin so stupidly asserted was related to "superior biological fitness" as defined by the economic utility of the offspring for human beings. That is despite the well known tendency for rigorously pure-line breeding to produce genetic, sometimes catastrophic biological unfitness. I think it is one of the major moral and cultural virtues of the Jewish religious tradition that it opposes that kind of thinking about human beings, something that Christianity and Islam have gotten from that tradition. It is one of the major ideas in religious morality that modern, materialist, generally atheist, scientism has rejected - one of those things which Francis Galton said in his memoir, he figured we were through with from the adoption of the theory of natural selection. I had an occasion to point out that one of the key differences in The Law of Moses from the "enlightenment" American Constitution was that when slaves escaped slavery and went to another town of village among the Children of Israel, they were allowed to remain free - the American Founders set up the fugitive slave laws, a direct violation of that Biblical morality. Another was that the "alien" living among them was to be treated in the same way as those held to be under the Covenant, being considered to be part of it after, as I recall, two or three generations.
I could go on but I won't for now, knowing only those really interested have read this far. As you can read in my archive, I've rejected the idea of ethnic differences for almost as long as I've realized that equality and not libertarian "freedom" is the basis of the only legitimate government there is, egalitarian democracy. The two ideas aren't the same but they are certainly related and, by moral imperative, morally performative. You see, when you believe that morality as as real as molecules, you are not allowed to ignore such realities. Materialists, atheists, secularists, those who superstitiously believe in scientism don't get that because they don't believe morality is real and far harder than their models of atoms and molecules.
* In my own experience of the past fifty years as I went from a thoroughly convinced conventional Darwinist to realizing how much of it was no better than the worst anthropological bull shit, there was nothing more of a contributor to that realization than reading the claims of the Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists and the arguments that scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin made against those. Gould's excellent point that what both of those forms of neo-eugenics dressed as "group selection" did nothing but make up "Just-so Stories" had what, for him, would have been the unintended result that I realized virtually everything claimed by not only Darwinist biologists but, even more so, the naive view of genetics that was shot-gun married to it in the neo-Darwinian synthesis was, as well, made up. That the scientific study of evolution was saturated with ideologies which those stories were created to serve and the entire thing was based on the fallacy of begging the question. Whether that ideology was as generally egalitarian and ideologically admirable in the case Gould, Lewontin and their colleagues who opposed what Gould also, very aptly, named "Darwinian fundamentalists" or the like of Dawkins and the evo-psy cult which has dominated biology for the past fifty years or so, all of it is ideological which, even more basically than the biology I was taught as hard scientific fact, violates one of the first principles of science going back to Bacon's Novum Organum THAT IT BE NON-IDEOLOGICAL. Since then I've seen just how thoroughly some of the physical sciences are, as well, saturated by ideology as well as the softer and the pseudo-social-sciences that Dawkins and Wilson and their colleagues wedded biology to.
** When I had to do some research on our small family farm going back not that far, into the 19th and late 18th centuries, I found an amateur genealogist commenting on how common cousin marriage was due to the small population and geographic isolation. The same is certainly true of every family alive today.
