Talk:Craniofacial anthropometry

Negroids?

Why is there a Caucasoid race article, a Mongoloid race article, but no real Negroid article? This is a major oversight and a minor outrage. Was this a conscious decision, or is simply because no one has gotten around to writing such an article.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back 12:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I too find it interesting that no one has ever gotten around to making a negroid article. It's like you can read up on the caucasoids and mongoloids, but if you want to read up on the negroids, someone has seen fit to just "leave them out" of history on wikipedia JayKeaton 09:39, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Further discussion is located here.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back 09:57, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Why do we have two articles?

Why do we have two articles about cranofacial anthropology? This seems like a POV fork to me. I see no real reason to have two articles for what is, essentially a limited subject of little importance. Any reason for these two articles to exist? The Races of Craniofacial Anthropology article is dreadful, badly written with no consistency and full of POV arguments. Alun 06:51, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Sources

An addition I recently made to the article was deleted with the following argument:

the source is not a scholarly source, and besides, it does not say anything about the supposed effect the U.S. border on the results of craniofacial anthropometry

Well, this is not true. The sources are scholars, as can be checked here.

As for "the supposed effect the U.S. border", that's a straw man. I never wrote anything of the sort. FilipeS 21:10, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

A scholarly source is not a website that interviews a couple scholars. A scholarly source is a text written by scholars, reviewed by scholars, edited by scholars, and published and read by scholars. That wasn't the reason I deleted your post, however. The real reason was that it made no sense. You contradicted the argument of the entire article, yet you did not even attempt to explain what you meant. I figured at first that you were trying to say that because some countries have a more homogenous population, an analysis of their skulls would not reveal the precise racial mixture of the people. This at least made some kind of sense, so I tried to reword your post that way. But then you reverted to your previous, incomprehensible comment, and you added a link to pgs.org, apparently the extent of your research on the subject. But the source did not support the claim you were making, and anyway, it was just a couple "experts on race" sitting on a couch babbling. Their sentences weren't even correct grammatically. I don't mean to suggest they aren't scholars, only that this is not a scholarly source, and at any rate, I do not see the connection between their comments and yours. They were only making some general criticisms of the concept of race in general, whereas you were apparently claiming that craniofacial anthropometry works in the United States but doesn't work outside of it. Dr. Goodman was actually claiming that it didn't work inside the United States. If you are trying to make a general criticism of the science, I would recommend you place it under "Challenges," and we can stop reverting each other. Peace, Ocanter 21:41, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure I have the patience to wade through this mess right now. I have a life, and some people seem to be sooooooo desperate to believe in the race myth... Still, I can't resist correcting some nonsense you wrote:

• Spare me your condescendance. The sentence I added was perfectly clear, as were the ones of the scholars I cited. I think you just didn't like what they said.
• "I figured at first that you were trying to say that because some countries have a more homogenous population, an analysis of their skulls would not reveal the precise racial mixture of the people." More or less that, yes. To be more "precise", the term "precise racial mixture" is inaccurate, because there are no such thing as "precise" races. The more-or-less strict racial divide which exists in the U.S. is due to social reasons, not biological ones.
• The page I linked to also contained remarks which you chose to ignore, about how the classification that American forensic anthropologists pretend describes race would likely fail in, say, Germany. (Yes, there are black people in Germany.)

FilipeS 13:34, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with everything you just said, except the conclusion. It is true that a North African immigrant in Germany might be called "black" because his skin is darker than that of the native Germans, and that the West African Negroes were called "black" in America because their skin was darker than that of the Europeans or the American Indians, and that these two individuals might nonetheless have very different genetic or racial backgrounds and different skull features. Do we disagree on anything so far? All we have said so far is that many people who are not closely related genetically have a similar skin color. The same could be said of light-skinned Polynesian or American Indian races ("populations," if you prefer) who are probably not related at all to Europeans. But I think where we disagree is only that whereas you say, "The term black (or white) doesn't always describe a close genetic connection; therefore there is no such thing as race," I merely say, "The term black (or white) doesn't always describe a close genetic connection; therefore the term is imprecise."

The racial divide is stricter some places in the U.S. than others. I live in California, and the population here is pretty mixed. Everybody's just kind of brown. Most people with any detectable Negro ancestry claim "black," and other people mostly view them that way, too. Generally if anyone can claim any race other than "white," he does so. This does not mean to me that there are not real genetic relationships among individuals. It means we are not talking about these relationships in a precise, meaningful way. I believe this is more due to censorship than anything else, but I do have a life to attend to as well, so . . . Ocanter 17:18, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

You are speaking about genetics, but this article is not about genetics. It's about craniofacial anthropometry — guessing a person's race from their bare skull. This technique works well in the U.S. because it was tailored and fine-tuned specifically for the demographic characteristics of the American population, which has a rather peculiar composition, globally speaking. What the sources I gave explain is that the same techniques would not produce reliable results if they were applied in other societies, even though those societies contain people which the average American would not hesitate to classify as "white" or "black" in most cases. So, even if race is an objective reality, craniofacial anthropometry doesn't measure it. It only measures something which correlates well with race, in a particular human population. FilipeS 23:37, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Racial reality

Racialreality shouldn't be cited! It's operated by racists/white nationalists!66.65.77.88 04:58, 2 March 2007 (UTC)Cwatson

I'm at a loss. Where is Racial Reality cited in the article? FilipeS 19:21, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I removed it. There was a sentence that stated Ethiopians have caucasoid skulls because "they are 40 percent middle eastern- descended" (a quote from racialreality, an ascientific white nationalist site.66.65.77.88 01:27, 4 March 2007 (UTC)cwatson

Although Racial Reality is definitely a website with an agenda, the quote itself may have come from one of the studies they reference. You should check the ultimate source of the quote. FilipeS 22:45, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

The only source I've read that posits this ridiculous crap also acknowledges that shared DNA also and likely could be attributed to the fact that Blacks from the African Horn formed the precursor or parent populations that migrated out of Africa and eventually mutated/branched off into that cluster of humanity known as "Caucasians" -- that they are, in effect, not Caucasoid, but Blacks who are proto-Caucasoid. deeceevoice (talk) 14:38, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

PC crap

This sentence (and the whole paragraph as well) is a tendentious PC crap that should be removed. It has zero significance for the topic.

"Classification by craniofacial anthropometry does not necessarily coincide with genetic ancestry or social self-identification. For example, about one-third of so-called "White" Americans have detectable African DNA markers." Of course, the DNA admixture is only "detectable", because it makes up a few percent that can have no influence on the phenotype.

'And about five percent of so-called "Black" Americans have no detectable "Negroid" traits at all, neither craniofacial nor in their DNA.' Another "pearl" of this article, based on an obsolete study from the pre-clustering era. For modern clustering studies, see e.g. http://www.springerlink.com/content/bh077258613343q6/ 82.100.61.114 (talk) 15:41, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Those are facts. What is tendentious crap is to wish to censor them. FilipeS (talk) 17:27, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

But you and your Marxist-Leninist colleagues obviously have no problem with the censorship of the newest clustering studies? Alas, you must now rely only on obsolete, outdated crap digged in the internet from sources going to the first half of 90's or even deeper! 89.235.19.204 (talk) 10:35, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Why not merge this article to better-sourced articles?

The sources currently cited in this article are not the most recent or most reliable on the subject, and the subject is just a minor part of subjects already covered by other Wikipedia articles? Why not just merge the good parts of this article into one of the more comprehensive articles? -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 23:36, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Which comprehensive articles do you have in mind? Wdford (talk) 06:40, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Pleistocene races

There were no Homo sapiens before the Pleistocene. There is something wrong with the maps. Unsourced, et least. Pomimo (talk) 11:14, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Er..

Not sure what this sentence is trying to say.

"Although the categorization of a skull is clearly given arbitrary parameters, it will not locate the owners geographic ancestry concretely all the time. "

Rich Farmbrough, 20:41, 29 November 2010 (UTC).

The History section and description of Caucasoids and Negroids

I believe certain parts of the History section are incorrect. This is not true: "Caucasoids were characterized by a doliocephalic shape" and "Negroids were characterized by a mesocephalic head shape." A number of Central Asian, Caucasion ethnic groups are Broad-Headed. Caucasians can in-fact, have either Doliocephalic, Mesocaphalic or Bracheocephalic skulls and the same holds true for the Negroids. There are also no citations given, and the reference at the end of the paragraph also proves that information to be incorrect. This is what it has to say on the Caucasion race: "The skull presents all varieties of forms, from extreme dolichocephaly to extreme brachycephaly."

So that particular part of the paragraph should be edited out, or paragraph should be reverted into an earlier version. Gregjackson112 (talk) 06:40, 26 January 2011 (UTC)