[bloppe]

There is far more human genetic diversity within Africa then there is in the rest of the world combined.

Also, your notion that certain people are inherently tied to certain places is only true if you accept arbitrary cutoffs for arrival time. The Lakota migrated from the Great lakes to the western planes in the 1700s, but it's hard to imagine them without their horses (which came from the old world) and bison (which they never would have hunted in ~Michigan). More time has passed since the arrival of the Spanish in Tenochtitlan, than between the arrival of the Aztecs (who probably migrated there from ~Arizona) and the Spanish. And of course, All the Native Americans descended from tribes that crossed the Bering straight from Russia, and every human's ancestors lived exclusively in Africa for a very long time. Anglo Saxons, Gaels, Norse, etc were constantly on the move within Europe before any of them crossed the Atlantic. Israelites displaced Canaanites before being displaced by Romans, then Arabs, then "coming back" after WW2. At any point in time, in any location on earth, the ethnic groups considered "native" almost certainly descended from people who were not considered native within at most a couple hundred years. Many white people can trace over 2 hundred years of ancestry in the new world. To say that's not enough to qualify as "native" is to have an incoherent conception of nativeness.

English doesn't help. I realize I myself used the term "Native American" while trying to argue that the term is out of date, but our language just was never equipped to describe these kinds of long term, highly chaotic processes.

[carlosjobim]

This is exactly the kind of interesting and wonderful discussions which people loose out on when they claim that the entire world is a melting pot and no ethnicities exist etc etc. Which you still do, even though you have good knowledge of anthropology.

There is nothing arbitrary about making cutoffs. It is difficult and undefined and subject to splendid complexity. After all its people we're dealing with here, so of course it is complex. But there are obvious external differences and similarities between people, and denying this takes a level of warping one's mind which would permanently damage the mind. For no benefit to anybody. There's also history, archeological evidence and genetic evidence.

What I notice in this discussion is people demanding exact limits everywhere, and throwing everything away when there isn't any. But there are some very exact limits, and the discovery of the New World is one of those. The people who were there before were more related to each other than they were to the arrivals.

> Many white people can trace over 2 hundred years of ancestry in the new world. To say that's not enough to qualify as "native" is to have an incoherent conception of nativeness.

"Native" isn't any badge of honour. Saying somebody is native to the land while the other is not doesn't mean anything to their qualities.

With the research into people's heritage and history, the goal is to go as far as you can before the mists of time become too thick. Beyond that, there's not much we can do but speculate blindly.

> There is far more human genetic diversity within Africa then there is in the rest of the world combined.

I've heard this before, but it just doesn't match up with what we can see and experience in physical reality. So they've measured in the wrong way quite frankly. The difference between people (everybody in the world) is in their genes, but you can probably not measure just quantitively. Especially since humans share an astonishing amount of DNA with beasts and with plants.

I can paint a house red and a house blue, and then a scientist will say that they are more similar in colour to each other than the red house is to a rose, because he just measures the chemicals in the paint.

Or, to loop back to the core of this conversation. There is no exact definition and clear boundary as to what is a boat and what is not a boat. There is no exact limit possible to define between a person being beautiful or not, but you can still point out a lot of measurements of all kinds, and most importantly everybody knows it when they see and experience it.