Some Southeast Asian Types

Following up on our recent post about Mongoloid types, let us look at SE Asians, or more properly Southern Mongoloids.

A classic Lao beauty. Does she look Australoid-Mongoloid? Give it up.

A very beautiful Laotian girl.

Malay types vary considerably, but this is a nice example of a common phenotype.

A classic Malay type, a very beautiful woman. Note the Muslim headscarf.

Common Thai type. Note light skin, common in Thailand. Many Thais have considerable Chinese ancestry.

Thais vary quite a bit in their features, but this is fairly common Thai phenotype. Note the very light skin.

Fascinating people, the Taiwanese aborigines. Probably derived possibly from an ancient Ainuid type base. They often have an almost Caucasoid or Amerindian appearance, which suggests an Ainuid origin.

Taiwanese aborigines, a very interesting type. The woman have probably had breast implants. They look something like Amerindians.

The Hmong say that Hmong women sometimes give birth to babies with blond hair and blue eyes, a legacy perhaps of their origins in the Tarim Basin long ago, the same homeland as the Tocharians and the Tarim Mummies (Tocharian speakers). That area has a long history of Caucasoid-Mongoloid interaction. I thought blond hair and blue eyes were recessive and would never show up in a Mongoloid line but maybe I am wrong.

A Hmong woman with, incredibly enough, a blond baby. When I worked with the Hmong, they told me that blond and blue eyed babies were sometimes born to Hmong women, a legacy of their origin in the Tarim Basin long ago.

These are some very classical looking Vietnamese women. Vietnamese have a strong South Chinese or Cantonese appearance, one of the most Chinese-looking people outside of China proper.

Classic Vietnamese types – young women.

The young Vietnamese woman below has heavy Chinese or Cantonese genetics. Note light skin color. There are many Chinese in Vietnam and many Vietnamese have varying amounts of Chinese genes in them. Nevertheless, many ethnic Vietnamese hate Chinese people, and many Viet Chinese complain of discrimination from the Viets. Many fled after the Communist takeover because they ran businesses in the South.

A Vietnamese woman with heavy Chinese (Cantonese) admixture. There are many Chinese in Vietnam.

Muong, who speak a language very close to Vietnamese, have a very Cantonese appearance. They probably have similar origins with the Vietnamese – a mix of recent Cantonese invaders plus native SE Asian “montagnard” types. The Cantonese invaded about 2,200 years ago.

The Muong, a group in Vietnam that is very closely related to the Viets. Note the strong Cantonese appearance.

Dark skinned Tai girls from northern Vietnam. They speak a Tai language. Related to the Thais of Thailand but not the same group.

The Tai minority of Vietnam. This is not the same group as the Thai of Thailand, but they speak a related language. Groups include Black Tai, Red Tai, etc. They live in the north. Note dark skin.

Palaung, a Mon-Khmer group from Burma, Yunnan and Thailand. Skin is dark. Probably an aboriginal SE Asian group native to the region.

Palaung, a group from southern China and Thailand. Note resemblance to Tai.

The Nung live in Vietnam. This Thai-speaking group has a strong Yunnanese South Chinese appearance. This group is part of Zhuang of Southern China (Yunnan). The Tai peoples came from Fujian and Guangdong long ago.

The Nung, a group from Vietnam. Very strong Southern Chinese (Yunnanese) appearance.

The Bai, a Tibeto-Burman group of Yunnan, may have origins in the north. Note Korean-looking faces and very North Mongoloid appearance.

The Bai, a Tibeto-Burman group from Southern China. Note rounded cheekbones similar to Koreans.

The Yi or Lolo of Yunnan, Vietnam and Thailand, a Tibeto-Burman group. Beautiful women. The language is very close to Burman. Probably genetically related to Tibetans. Origin possibly in far northeastern Tibet.

The Yi or Lolo, a Tibeto-Burman group from Yunnan.

A Tibeto-Burman speaking Akha tribal woman from the north of Thailand. They live in Thailand, Burma, Yunnan and Laos. Origins are apparently in Yunnan. They left around 1650 after a Ming Dynasty invasion. Very closely related to the Lolo-Yi. This group uses opium heavily.

An Akha tribal woman from northern Thailand. Basically a Yunnanese grouping.

Very Malay-appearing Cham Muslims of Cambodia.

Chams, Muslims from Cambodia. Note strong Malay appearance.

More Chams below, these with a more typical SE Asian look.

More Chams. These women have a more typical SE Asian appearance.

Northern and Southern Mongoloids

It is best to split the Mongoloid race into two branches – Northern and Southern Mongoloids.

Northern Mongoloids include the North Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Xibe, Oroquens, Mongolians and various Siberians.

North Mongoloid – South Korean girl.

Southern Mongoloids include a large grouping including many of the peoples of South China – Tibetans, Dai, Burmese, Thai, Hmong, Khmer, Lao, Vietnamese, Malay, Filipinos, and most Indonesians.

Southern Chinese – Northern and Southern Mongoloid mix.

Below is a pure Southern Mongoloid.

Southern Mongoloid – Kinaray-a Filipina.

For comparison purposes, see a Japanese (N. Mongoloid) and Filipino (S. Mongoloid) mix below.

Japanese – Filipina mix. A mixture of N. Mongoloid and S. Mongoloid in this case results in a phenotype that is mostly N. Mongoloid.

There is a lot of controversy on the boards about this issue. Some say that Southeast Asians are not pure Mongoloids – that instead they are Mongoloid-Australoids. Most of this critique comes from Chinese racists. Many of these Chinese are overseas Chinese who live in the Philippines and Indonesia. Chinese people are unbelievably racist as it is, but the overseas Chinese are some of the most insanely racist of all the Chinese, far more racist than the mainland Chinese.

This is all based on something called Han Supremacism. Han Supremacism is the underlying racist ideology behind almost all Chinese racism. Han Supremacism generally says that Northern Chinese are superior to Southern Chinese. The Southern Chinese were originally the Yue people, but they got conquered by the Han and become Hanized.

According to Han racism, only the Han are Chinese people. All of the other ethnic groups in China – and there are over 80 of them – are all “non-Chinese.” Hence the Taiwan aborigines, the Dai, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the Mongolians, the Hmong, and some would say even the Cantonese, are all “non-Chinese.”

This is the most vicious Nazi-like ethnic nationalism, whereby only the majority ethnic group is defined as part of the nation and the rest of the residents of the land are said to be “foreigners.” This was precisely the fascist ethnic nationalism that overtook Europe in the 1930′s and 1940′s and it is essential to all fascist movements all over the globe. It was also a part of the ideology of the fascist Young Turks of Turkey when they murdered 2.5 million “non-Turks.” This same fascist ideology resurfaced again in the Balkans in the 1990′s.

The Han want to believe that Southeast Asians are inferior to Northeast Asians. This way of thinking is also prevalent among Japanese, but most Japanese don’t even bother to think about Southeast Asians. They are more concerned with Koreans. The reason for the inferiority of Southeast Asians, according to Han racists, is that they are part Australoid. Strictly speaking, this is not really true.

What is true is that the transition from Australoid to Mongoloid took place much later in Southeast Asia than it did in Northeast Asia. The NE Asian transition took place 9,000 years ago, and the SE Asian transition, at least in Vietnam, took place ~2,200 years ago. Nevertheless, actual Australoid genes in SE Asians are few in number. The Malay and the South Vietnamese have a few Papuan genes, but the numbers are very small. Filipinos only have a sprinkling of genes from the Negritos, similar to the Amerindian genes in many White Americans.

Southeast Asians do tend to have darker skin than Northeast Asians. The fact that they have lighter skin is one of the reasons why North Chinese look down on South Chinese so much.

Even Southern Chinese can have fairly dark skin – see the group below.

Southern Chinese. Note that some Southern Chinese can have fairly dark skin.

Some Filipinas have skin that is so dark that they could well be Blasians – Black-Asian mixes. However, the woman below is a pure Filipina.

Some Filipinas look very dark. This Filipina could even be a Blasian, but she is 100% Filipina.

While most Filipinos have no observable Negrito blood, in the urban slums, you can sometimes see Filipinos with Negrito elements. The girls below seem to be mostly Southern Mongoloid (Filipino) but they seem to have a small Negrito element.

Slum dwelling children in the Philippines. These kids appear to have some Negrito in them. Some Filipinos have observable Negrito elements, but most do not.

Below are Filipino Negritos. They would be regarded as an Australoid people.

Pure Ati from the Philippines. These Negrito people have very low population numbers and may even be going extinct.

The Negrito woman and her child below have quite a bit of Mongoloid genes in them.

The true Australoid-Mongoloid types would be the Eastern Indonesians, the Melanesians, the Micronesians and the Polynesians. The Polynesians are ~50% Austronesian and ~50% Melanesian. Micronesians have more Melanesian in them. Melanesians are a mix primarily of Austronesian and Papuan.

A Timorese woman, a true Mongoloid-Australoid mix. Timorese are about 80% Melanesian and 20% Southern Mongoloid (Austronesian)

Asian Men and Masculinity

Ishmael writes:

And regarding Japanese society, that’s one of the most masculine societies in the world. I second that. Men definitely rule the workplace there working long hours and chain-smoke like crazy. There’s a Viet nightclub place near my house that are filled with rough, manly types – not the androgynous crap.

Oh yeah! A lot of Vietnamese men, especially the older ones, are very macho. Rough, tough, badass, hardass men. I met a lot of them when I lived in Orange County. Also, a lot of Filipino guys are also very hard. Maybe especially the older guys, but I have heard that a lot of younger Filipino men in the Philippines are very hard, rough, tough, badass, supermacho type guys. I made friends with a lot of Filipinas on dating sites and the husbands were all macho bastards. They drank, gambled and especially fucked around like crazy. They all cheated on the women. Especially when the women went overseas to work, the guys all take mistresses. Filipino guys are badass motherfuckers!

Of course older Japanese society is very rough, tough and hard. The men rule that place with an iron fist. I met a lot of Japanese guys when I worked in Gardena, and especially the older ones were very macho type guys. Badass dudes. There seemed to be a connection whereby the more connected a guy was to Japan, the more tough and macho he was. I also met a lot of younger Japanese guys with deep connections to Japan (typical of Gardena). These young teenage boys were quite masculine. One thing you noticed was tightly controlled emotions and a strong hatred and distaste for homosexual men.

I also met a lot of Korean guys in LA, and there, the older ones were pretty badass too.

I spent some time around the Chinese sections of LA, and there are organized crime gangs there called Tongs. The young men there are very hard, rough and tough. You really do not want to mess with them at all. And the Chinese women those gang guys had did seem to be the cream of the crop. I met quite a few Chinese women when I was getting my Masters. I asked around about Chinese guys and the general impression was not that they were pussies. I knew this one woman, and I was talking to her about a recent Chinese movie getting showed around in the West.

“God!” I said. “All the Chinese men in that movie! They were all such pigs! Are all Chinese men really such pigs?”

She looked at me knowingly and nodded her head.

It is said that many modern Thai men are a bunch of pussies, but that has not been true traditionally. Even today, I have heard that many young Thai men are very tough and hard. You don’t mess around in Thai nightclubs, especially those heavily frequented by Thais. If you’re non-Thai and you are acting up, the young Thai males will corner you and order you to knock it off. If you don’t, they will definitely kick your ass!

It is only in the last 20 years or so that I have noticed, especially in Asia, the seeming pussification of the Asian male. Young Japanese men are now called “herbivores,” by society as many seem to have abandoned masculinity. They are despised by young Japanese females as weak and pussy. There is an incredible amount of male homosexuality exploding in places like Thailand. It’s quite unbelievable.

And when I was working with a lot of young Koreans translating my shock articles, I noticed a lot of young Korean men who were adopting extreme androgynous appearances to where you often could not even tell if it was a guy or a chick. Really into clothes and hairstyle too. Many were extremely good looking. I have no idea if these guys were straight, gay, bi or what, but once your society gets to the point where the guys are so femmed out that you can’t even tell if they are male or female, I am thinking you’ve got a problem.

The “nerdy Asian” thing is new. It has to do with young Asian men in the West. Asian males traditionally despite their very high IQ’s were *not* nerds. Hyermasculinity has long been mandated in the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Korea, and Japan.

Phenotypical Differences Between NE Asians and SE Asians

Dave Coe writes:

What about in terms of looks? I personally find Northeast Asian women more attractive, but all the white guys who go to Asia seem to go the Southeast.

The Mongoloid race is newer in SE Asia than in NE Asia. In NE Asia, there was a full transition from Australoid to Mongoloid 9,000 YBP. In SE Asia, the full transition occurred as late as 2,000 YBP, hence you do tend to see more Australoid features in the SE Asian Mongoloids because the transition was so recent. I suppose to be crude you could say that SE Asians retain more archaic features, and NE Asians have fewer archaic and more progressive features.

There is a lot of overlap though. I can’t believe how Chinese many Filipinas look. I am not sure why this is. Possibly the Taiwanese aborigines from which they are heavily derived had a heavy “Chinese” type component. There has also been a heavy infusion of more modern Chinese types in the past 900 years. There was a particularly heavy wave 900 years ago.

Vietnamese women also have a heavily “Chinese” component.

What happened in SE Asia in the last 2000 years is that there was a very heavy infusion of probably more progressive Chinese phenotypes from southern China that moved in via waves into mainland SE Asia and at least the Philippines. The indigenous SE Asians were more archaic Australoid types  – more properly seen as “Melanesian” types who nevertheless had been transitioning towards a more modern Mongoloid type for a long time. The waves just helped this along in a big way.

The Thais and Lao for instance are primarily derived from a heavy wave from Yunnan 900 years ago that mixed in with indigenous types. In Vietnam, a huge wave overran the area 2,200 years ago via the Cantonese region and subsequently interbred with indigenous types. “Montagnards” are a good example of an indigenous type in Vietnam.

The genetics of Malaysia, Burma, Cambodia and Indonesia are a lot more complicated.

How Close are Southeast Asians Related to Southern Chinese?

Tyler Lee (apparently a Chinese male) writes:

I think it is only applicable to about 10-15% of city dweller Filipinos when suggested that they are related to Southern Chinese. I have been to quite a few places in the Philippines and most Filipinos look like native Malaysians & Indonesians, and their native cultures and languages are almost alike.

The ones that look like Southern Chinese are most likely to be mixed descendants of earlier Chinese immigrants from centuries ago. Another supporting fact is that although they have been a democratic nation for longer than nearly all Asian countries, Philippines is still dirt poor, and Filipino IQ, as a whole nation, is no where near that of Southern Chinese.

However, I do see similarity with Fujianese/ Cantonese and Vietnamese, based on the look, culture and relatively high academic/professional performance among these in the U.S.

Filipinos are very close to Southern Chinese. However, Thais, Lao and Vietnamese are also very close to Southern Chinese.

As far as why Thais, Lao, and Filipinos do not particularly look like Southern Chinese, that is because they are heavily admixed with native SE Asian or native Filipino. In Filipinos, the male line is Ami from Taiwan, but the female line is ancient island SE Asian related to proto-Tai from 10-20,000 YBP. This was basically an Australoid or Melanesian type grouping. The male line via Taiwan aborigine is not related to more recent infusions of Chinese genes in Filipinos over the past ~1000 years.

It is well known that Vietnamese were predominantly Australoid (Melanesian) until ~2,000 YBP. At that time, there was a huge infusion of genes from Southern China (Cantonese region) and they transitioned from Australoid to Mongoloid (SE Asian type). They had already been transitioning this way for ~2,000 years, but the mass infusion of Chinese genes helped them along.

With the Thai and Lao, they are mostly Southern Chinese. A huge infusion of Southern Chinese genes poured in from Yunnan about 900 years ago and admixed with native SE Asian (probably Melanesian/Australoid type). This admixture created the modern Thai or Lao people.

Closely related groups can have dramatically different IQ’s. We can see this by looking at SE Asian IQ’s.

                  IQ     Genetic distance*
Group

Southern Chinese  105    -
Northern Chinese  105    Very far
Vietnamese         99.5  Very close  
Thai               98.5  Close
Lao                89    Close
Filipinos          86    Close

*Genetic distance compared to Southern Chinese.

1. Thai, Lao and Filipinos are about equidistant from
Southern Chinese

A North-South Chinese Mix Cline in SE Asia?

Repost from the old site.

A question from the comments about the Are SE Asians Australoids? article:

Aren’t Khmer a little more Australoid than people in Vietnam (at least Northern Vietnamese), most Thai, and Laotians? There seems to be a clear cline in Southeast Asia, the areas bordering China seem to have more NE Mongoloid Admixture than those of the Malay archipelago and the Khmer. I’m basing this on appearance and not genes, which you pointed out, rightly so, as being misleading.

This question keeps popping up because so many folks are convinced, based primarily on appearance, that many SE Asians are part-Australoid.

First of all, the Vietnamese, Filipinos, Thai and Khmer are all quite close to the Southern Chinese genetically. Of these, believe it or not, the Filipinos are possibly the closest of all. The Vietnamese are also very close, but I don’t have any figures. Both the Filipinos and the Vietnamese are very close to the coastal Southern Chinese of Fujian and Guangdong Province bordering the Taiwan Strait.

Next come the Thai, Lao and the Khmer. These groups are much closer to the Southern Chinese than Malays or Indonesians. All of them are about the equidistant from the Southern Chinese. Filipinos are much closer to the Southern Chinese than these three groups.

The Thai and Lao are primarily a Southern Chinese group called the Tai that came down into that area in a massive wave about 800 years ago. To some extent they bred in with whatever people were already there. This Tai group came from Yunnan.

The Vietnamese are very closely related to the Southern Chinese. A huge wave of Southern Chinese poured into Vietnam 2,200 years and bred in with existing people. This group came from the Taiwan Strait – the area north of Vietnam along the coast.

The Khmer came down into the area possibly 5,000 years ago with the first wave of Austroasiatics. They also came from Southern China, probably Yunnan once again, but longer ago than their neighbors the Thai, Lao and Vietnamese. The Austroasiatics are considered to be some of the original people of the SE Asia.

The Zhuang of South China are probably the purest relatives of the original Austroasiatics. They came from Central China (possibly originally as the Dai) to Yunnan about 5,000 years ago. One line went to the Zhuang in Guangxi in Southwest China and another line went to the modern Tai-Dai in Yunnan.

Also, the Khmer bred in much more than their neighbors with people from India who came about 1,500 years ago. So, the Khmer contain more of the original Austroasiatic group and less of recent Southern Chinese mixture than the Thai, Lao and Vietnamese. This accounts for their appearance.

Filipinos are closer to Southern Chinese (Guangdong) than any of the groups above except maybe Vietnamese. They are also very close to Taiwan aborigines. Most people have a hard time understanding this because they look so different from most Southern Chinese. But there are Chinese from around Fujian and Hong Kong who look quite dark and, to my mind, SE Asian-looking.

Malays are Taiwan aborigines in large part (Austronesians), and are also are made up of Southern Chinese who came down 4,000 years ago as Austroasiatics.

The Austronesians came through the Philippines, down into Borneo and Sumatra and then up into Malaysia about 2,000 years ago. The Malay do have some Papuan genes, but so do the Southern Chinese and the coastal Vietnamese. Once again, the Malays have less recent Southern Chinese admixture and more archaic Southern Chinese admixture (Austronesian and Austroasiatic).

Malays also definitely have Australoid ancestors in the Semang, the proto-Malay and the Senoi, although we can’t see it in their skulls or much of it in their genes.

The Indonesians in the Center and East of the country have quite a few Melanesian Australoid genes, but the ones in the West have almost none. The ones in the West appear to be Taiwanese aborigines similar to Filipinos.

It’s really a common fallacy that there is such a cline in SE Asia, with folks becoming more Australoid and less Chinese as you go south. What there is is that in some places, you find more recent Southern Chinese mixture and towards the South, you get more archaic Taiwanese and archaic Southern Chinese mixture.

A modern Southern Chinese woman from Chengdu Province. Isn’t she beautiful? God I love this kind of woman. It’s possible she may use some sort of skin whitener to make her skin look more white, or she may just stay out of the sun. White skin has been highly valued for a long time, and my blogging colleague Dragon Horse (feel free to check him out – he’s smart as Hell) notes that it had been highly valued long before Chinese even knew much about Europeans.

In other words, Chinese were not trying to look like White Europeans – they hardly even knew who they were. A preference for lighter skin was simply an independent development in China based on their own considerations and values. Many will look at this woman and say she has a NE Asian facial type. Well, that may be so, but Caucasians are closer to NE Asians than she is as a Southern Chinese. The genetic distance between Southern Chinese and Northern Chinese is vast.

We only find a few Australoid genes in SE Asians and even then only in Southern Chinese, coastal Vietnamese and Malays. Skull-wise, nothing exists, except that the Senoi of Malaysia do have Australoid skulls.

I guess people say this based on appearance. There is a SE Asian native type characterized most prominently by Malays, Khmer, Filipino, Western Indonesians, etc. that people think looks a bit primitive, and they associate that with Australoids.

Really it’s just a native indigenous development, although it does seem to represent a more archaic type – either archaic Taiwanese or archaic South Chinese – and has nothing to do per se with Australoids.

Recall however that the whole region slowly transitioned from Australoid types to modern SE Asian types about 5000 years ago, and that’s later than most groups. Maybe that is what people are seeing. But there’s nothing we can measure in genes or skulls.

Thai, Lao and Vietnamese don’t have any NE Asian mixture that we can see. There is a Southern Chinese look that can resemble Northern Chinese, but the two groups are very far apart. Even Southern Chinese don’t have much northern mixture, but there are some groups that are more northern than others.

The Wa (Va) of Yunnan and Burma are about 50-50 Northern and Southern Chinese, and the Hmong have more Northern Chinese than other Southern Chinese groups.

A Hmong woman. We have a huge Hmong population here in the Central Valley. By and large, they are good people and I like them a lot. The Hmong are interesting among Southern Chinese in that they have more Northern Chinese than most of the rest of the Southern Chinese. They also have a unique genetic line going back up to 42,000 years (!). It’s pretty incredible that some sort of proto-Hmong have been evolving for that long.

The website I got this off described Hmong as partly Australoid, but I think that’s silly. They are saying this by looking at the faces and saying that the face looks somewhat Australoid. The Hmong are probably less Australoid than that Chengdu woman above.

I find some of these Hmong women, like this one, to be really beautiful. They definitely look different. They have round, moon-shaped faces, and short, stocky, bodies. Character-wise, they are very Chinese-like.

Their IQ in the US is only 82.5 (lower than US Blacks) but that must be due to language difficulties. Their verbal IQ was insanely low, while their performance IQ was quite high. The Hmong have also been living like hillbillies for centuries, so there is probably a lot of potential for Flynn Effects in the US. That’s a traditional costume she is wearing.

Caucasians are closer to Northern Chinese than Southern Chinese are.

A classic NE Asian, in this case a Manchu woman. The Caucasians that they most resemble are Northern Turkics such as some of the people in the Altai and the residents of the Stans.

I can’t see much difference in phenotype between her and the Southern Chinese beauty above, but maybe folks who understand Asian phenotypes better can see these things. These people are also quite close genetically to Amerindians. Koreans, Japanese and NE Chinese are all quite genetically close, although I guess they mostly hate each other and would not want to believe that.

A Tajik man. Boy, does he look Jewish or what? These people are quite closely related to NE Asians and also to Northern Indians. They are closest to Iranians. A very interesting people, they are thought to be the original Aryans. Funny how Aryans White Power types go back to Aryan dudes who look like nice Jewish boys. Wonders never cease.

People base so much popular anthropology on superficial appearances, but that’s not really scientific.

Is There An Australoid Race?

New commenter Nikephoros, from Colombia, an antiracist type who I suspect is also a race-denier, comments:

NP: Then SE Asians are “Australoid” right to this day. SE Asians don’t differ craniometrically too much from Papuans or the more gracile Australian types.

RL: I am not sure I agree with that. Studies of Vietnamese skulls clearly show that there are different types, with the ancient Melanesian skulls slowly changing and becoming more Oriental, eventually trending over the last 2,300 years towards the true SE Asian type. The Melanesian type seems completely phased out 2,3000 YBP.

And there is a set of skulls that pools together as Australoid – Tamils, Indian tribals, Negritos, Senoi, Melanesians, Ainu, Papuans, Aborigines and some Amerindians.

My understanding is that SE Asians proper are definitely not a part of this group. They are more progressive and less archaic.

NP: Do you have any link to those studies? SE Asians skulls seem to cover all the range from “Mongoloid” to “Australoid”, with most falling somewhere in between. Also so-called Australoids are a quite diverse group when it comes to cranial morphology.

If you go to George Weber’s site, you will see that Fuegians, the Pericu and the ancient skulls of the Americas plot with Aborigines, Melanesians, Papuans, Ainu and Negritos. I would call that group something like Australoids.

A traditional Ainu couple.

A Vietnamese paleoanthropologist characterized Vietnamese fossils. To him, there was a clear progression from Australoid or Melanesian (20,000 YBP) to SE Asian of today, with a lot of classic Oriental type input from China to the north.

A Melanesian man with blond hair. This was the dominant type in Vietnam until 2,200 YBP.

A classic Vietnamese type. What a cutie!

I don’t think many SE Asians look Australoid, unless you include Negritos, Senoi, and some East Indonesians, but those Indonesians are really Melanesians.

This paper shows that the Semang Negritos and Senoi of Thailand cluster with the Tamils, coastal New Guinea (Melanesians) and the Andaman Island Negritos. That looks like an “Australoid” type grouping to me.

A Dravidian from India with Australoid features. Before 10,000 YBP, Indians looked like Aborigines.

An Andaman Islands Negrito from the Jarawa group.

Melanesian teeth are very different from SE Asian teeth. SE Asian teeth are halfway between Melanesian teeth (Australoid) and NE Asian Sinodont teeth. This implies that SE Asians are halfway between Australoids and classic Mongoloids (NE Asians).

The ancient skulls from Thailand – Tabon, Niah, Gua Gunung – all look like Aborigines or Melanesians. Notice it says Aborigines or Melanesians. So there are similarities between the groups.

Australoid race: Aborigines, Papuans, Melanesians, Negritos, Ainu, Fuegians, Pericu, Tamils other Vedda and tribal types and ancient Amerindians.

A Papuan dude with some funky bones in his nose. This man looks almost Polynesian, but then Polynesians have a Papuan component via Melanesians.

Sure, it’s kind of a messy group, but it’s good enough for me and it seems to have some basis.

I also don’t have any problem with a Mongoloid race that includes SE Asians and NE Asians, with exceptions for Ainu, Negritos, Senoi and East Indonesians.

Asian Crime Rates: A Lesson in Mathematics

Repost from the old site.

Since most folks are downright illiterate when it comes to math, it’s time for a little math lesson. One type of factoid that seems to continually ensnare Americans is the “Y number of people are killed by X type of people per year”, game.

It stands to reason that if all of X people group is locked up or kicked out of the country, Y # of the people’s lives will be saved. I am no fan at all of illegal immigration, but I do not like fake arguments either. A fave argument of the anti-illegal crowd is this (scroll down to see the comment):

Every year over 9000 (three times the number killed on 9/11) Americans are killed by invading Hispanic illegals (primarily Mexicans). This is also far more Americans killed on American soil than have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since the start of the invasions.I’m not aware of any Americans killed in America every year by Iraqis or Afghanis, are you?

So I ask you, which of the countries I’ve mentioned above is America’s greatest enemy and responsible for the greatest numbers of American civilian deaths? I’m talking women and children as well as men.

As you can see, this argument sounds pretty powerful, and it may well be true, I have no idea, though the figures seem awfully high to me. How can 12-20 million illegals possibly kill 9,000 Americans per year? That is 25 Americans killed by illegals every single day here. Don’t you think this would be all over the papers?

But there is a way that all such articles are potentially red herrings. For instance, suppose that we could prove that Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants, legal and illegal, are responsible for X number of crimes or X number of homicides per year. The argument would say that if these Asians did not live in the US, those lives would be saved or those crimes would not have occurred.

And this much is true. But in all cases, someone else would have been killed or victimized instead. The truth is that the crime rate in the US would actually increase if all Asian immigrants and Asian-Americans were deported. The lives of some murder victims would be saved, but even more would be murdered as a result of the deportation.

Some would be saved from being crime victims, but even more other people would be victimized in their stead.

You are sitting here thinking, how does this make any sense at all? Well, it has to do with averages. Asians in the US have a crime rate that is fully more than 4 times lower than the White crime rate, which itself is already quite low.

Therefore, as the percentage of population that is Asian increases, the US crime rate will decrease, even if the increased population creates new victims as a consequence of sheer numbers. As the percentage of the US population that is Asian decreases, the US crime rate will increase, even with fewer people in the country.

Because what we are looking at here are not individual crime cases, but instead we are looking at crime rates as a whole. And this is really the only thing that you should concern yourself with if you are worried about becoming a crime victim.

The 4 times lower crime rate applies to all US Asians, who make up about 3% of the population. It even includes Filipinos, who make up 1% of the US population.

This is interesting because some consider Filipinos to be a crime-prone race compared to the rest of Asians. Japanese, Chinese and Koreans are well-known for looking down on Filipinos as not being real Asians. Phrases like the “niggers of Asia” are even tossed around. In Japan, there are signs outside establishments saying, “No Filipinos Allowed”*.

This despite the fact that there are many Koreans in the Philippines studying English.

Or that Chinese, 2% of the Philippines population, control an incredible 70% of the wealth in the nation. Indonesia has similar obscene figures for their tiny Chinese population. No wonder there are periodic pogroms against the Chinese in Philippines and Indonesia. There was a similar situation in Vietnam with the overseas Chinese, as they are known, and consequently many Vietnamese do not like Chinese much at all.

The low Asian crime rate also includes US Filipino, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and Hmong street gangs, the bane of US anti-immigrant groups. Apparently the crime rates of these gangs are dramatically offset by the extremely low crime rates of older members of these groups who are not in gangs.

So, the slow displacement of US Whites by Asian immigrants, while not pleasant for US Whites in many ways, will actually make the US a safer place to live, all other things being equal.

*Warning: Racist website.

Neuroanatomical Correlates of IQ

The reality is more nuanced than that, as intelligence is indeed linked to grey matter volume, cortical thickness & myelination integrity (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5:1-13, June 2004).

Leigh Van Allen, in a 1981 book, showed via meta-analysis that head size was modestly correlated with IQ. More recent work with MRI analysis gives us a correlation of .42 with head size and IQ. However, there are problems with this correlation. Eskimos have the largest heads of all, yet their IQ is only 91. Vietnamese have some of the smallest heads of all, yet their IQ is 99.5. Ugandans have huge heads, larger than Southern Europeans. The Ugandan IQ is ~67 and the Southern European IQ is ~95.

It’s hard to make sense of these findings, but the imperfect correlation remains. Within races, surely smarter people simply have bigger heads. One theory is that much of the large Eskimo brain is devoted to visuospatial analysis, something that they are exceedingly good at. This confounds the large head and IQ correlation.

So maybe it’s not so much how big or small your head is, but what might be more important what sort of stuff you have in that small or large head of yours. The small Vietnamese brain may be highly developed in important ways. The large Ugandan brain may have a lot of areas that are not so important. But all of this is exceedingly conjectural and controversial and tends to lead to one conundrum after another.

Race realists love to throw these findings around as if they prove that IQ is completely genetically based. However, environment seems to play a large role in brain development and it seems to give larger brain. Head size has been increasing in the West for a century now, along with improved nutrition and rising IQ’s. Better nutrition is probably giving us bigger heads and making us smarter to boot. But there’s clearly a ceiling on this effect.

One of the the theories suggested to account for the Flynn Effect has been the increased complexity of mathematics education in the West in the past 100 years or so. This math education is thought to cause increased development of frontal parts of the brain. So you see environment can grow your brain too.

One thing that is clear from all of this is that intelligence is biological and not some construct created out of thin air.

White Men Can’t Bang

Repost from the old site.

The title is a take-off on the movie, White Men Can’t Jump. It appears that, in addition to deficient basketball skills, White men, at least in the California, are also deficient in gangbanging skills. Whites have a very low rate of street gang membership, at least in California. Sadly, that is not true of other ethnic groups.

I am not writing this post to stir up racism, but only to explain such phenomena as White flight, especially noticeable in California.

It is worth noting that once you get to high-income cities in the state like Walnut Creek, these cities are often pretty diverse ethnically these days. There are good numbers of Hispanics and Asians in that town, and Blacks on the streets are not rare.

At a certain income level, better-behaved, more integrated members of all ethnic groups will be present in a town and ethnicity per se will probably have little effect on crime or gang membership – the rates will be pretty low for all groups.

The problem seems to occur at lower income levels, especially poor or low-income areas, and there crime and gangs are correlated with race. In those areas of California, low-income Whites are often fairly well-behaved, while low-income Blacks and Hispanics are simply a catastrophe.

I recently moved from a mostly-White small town in California in which many of the White residents were poor or low income. There were no gangs and there was no graffiti.

Crime rates were so low that I often left my car or home unlocked. Pathology existed, but it tended to be more mild or inner-directed (drug and alcohol abuse, minor drunken fights, domestic disturbances) rather than more virulent or directed outwards.

I moved to a city about three times as large that is 70% Hispanic. It is probably about as poor and low income as the White town I came from. In the low-income area I live in, depraved Underclass “nigga-gangsta” culture holds sway as the local Hispanics are in thrall to gang, drug and gun culture. That is the only way to describe it.

Pimping, open prostitution, open drug sales, open fistfighting, public drunkenness, graffiti everywhere, high crime rates – the place is a train wreck. Welcome to the “hood”, as locals proudly describe it. I have already suffered a theft from my apartment, while I suffered no thefts in 16 years in the poor White town. The young people often seem overtly menacing, predatory and amoral.

Gangs are omnipresent, and there may be as many as 6,000 gang members in a town of 50,000. Whereas the poor Whites directed their aggression inwards with drug and alcohol abuse, the poor Hispanics direct it outwards, threatening and harming others.

I finally realize what White flight is all about. Most Whites don’t really care what your race is or what your skin color is. Based on grotesquely elevated Black and Hispanic crime and gang membership rates in California, for Whites to flee large Black and Hispanic populations is not necessarily an act of racism at all – it is an act of sheer logic and self-protection.

Not only is it rational for Whites to flee large groups of Blacks and Hispanics, it is also rational for well-behaved Blacks and Hispanics (and there are many millions in California alone) to flee these areas too. And we are already starting to see this in the state.

I had already calculated differential crime rates among ethnic groups and plotted them to IQ in a previous post in an attempt to try to understand crime, ethnicity and intelligence. Unfortunately, IQ did not explain differential ethnic crime rates well.

I recently got ahold of data on gang membership in California and decided to use it to calculate rates of gang membership per ethnicity and then compare the groups. I have included the crime and IQ charts from the previous post for comparative purposes. It turns out that gang membership is a vastly worse problem than crime per se, and the ethnic dimensions of it have not been adequately explored.

In order to do that, let us look at the figures for California, from a 1996 document that is already 11 years out of date. This is the way things were 11 years ago. I lacked figures for the nation as a whole.

Gang membership rates1:

Amerindians: None Known, minimal
Whites:      Baseline
Polynesians: High, figures unknown2
(SE) Asians: 18 X higher than Whites (!)
Hispanics:   54 X higher than Whites (!!)
Blacks:      140 X higher than Whites(!!!)

Now compare to crime rates themselves, this time for the nation as a whole. Asian crime rates are low, but gang membership is high, a seeming paradox. If the increase in crimes committed by certain ethnic groups compared to Whites seems shocking, the increased rate of gang membership is truly out of this world and surreal.

Crime rates (based on The Color of Crime):

Asians:      78% lower than Whites (!)
Whites:      Baseline
Amerindians: 2X higher than Whites
Polynesians: 2X higher than Whites
Hispanics:   3.3X higher than Whites
Blacks:      8.2X higher than Whites (!)

Now let us look at IQ scores.

IQ scores:

Whites:          103 (link)
SE Asians:       93.53
Hispanics:       89
American Indians 87 (link)
Blacks           85 (link)
Polynesians      85 (link, link)

The rates of gang membership are vastly more than would be expected by IQ; nevertheless there is indeed a linear relationship which is surprising, except in the cases of Polynesians and Amerindians. With 1% of California’s population, Amerindians may be too small of a population to do much gang-wise. Polynesian figures for rates of gang membership do not exist, but seem to be high.

In particular, the rates of Black crime and gang membership are vastly more than would be predicted by IQ.

Furthermore, these figures do not take into account the Flynn Effect (FE), whereby the average Black and Polynesian today has the same IQ as Whites of 1957, the average Hispanic today has the same IQ as Whites of 1970 and the average SE Asian today has the same IQ as Whites of 1985.

As IQ’s have gone through the roof over the last 40-50 years, paradoxically, crime and gang membership rates in the ethnic groups above have similarly skyrocketed. Since no one proposes a theory whereby rising IQ leads to increased crime, rising IQ has nothing to do with differential ethnic crime and gang ratios.

Nevertheless, there is still a disturbing White – SE Asian – Hispanic – Black ranking in IQ and gang membership (leaving aside Amerindians). IQ may still be relevant to crime and gang ratios if the FE has not effected some aspect of IQ that is tied into crime.

It is true that the FE has not led to an across the board, broad increase in general intelligence. For more on the FE and controversies about what it is measuring, see my post here.

Whites from 1957-1970 (whose IQ’s ethnic IQ’s now compare to) were even less likely to join gangs than Whites are today, in fact, their gang membership was about zero, and even their crime rates were relatively low.

However, by 1970, there were already noticeable Black and Hispanic gang problems in the US.

It seems, based on comparisons of ethnic IQ’s to those of Whites from 1957-1970, that there is absolutely no way whatsoever to explain high ethnic crime rates based on intelligence. When attempting to explain rates of ethnic street gang membership, we need to look elsewhere than IQ.

Let us look at Philippe Rushton’s R/K Selection Theory. I am not a fan of his and the theory has some major issues, but at least one part of it makes sense.

                Blacks Whites   Asians

Aggressiveness  +      Baseline  -
Cautiousness    -      Baseline  +
Impulsivity     +      Baseline  -
Self-concept    +      Baseline  -
Sociability     +      Baseline  -

Greater extroversion will tend towards the Black end, and greater introversion will tend towards the Asian end. Rushton’s theory has some issues. For Asians, he used only NE Asians, and not SE Asians, American Indians or Hispanics, who are part Amerindian. Studies have shown that Papuans, Polynesians, Negritos, Micronesians, Melanesians and Aborigines are also Asians, yet they are excluded.

From a very early age, Asians are placid, introverted and less aggressive. Blacks are at the furthest end of activity and extroversion scale. As we know from all races, more extroverted folks tend to be more aggressive. Whites are known to be somewhere in between. I do feel that this explains a lot of behavioral differentials between races.

At worst, Asian societies are so conforming and rules-oriented that they seem boring and oppressive.

As far as Blacks, at worst, a society of extroverts of any race would definitely have issues with not just aggression but unreliability, irresponsibility, drug and alcohol abuse, more partying and less studying, precocious and profligate sexuality, impulsiveness and even chaos.

Indeed, sociopaths are simply extroverts taken to the behavioral extreme, as schizoids and obsessives are the result of introversion gone wild.

This works pretty good for Asians, Whites and Blacks on a number of variables, including crime rates (see table above).

However, this theory completely falls flat on its face when trying to explain elevated crime rates of Amerindians and Hispanics (see table below).

                Asians Whites    Am Indians

Aggressiveness  --     Baseline  --
Cautiousness    ++     Baseline  ++
Impulsivity     --     Baseline  --
Self-concept    --     Baseline  --
Sociability     --     Baseline  --
Crime rates     --     Baseline  2X (!)
Gang membership --     Baseline  --

                Asians Whites    Hispanics

Aggressiveness  --     Baseline  -?
Cautiousness    ++     Baseline  +?
Impulsivity     --     Baseline  -?
Self-concept    --     Baseline  -?
Sociability     --     Baseline  -?
Crime rates     --     Baseline  3.3X (!)
Gang membership --     Baseline  140X (!)

                NE Asians Whites    SE Asians

Aggressiveness  --        Baseline  -
Cautiousness    ++        Baseline  +
Impulsivity     --        Baseline  -
Self-concept    --        Baseline  -
Sociability     --        Baseline  -
Crime rates     --        Baseline  -
Gang membership --        Baseline  17X (!)

Based on the data above, Amerindians should be expected to be even more introverted than Asians. Hispanics might be expected to fall somewhere in between Whites and Asians. SE Asians should be expected to possibly fall between NE Asians and Whites on all variables.

If Asian babies are placid, then the Indian baby is like a rock – an alert rock, but a rock nevertheless. Indian babies are known to be silent, and amazingly, it is not even easy to make them cry.

Indian women cart them around in pouches on their backs in Mexico, and if you did not know better, you might think they were asleep or even dead. Hispanics in the US are about 60% White and 40% Amerindian.

SE Asians, although they are genetically diverse from NE Asians, are still Asians. I do not have any proof, but I would assume that SE Asian babies are placid like NE Asians. As they grow older, SE Asians seem more quiet and introverted than Whites and Blacks, though maybe less so than NE Asians.

This intuitively appealing theory fails totally when trying to explain high crime and gang membership rates of Hispanics, high crime rates of Amerindians, and high gang membership rates of SE Asians. All of these groups tend towards the less activated, more controlled and introverted Asian end, and all are Asians or part-Asians of one type or another.

A biological explanation may work for Polynesian crime and gang membership rates, because recent evidence shows that they have a “warrior gene” that effects MAO in the brain in greater numbers than other groups. This results in impulsiveness, risk-taking, aggression, violence and elevated elevated levels of smoking and drinking. They probably selected for it on their long, risky trips across the seas.

But there is no evidence that any other group above has such a gene in such high numbers.

I confess that the relative frequencies of gang memberships and ethnic groups bothers me, because I can’t figure out why some groups are more prone to this than others. Then again, if you can come up with a rational theory that even partly explains any kind of crime, you are practically eligible for a Nobel Prize. Criminology is the ultimate Black hole of theory and scholarship.

More and more, it seems that culture, possibly poverty (at least in some groups anyway), and not genes or IQ is what drives gang membership and crime rates.

Yet different races are more or less prone to crime and gang membership even when they live in poverty. Poor Whites commit relatively few crimes and are much less likely to join gangs than the poor of many other groups.

As yet, we lack a good explanation for this.

As a beginning theory, and because I honestly cannot come up with anything else, I might offer that there is still something protective in White culture in California right now that is keeping Whites from joining gangs at high rates. What that protective factor is, I have no idea, but I do not think that this has anything to do with it.

As far as what is causing such high rates of gang membership in the other groups, a depraved gang, drug and gun culture has developed among certain groups for complex reasons. It has then spread outwards to other groups, while expanding in the core groups. The protective factor that insulates White culture is apparently lacking to various degrees in the other groups discussed.

If and when any considerable sector of young US Whites begins to adopt the Underclass gangbanging criminal culture of other ethnics, the US is going to be in for some very serious problems. It is only the relative resistance (so far) of US Whites to gangsta culture that is keeping the nation from a Goyaesque crime, gun and gang Hell.

Notes

1. Rates were calculated based on 1996 street gang numbers per race computed against the ethnic group’s % of the California population as of recent years.

Whites had 5,000 gang members and have 49% of the state’s population.

Asians had 25,000 gang members and have 13% of the state’s population. This distorts the Asian rate by overestimating gang membership in NE Asians because most Asian street gangs are SE Asians, but I did not have access to breakdowns in the state’s Asian population per country.

Hispanics had 170,000 gang members and have 33% of the state’s population.

Blacks had 100,000 gang members and have 7% of the state’s population.

2. In California, Polynesian gangs are about 80% Samoan and 20% Tongan.

3. I toss out an estimate of SE Asian IQ of 93.5 based on a Hmong IQ of 96.5, a Vietnamese IQ of 99.5 (link, link, link) and a Lao/Khmer IQ of 89 . A rough average of these gives a SE Asian IQ of 93.5, which is not low at all. The Vietnamese IQ is from two major studies in Vietnam. One in 2001 found an IQ of 101 and one in 2006 found an IQ of 98.