I’ve always been perplexed by the origin of the Australo-Melanesian or Australoid race. The official story — according to the mainstream geneticists of Harvard University & co — is that they originated via the same ‘Out of Africa’ expansion as all other Eurasian peoples (namely Caucasoids and East Asians) and that they are merely one part of the wider ‘East Eurasian’ branch, alongside East Asians. For reference: ‘West Eurasian’ is synonymous with ‘Caucasoid.’
An image from David Reich’s book:
The big problem with this theory is that it doesn’t pass a simple visual inspection. It completely violates basic common sense. Phenotypically, Australoids are as different from East Asians as they are from Europeans. Physically, they are far closer to Sub-Saharan Africans, to the point that they could easily be mistaken as Africans by the untrained eye. Although there is significant phenotypic variation among West Eurasians in terms of skin/hair/eye pigmentation, when looking at facial structure, Europeans and Middle Easterners obviously belong to the same broader racial category (or subspecies). The same cannot be said of East Asians and Australo-Melanesians. If forced to divide humanity into two hypothetical racial groups — Eurasians and Sub-Saharan Africans — based on phenotype alone, no sane person would group Australoids with the hypothetical Eurasian race.
The principal component analysis below also shows that Australoids (represented by Papuans) are clearly distinct from Europeans and East Asians.
For some time, my personal theory has been that, insofar as the Out of Africa (‘OoA’) model is accurate, Australo-Melanesians must have originated from a separate OoA dispersal to all other Eurasian peoples. This population must have been more closely related to Sub-Saharan Africans and probably phenotypically distinct from the ‘Eurasian’ (Caucasoid/Mongoloid) OoA population. The Australoid OoA migration may even have taken place via a completely separate route to that of Eurasians. Perhaps the Eurasian OoA population originated in North Africa and migrated through Egypt into Eurasia, while the Australoid OoA population originated in Central Africa and migrated via East Africa into the Arabian Gulf Peninsula.
This, to me, seems like a far more logical conclusion than Australoids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids emerging simultaneously as one indistinct population that supposedly resembled Sub-Saharan Africans, but somehow only the Australoids maintained the original Sub-Saharan-African-like phenotype of this undifferentiated ‘Out of Africa’ population.
At least the divergent evolution of West Eurasian and East Asian phenotypes makes sense: One of the East Asians’ major ancestral populations inhabited the Siberian polar regions before migrating south and dispersing throughout East Asia. Intermixing with its native inhabitants. East Asians’ epicanthic eye folds are a form of borealization that evolved in response to snow-blindness. They are the biological equivalent to Siberian snow goggles.
The Ainu peoples, who inhabited Japan before they were displaced by Yayoi migrants from mainland East Asia, sometimes appear to be more closely related to Europeans than East Asians. They aren’t but people could easily be fooled into thinking so as many European anthropologists were in the past. Could they represent an early, non-borealized East Eurasian phenotype that was once common throughout East Asia?
I’m not alone in my skepticism of the standard OoA model. Nobody outside of the West dogmatically believes in the “Single Dispersion Out of Africa” theory. It is an unchallengeable founding myth of the postwar globalist doctrine: “We are all Africans. We all bleed red. One race, the human race.”
The Multiregional Hypothesis is popular in East Asia due to Early Modern Human fossils such as Liujiang man, who had similar ‘Mongoloid’ facial features to modern East Asians. Despite predating the proposed Out of Africa migration by up to 100,000 years. Naturally, Western globalists argue that this theory is “rooted in Chinese nationalism and racial chauvinism.” However, even some Western scientists have suggested that Eurasia was populated “from multiple Homo sapiens source populations that had entered Arabia, South Asia, and the Levant prior to and soon after the onset of the Last Interglacial [period].” This seems to be the most logical scenario, in my opinion. ‘Multiple Homo sapiens source populations’ is key — not Homo sapiens + Neanderthals + Denisovans etc., but multiple Homo sapiens populations alongside other human species.
Below are images from ‘On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives,’ pub. Science Journal (2017). The study doesn’t support my theory but the images are still helpful.
So, what do current studies say? Well, obviously they all support the single Out of Africa origin theory because it’s the pseudo-religious doctrine of Postwar World Order.
A 2017 study published in Nature found that humans had arrived on the Australian continent of Sahul by ~65,000 years ago. For reference, Early Modern Humans first arrived in Europe 45,000 years ago. They were more closely related to modern East Asians and soon went extinct. They were replaced by Early Modern Humans related to modern Europeans, who arrived on the continent around 40,000 BC.
The 2017 study also noted that Australoid habitation of South Asia and Sahul overlapped with various archaic hominins, namely Neanderthals and Denisovans, and “super-archaic” hominins, such as Homo floresiensis and Homo erectus. A 2021 study found that Australoids carry significant ancestry from Denisovans (up to 6%), in addition to traces of ancestry from super-archaic hominins.
(Below) Australoid Negrito population Ayta Magbukon has the highest proportion of Denisovan ancestry, despite having 10-30% East Asian ancestry.
A 2011 study suggested that Australoids had split from the Eurasian OoA lineage up to 75,000 years ago. While a 2016 study claimed that this split occurred around 58,000 years ago. This 2021 preprint by the Max Planck Institute & co suggests that Australoids descend from two lineages: One related to ancient East Eurasians dubbed ‘Basal-East Asian’ (which originated in mainland Southeast Asia ~50,000 years ago and is represented by the ~40,000-year-old Tianyuan Man) and another dubbed ‘South Eurasian,’ which is theorized to have split from Eurasians around 58,000 years ago.
“it is reasonable to describe Papuans as either an almost even mixture between East Asians and a lineage basal to West and East Asians […] or as a sister lineage of East Asians”
The paper was titled ‘Genetics and material culture support repeated expansions into Paleolithic Eurasia from a population hub out of Africa.’ So, at least they’re recognizing that OoA took place via multiple migration events, and at least they acknowledge that Australoids stem from a distinct early OoA lineage. However, they still claim that Australoids and Eurasians belonged to one undifferentiated population, which I find extremely hard to believe.
Am I completely wrong? Maybe. Human phenotypes can change a lot in 20,000 years under the correct selection pressures. Perhaps the tropical/desert climates of South Asia and Sahul somehow preserved Australoids’ African-like phenotype, while Eurasians evolved Caucasoid/Mongoloid phenotypes? It all just seems a little too coincidental and a little too politically convenient.
These are the same geneticists that have spent the last half-decade claiming that Europeans descend from “Middle Eastern migrants” (Anatolian Farmers of the Aegean who were genetically most similar to modern Sardinians and Southern Europeans) and “Asian invaders” (Caucasoid white-skinned Indo-Europeans from Eastern Europe). They also baselessly claimed that Western European Hunter-Gatherers, like Villabruna Man, was “Middle Eastern migrants” and let’s not forget that they have propagated the insane lie that Western Hunter-Gatherers had “black skin pigmentation, like Sub-Saharan Africans.”
What do you think? Are they telling the full story?
This post is really well done and very nice. Unfortunately, I can't quite understand every word, but I understand that Papuans are a breed with a nice mix of origins.
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