AHC/WI: Convergent Evolution of Human families

Albert.Nik

Banned
With a limit of POD not behind Humans first evolving in Ethiopian highlands,have two Human groups or ethnicities evolving to be exactly identical in appearence and language/language families. You are at liberty to choose which Ethnicity you want. But the result is as mentioned. It could most probably happen through particular migration patterns of early Humans or Hominids engineered.
Example is like this: Proto-Indo-Europeans evolved first in the Caucasus. You can find ways how a migration of early Humans can result in Proto-Indo-Europeans evolving in the Americas or New Zealand as well. Just an example. You can choose how you want to get this.
 
Probably ASB, since there's such a huge diversity amongst humans that black skinned peoples do not look alike (compare South Africans to West Africans to Australian Aboriginals) and light skinned people likewise don't look alike (compare Europeans to East Asians). As for linguistics, that's even more ridiculous, the depth of time would be so ancient that it would be impossible to prove the languages were related to each other. Sure, Nostratic and other hypotheses exist and there's likely some element of truth to them but they aren't possible to prove.
 
Probably ASB, since there's such a huge diversity amongst humans that black skinned peoples do not look alike (compare South Africans to West Africans to Australian Aboriginals) and light skinned people likewise don't look alike (compare Europeans to East Asians). As for linguistics, that's even more ridiculous, the depth of time would be so ancient that it would be impossible to prove the languages were related to each other. Sure, Nostratic and other hypotheses exist and there's likely some element of truth to them but they aren't possible to prove.
Indeed. Skin colour would be the easy part since it's a function of diet and proportion of uv light but other feature variables that people like to pick have a less easy to determine "cause". Though since most features are spread across all people then a little ASB tweaking might "justify" particular concentrations.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
Probably ASB, since there's such a huge diversity amongst humans that black skinned peoples do not look alike (compare South Africans to West Africans to Australian Aboriginals) and light skinned people likewise don't look alike (compare Europeans to East Asians). As for linguistics, that's even more ridiculous, the depth of time would be so ancient that it would be impossible to prove the languages were related to each other. Sure, Nostratic and other hypotheses exist and there's likely some element of truth to them but they aren't possible to prove.
The comparisons you made are people who evolved in totally different conditions but.
Take the example of White people who followed an evolution pattern and first evolved around the black sea,what if that was repeated in a region with similar climate and Geography due to migrations being different? Let's talk about linguistics next.
 
So with the linguistics (I don't want to touch the ethnic stuff), you want something like English-Mbabaram dog, just on the scale of an entire language?

Yeah, that's ASB-level improbable. There are far too many linguistic features, and areal influences are far too complex, to allow languages to converge in that way.
 
The comparisons you made are people who evolved in totally different conditions but.
Take the example of White people who followed an evolution pattern and first evolved around the black sea,what if that was repeated in a region with similar climate and Geography due to migrations being different? Let's talk about linguistics next.

South Africa and Australia are similar environments, yet it's highly unlikely in any TL, even one where native South Africans (the first major migration of humans) died out, that South Africans resemble Aboriginal Australians. Although the environment is similar, there's far too much isolation to ever make a similar group evolve. While TTL's South Africans might look more like TTL's Australian Aboriginals, there's too many physical features they'd need to evolve in isolation to look the same, at least in the same way that an Italian and a Swede can both be called "white/European/Caucasoid".

Linguistics is even more ridiculous, since it's impossible to prove the relation of all Australian Aboriginal languages to each other, and even the Pama-Nyungan family, the majority of Aboriginal languages, has a depth of time at least as old as Proto-Indo-European and some linguists consider it invalid. That's in Australia alone. Tasmanian languages appear very unique in their own right, and several small distinct language families exist in northern Australia. That's one continent alone, one which appears to have had rather few influences from outside IOTL. I'd wager that someone TTL would have just as much luck putting TTL's equivalent of the Khoe languages in the same family as the Australian languages as someone IOTL would have comparing the Khoe languages to the Pama-Nyungan languages. It would be impossible to prove.
 
Taking the OP and the general ideas, if we're talking about convergent evolution of appearance, my guess is that evolution of human populations has probably had a lot of chance and contingency in it, and there's been lots of extinction of different human groups and probably lots of re-evolution of the same physical appearance. E.g. the Jomon and Ainu descendants are argued to share some physical characteristics (face shape, hair, etc.) with West Eurasian peoples that most East Asian people don't, even though we know they had no special relatedness between Western and Jomon at all).

If we were able to re-run Out of Africa prehistory multiple times, I wouldn't be totally surprised if we were at a medium level of differentiation in appearance, and there were outlier possible worlds with far more or less differentiation in appearance.

So it's not like it's totally ASB that in an ATL the founding groups moving into the Americas could be otherwise like in our world but just happen to look more like Europeans today and evolve to look closer to them as well.

But it seems like it's a possibility of limited interest to discuss? It's just appearance and mostly superficial. Maybe there would be less likely to be racism when the groups re-encounter each other (or there might not be at all, given how people can have strong racist ideas over small differences), but other than that.

If we're talking culturally about Indo-Europeans, and assuming the steppe hypothesis, then we'd probably need the survival of animals in the Americas that would allow for a pastoral economy to develop (possibly just the horse) or maybe just different domestication events on the animals that were there. But we've talked about that sort of thing already ready in other threads about that already!

As others discuss, there's a limit to this sort of thing; in some possible alt-world where people who looked kind of more like Europeans lived in the Americas, and developed a pastoral economy kind of more like is thought to exist for proto-Indo Europeans, and had a language that just happened to be kind of closer to IE, they still wouldn't actually be possible ever to be replicas of them.
 
Convergent evolution? IMO, you can't do it with two varieties of hominin without making them both (effectively) H.sap. We're not sufficiently different (are we?).

For this to work, you'd have to have the "second species" be evolved from cats, or something, yet still resemble us.

And brother, that's ASB. Fascinating, but ASB.
 
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