More on Paleoanthropology and Chinese nationalism…
A link from reader Scott Loar relating to a previous post on paleoanthropology, race, and Chinese nationalism: This month’s issue of Scientific American contains an article by Gary Stix on DNA research which bolsters the ‘out of Africa’ theory of human evolution.
Where’s the China connection? Well, as I have blogged about before, the idea that the Chinese may have emerged from someplace else–especially when that someplace else is Africa–and then migrated to China is a hard sell here, even among academic specialists.
Thanks to Scott for the link. For those (with JSTOR access) interested in the background to this debate, be sure to check out Barry Sautman’s article “Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropology in China,” from the February, 2001 edition of the Journal of Asian Studies.
Since Science must serve the Revolution, Paleoanthropology will loose this round in China for sure.
“the idea that the Chinese may have emerged from someplace else–especially when that someplace else is Africa–and then migrated to China is a hard sell here, even among academic specialists. ”
This is such a blank general statement. While there is a strong faction of proponents of multiregional origin of modern humans in China as compare to the West. Equal number of Chinese evoluntionary biologists and geneticist accept the “Out of Africa” Theory.
金力 Jin Liis a principal investigator of The Genographic Project which aims to map historical human migration patterns by collecting and analyzing DNA samples from hundreds of thousands of people from around the world.
Here is the first sentence about Jin Li from the wiki entry:
”
Jin Li (Chinese: 金力, Jin Li) is a Chinese geneticist who led[1] the research that concluded that all East Asians, including the Chinese, originated from Africa, adding support to the recent single-origin hypothesis of which he is considered[2] a leading proponent.
”
While your statement might certainly ring true for Chinese academic environment in 1980s and prior, it’s bit dated now in 2008.
CMD,
I have no doubt there are many Chinese academics who DO subscribe to current theories in human evolutionary development, but here’s the salient point: there are still quite a few who don’t. And that’s among academics, when broadening this discussion to include the rank and file and the state media, the prevailing sentiment would seem to be decidedly against the ‘out of Africa’ theory.
The previous posts on this subject both quoted newspaper articles–from this year—which suggested as much.
(And to be fair, we have school boards in the US and even a couple of university professors trying to throw out the whole idea of evolution, but that’s another kettle of warm fish….)