I lean your way of course, it’s not totally arbitrary, but where we draw a line tends to be a bit arbitrary.
Yes? If that's how we see it for other groups animals, cultures, peoples, neandertals then why not for HNdrathals or so?
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-a...
What makes a "race" is basically just total nonsense. Arguably there should be many "races" in Africa given the genetic diversity.
> We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races.
We're also all mixed-species.
[1] https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscien...
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out. USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Principal_component_...
Here in Belgium my grandma was first to go work 2 municipalities away. Her parents were farmers. She cried when she came back and swore she would not go back the next day. Such a distant like was traveling to the end of the world to her i guess. Later they traveled to the south of france by bus and such but they never went beyond a neighbouring country. Still it's a thing her parents could only have dreamed of.
I think people have a bias by which they forget the massive technological advancements of recent years on one hand. And see the stories of travelers of the distant past on the norm on the other hand rather than things written about because they were so rare and interesting.
Most people stayed put untill you could pinpoint their location based on their genome and it influenced who you can get donor organs from. They repeatedly developed local cultures, languages and dialects in doing so.
>But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Those are not ethnic groups. The Flemish, the Vilamovians, the Germans, the Basques, the irish are examples of ethnic groups.
Idk if it's intentional but there seems to be this progressive shift/push that pushed nation to mean state and now makes it so some start using ethnicity instead of racial categorisation.
Races has nothing to do with any of that - Neanderthals themselves seems to had different looks, depending on region they were living and had contacts with other humans - and we all were the same species.
China's 1.0ish fertility rate means that they will be gone in 14 generations or so. India's not that far behind them. It's strange hearing people talk about the "erasure of races"... a meme that goes back 70 or more years at this point, when the only race that will be erased is the human race.
When fertility rates are 1.0, every subsequent human generation is half the size of the previous. Rapid population will become impossible to ignore in just a few decades. Human extinction looms.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.