This is pure speculation but, if you look at 5,000 years of Chinese history, you will see that it has been mired in countless wars, invasions, and famine, some of which, reduced the population of the north China plain by as much as 1/2 to 3/4. The hunnish, mongol, and manchu invasions were particularly devastating. It's often been said that the north China plain was always populous enough to absorb the foreign genes of countless invaders, be they mongol, turanid, or tungusic, making the invaders in a few generations looking like the Chinese they've invaded. I think this is bs, because if you look at the census figures of north China, it never exceeded more than 10-20 million people until the late 19th century. Which means the population was not big enough to dilute the genes of hundreds of thousands to millions of non-Chinese who have entered Chinese soil. Usually the historical pattern of china is: foreign invasion, then stability, civil war and famine (instability that decreases the population), and then back to foreign invasion. The chaos, strife, and civil wars in China have always reduced the population significantly and opened China up to foreign invaders, and consequently, foreign genes. In times of peace and instability, the newly acquired genes would have then become established in the Chinese population, and the invader and the invaded's genes both change to become something in the middle.

Thus you could say that instability catalyzes the rate at which foreign genes are introduced, and stability catalyzes the rate at which these genes spread throughout the entire population.

I am always surprised how fast the members of community change their appearance. After they crossed the Bering strait, it took only a couple of thousand years to change the appearance of Siberian people to the completely different looks Indians today have and, hell, this group is far from looking alike as one can be: For instance North American Plain Indians look very different than Caribs or Anden Indians and so on.

Chinese complexion looks very varied to me. I think the Chinese genotype must have changed a lot over the course of time.

i think the original Chinese 5,000 thousand years ago resembled more like Native American silvids (woodland indians). China back then had a very similar climate, flora, and fauna like what the amerindians in Northeastern US and Canada had to adapt to. The silvids have relatively weak mongoloid features compared to the native americans in the southwest or the pacific, and i believe retain the progressive (as opposed to prognathism and paedemorphism that characterizs southern amerinds), lankiness, and long-headedness that made them successful hunter-gatherers. the trend in paedamorphism is due to the onset of civilization which allows those who are less physically fit to survive and breed. the original chinese were much the same way, i believe.

It's no surprise the Iroquois, Cherokee, and the Sioux were the most successful Native American tribes to stave off European domination, due to their superb physique as compared to the pugdy and infantile Aztecs and other Indians of Mesoamerica.

Here's a verbal warning for that one. That's a racist comment.

Vanguard, I should have guessed you were a white supremacist from your username, I can't count how many racists I've seen with that screen name.

The southern Amerinds, with their deep set eyes, tall nose bridges, prominent foreheads, and lesser facial flatness. Look much more Caucasoid than northern native Americans.

This "Vanguard" is a racist Eurocentric, his intention is to spam the forum with claims that the founders of Chinese civilization were caucasoids and became Mongolid due to barbarian invasions.

How do you say "a couple of thousand years"? Shouldn't it be something more? Anyway the Eskimos still look like Chinese . The Amerinds should be so different because of climate change, perhaps because they evolved again when they migrated South.

By the way, even the "barbarians" did not have racial description, unlike the people who were said to have "Macacca-like" features.

Some Amerinds from the pacific northwest can look similar to Japanese/Chinese...

Han dynasty population is 50+ million and in the north, even in early Tang the population is still concentrated in the north

You would do well to know of Ran Min; barbarians resettled within the frontiers did at one time number perhaps 10% of the population in some locales, however the populations remained rather distinct, hence when the Jin government collapsed the barbarians rose up as tribes, rather than random citizenry. These barbarians could be distinguished in appearance from the Hans and were exterminated by Ran Min.

This is but little more than a century after Han, and only a few years after what was still a united empire. Obviously, the Hans of then are "Mongoloid" like the Hans of now.

I think 5000 year is barely enough to make new phenomena...
http://img486.imageshack.us/img486/5251/pq17130580058ab.jpg
(Eskimo and Northwest America should be the "recent" line)
might be "a little bit distinguishable" but nevertheless still similar.

im sorry, but i reject the theory that caucasians of the tarim basin founded chinese empire as totally implausible. i am more inclined to believe that the ancestors of native americans founded china than caucasians. if you analyzenative american cultures of the eastern woodlands and central plains, you'll realize they share much of the same beliefs and cultural values of chinese. there is even anthropological evidence connecting them to koreans.

im not going further on the discussion of native americans, but you compare the brasilids of south america, pure mesoamerican natives of mexico, and then compare them to silvids of the woodlands and plains, you can clearly tell the difference. i never once mentioned the silvids were more caucasoid, only lankier, more dolichocephalic (long headed), and have more progressive chin and less prognathy. These are not features exclusively associated with caucasoids (indeed many caucasoids such as alpinids are very brachycephalic) but various mongoloid and africans have those features as well. they are more associated with adaptation to a particular environment, so certain mongoloid and caucasoid subraces will have certain features than other subraces of the same races lack.

Oh great. We just got the 'blacks founded China' debate out of the way, and now we have 'ancestors of native Americans founded China'.

Well, depends on how we see it, technically, if you go back far enough, the ancestors of native Americans are the ancestors of the Chinese as well (in so much as we can even define Chinese as something biological rather than cultural)

What I feel sometimes that can be harmful to such discussions is how many forummers think about humans as having races/subraces. The genetic variation between 'races' are less than 7% of the total genetic variation found among humans. In fact the greatest genetic variation is found among individuals. And this total genetic variation among humans is so slight that no biologist would classifly them as a seperate race/subrace.

In response to the original topic what exactly is the "original chinese genotype"? If we can't even define it how can we know if we 'lost' it? Chinese has for the large part of its history being defined by its culture, I must say any attempt to paint Chinese (or Han if you prefer) as a 'race' is ultimately self-defeating.

hehe..

rasism against rasism..

what a Nightmare..



haha.. really? why? what of genes are loosed? is it realy important?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html

Hey!! it draws M175 (O*) entered China from Southeast Asia, and M122 (O3) from Southwest China!!
The letters there means mtDNA, where the Y-genes are in numbers, to avoid confusion.

Vanguard,

My annoyance lies with you saying northern native-Americans have "weaker Mongolid features" and are thus more "progressive". And also with your racist comment against aztecs.

that is a laughable notion, stop twisting my words. progressiveness has nothing to do with race, any race is capable of developing progressiveness. progressive does not mean superior traits, it has more to do with particular features of the face (long headedness, strong chin, bony cheeks, high forehead, etc) .

Sorry, but I think "Vader" should be banned from this forum, or at least given a serious warning for his ridiculous post about "Japan".

The term "progressive" was popularised (or perhaps invented) by white supremacists to describe Caucasoid facial features.

And you clearly do believe that progressiveness means superior traits, given your comment about the Aztecs compared to northern Amerinds.

care. superior is a very subjective term. in biology progressive features do not confer "superiority", (or higher reproductive success) progressiveness describes a set of traits that helps an individual survive better in a particular inferiority. another set of features, paedemorphism, confers "superiority" in another, different environment.

Vader's posts have been dealt with, and I've restricted him from posting. Hopefully, an admin will finish the job. Now, what exactly was the point of that? :B

If that's what you meant, fine. But It's not the impression I got from reading your earlier post.

lets see... i'm trying to tally up all the people who founded Chinese civilization instead of Chinese

we have

1. Whites
2. Blacks
3. Koreans and/or Mighty Dong Yi confederation
4. Miao-Hmong
5. Native Americans

ok folks, get a life

Two things:

1. "because if you look at the census figures of north China, it never exceeded more than 10-20 million people until the late 19th century" - that's certainly not true. In fact as early as the Western Han Dynasty, there were over 50 million people in China, most of which were in the north.

2. "you will see that it has been mired in countless wars, invasions, and famine, some of which, reduced the population of the north China plain by as much as 1/2 to 3/4" - that's the amount of reduction in the number of people registered on the official population censors, it does not mean that many people were killed. Just because someone is not on the official population censor does not automatically mean he/she is killed. During times of war/disunity/chaos the official population censors tend to be very inaccurate and do not actually reflect the real size of the population. To take an accurate population censor/registry requires an unified and stable government and bureaucratic system, which China didn't have during chaotic periods.

Oho... the closest is number 4, the farthest number 2. (by lineages)

Did they not resist Xianbei domination?? [oh - Ran Min the Hitler of East Asia ]

one of loosed genes?

http://www.s8int.com/page26.html

The Tocharians, who were Buddhists, are thought to have built and ruled a string of cities along the central Asian stretch of the Silk Road. Study of Tocharian manuscripts has revealed that they used a language closely related to Celtic and Germanic tongues; their paintings reveal them to have been a fair-haired, blue-eyed people.

These distinctive characteristics have caused many scholars to link them with the mummy people, who predated them.

Here's where the story gets political. The Uighur majority in Xinjiang now chafes under Chinese rule. There were Uighur uprisings in 1990 and '97, which were summarily crushed by the Chinese Army. To strengthen its hand in the region, the Chinese government has flooded Xinjiang with some 6 million ethnic Han Chinese.

Though the region contains one-third of China's oil reserves, 95 percent of the Uighur population lives in poverty. The Uighurs protest that China has polluted their homeland with industrial toxics and radiation (this is where China couducts its nuclear tests).

China has responded harshly to the dissent. Amnesty International reports that "a pattern of human rights violations has emerged in Xinjiang since 1989."

China supports it claim to Xinjiang with a myth promulgated since Mao took control of the region in the '40s: that China developed in isolation and that this area has always been part of China -- even though the name Xinjiang means "new territory."

Uighurs have seized upon the mummy pople as proof that their homeland is historically distinct from China. When Davis-Kimball went to Xinjiang she stepped into what is lterally a battle over the area's history, with a mummies at the center.

"They were Caucasoid," David-Kimball says. "This is a no-no for Beijing."

Such a "no-no" that the government has long been loath to allow foreign researchers into the region. Though the mummies were discovered at the beginning of this century, it has been hard to get access to them for the past few decades. More than 30 camera crews had applied to document the story of the mummies and were rejeced before the Chinese government gave the go-ahead to a joint project of "Nova" and England's Channel 4.

Throughout their stay, the team of Davis-Kimball, China historian Victor Mair and forensic anthropologist Charlotte Roberts were closely monitored by Chinese officials. The officials even went so far as to plan an elaborate hoax to mislead them, Davis-Kimball says.

On a grave dig supervised by government chaperones, the team was led to an obviously disturbed tomb that comtained a mummy that had been neatly decapitated. Davis-Kimball and the others concluded that the government had cut the mummy's head off to prevent the team from capturing a Caucasian face on film.

"They had taken the head off so that we would not photograph the Indo- European head, "Davis-Kimball says.

The team had seen the same mummy, intact, along with several others in the back room of a small local museum a short time before the sham excavation.

Inn the Nova program -- entitled "Mysterious Mummies of China" -- Mair says he noticed fungal growth on the corpse that indicated the body had been recently moved. (The office of the Chineses Consulate did not respond to requests for a response to these charges.)

The team also had trouble getting into some of the regional museums, where many of the hundreds of mummies that have been unearthed are stored. Often, Chinese officials would give them permission to visit, only to change their minds soon after. "We were on this yo-yo all the time," Davis-Kimball says. "We never knew what was going to happen next."

So Davis-Kimball and colleagues resorted to a little Indiana Jones-style subterfuge of their own. With the help of a sympathetic local scholar, they snuck into one key museum at midnight, avoiding the scrutiny of wary Chinese officials.

"I kept thinking, how terrible that we had to stay up all night just to photograph something that scientists should be able to study," she says.

Davis-Kimall has made her mark in the field of archaeology with a bold, no-nonsense approach. A silver-haired woman who's comfortable in jeans and a sweatshirt (but would rather not discuss her age), she entered the scholarly world late in life, after raising six children and working as a nurse and a convalescent-hospital administrator.

......Since the 1960s the concept of cultural diffusion has been downplayed as an explanation for similarities shared by distantly separated societies. The politically correct philosophy has been that far-flung societies must have evolved independent of one another.

Finds such as the Takla Makan mummies are now forcing a reexamination of diffusionism. Archaeologists have discovered evidence that whelled wagons were first brought to China from the West thousands of years ago. Among the colorful woven clothing found in the mummies' graves are hats identical to ancient hats found in Austria and southern China.

The "Nova" program speculates that the mummy people originated in Eastern Europe, near the Black Sea. This conclusion is based partly on some striking petroglyphs found on a massive 500-foot-tall rock outcropping. The carvings - which seem to show a fertility dance, a crucial concern for ancient people with infant mortality rates of 33 percent or higher - are distinctive for their triangular torsos and 90-degree arm positions.

The only other place where similar images have been found - by Davis-Kimball and other shcolars - is in Moldova, a region between Romania and Ukraine, near the Black Sea.

Ancient artworks also helped strengthen the link between the mummy people and the later Tocharians. At the top of a sheer cliff, deep in a complex of caves filled with Tocharian script, Mair found ancient paintings of fair-haired, blue-eyed people that closely resemble the mummies.

Altogether, the findings from the expedition indicate that what's now western China was in fact occupied by non-ethnically Chinese people well before theh Silk Road was established, and that those people later built cities along the trade route - cities that fostered much of the important cultural exchange between East and West.

I think, it's really pointless to define the chinese people by blood group or genotype. We have seen so many senseless threads that comes to nothing when it comes to talk about chinese blood. I laugh at so many threads claiming the non-chinese founded the chinese civilization (blacks, native american, korean, whites ...).

It might be interesting to note the genetics or the roots to where you originate from, if you're a chinese, or whether you have bloods of Xianbei, Khitan, Turks or Mongols or any non-han blood. But it certainly doesn't do any constructive good to the discussion of the history of chinese people.

The 'definition' of chinese people cannot be defined by blood. The people that lived in China are so thoroughly mixed throughout the history, followed by so many conquest by other invaders, that it's not possible to trace 'who exactly founded chinese civilization'.

I'm of the argument that the chinese are defined by cultural identity or nationality. Even as I'm a Taiwanese of Minnan origin, there has been claimed that 2000 years ago, I'm not a 'chinese', probably related to Min-Yue people. But today, if I were to group myself, I would group myself as a han-chinese, partly because I associate my ethnic culture with han.

From the history of chinese people, from yellow river civilization, it was firstly the Huaxia people, then followed by han-chinese, 5 "hu" people (Xianbei), Turks, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongols, Manchu etc...China is just exactly like Europe with 'different mix of people', but with a common nationality called "chinese" and a country called "China".

The looks of chinese also vary differently according to different parts of China, if you do travel and see.
In the north, the han-chinese are bulkier and taller (faces are more squarish), whereas the southern han-chinese are generally shorter. In the west, the Uighur-chinese are more of central-asian looks (Eurasian). There are even minority groups such as Russian-chinese that look exactly like whites.

China is a multi-ethnic and cultural country, not a 'mono-ethnicity' country.

Don't forget the Semetic people (lost tribe of Israel hehehe). Now if we just add Austronesians to the list......

Also, most importantly, last but not least......

the mighty MARTIANS.

The Baiyue too. :B

So? What's the point? What's now the United States was occupied by the native Americans long before the founding of the United States. Today the United States consists of 49 continental states and Hawaii.

whats your point?

I think Miao-Hmong intersects with Baiyue (the relationship is like Koreans to Mighty Dong Yi confederation)
more: Egyptian ("Hamitic") People
http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php...dpost&p=4785514

Anyway the founders of Chinese civilization were "Asians" (remember, in the Asian History section, we have "All Asians the same??" )
so modern Chinese have not lost their original type, and "Whites", "Blacks", "Semitic/Israeli", "Egyptian" as founder of Chinese should never be an idea

re: kediren's posted article, it is interesting behavior if true on the part of the communist government. of course, whether or not they are duplicitous and however foolish they may be, this "reporter" or whoever by his tone is most likely no god of objectivity either

Too many dorks with agendas due to some kind of angst growing up like to hate against china for no good reason. i think it is because of their own mediocrity and failures

The Tarim Mummies are actually old news, and Mair's book states that he had full access to the mummies kept in the Urumqi Museum. He even worked with Chinese experts studying the mummies. The Xinjiang Uyghurs are unlikely to identify themselves with these ancient inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, because their own roots lie in Mongolia.

Chinese academics actually readily acknowledge the ancient presence of the Tocharians in the Tarim Basin and Gansu Corridor. They have their own ancient records of the Yuezhi.

Of course, I see no reason for it to be any other way. Chinese have long known of barbarian peoples. This kind of sensationalism is merely inferior dorks seizing upon the racist model to explain the world and make themselves feel better

make themselves ?

who mean you?

Have you lost the ability to construct a sentence. What did you mean to ask?

::EDIT:: With that kind of avatar and that kind of sig, you must be a nice person. I know full well what you meant to ask, but, let's be honest, the meek shall not inherit the world and the only niceness in my heart is the niceness I will feel when I conquer it

SO NO I mean the racist inferior dorks who will bow before my transcendant greatness

Fool.