I have a question. There are certain populations who can't grow any facial hair, the most famous example being Native Americans. Does this have something to do with their Y-chromosome lineages or is it autosomal?

The very reason Europe came out ahead was because of the heterogeneity in language. You had multiple centers communicating and competing with each other. The opposite of that, China, was the reason why Asia lagged behind. The reverse of that, the multiple Chineseness of now, is why China is in a renaissance now. Most of the initial investment that kick-started the Chinese behemoth was from HK and Taiwan, and most of the innovative ideas behind this great leap either were from Taiwan, HK-Macua, Singapore or via these place. And they do speak different languages. At a certain point of the curve, having multiple languages become a productive thing, if we ignore the cultural benefit of multi-culturalism.

"What isn’t easily explained is why sites after 50,000 years ago should be susceptible to this same path-dependence — particularly since they should derive some or most of their ancestry from Africa/West Asia." "Personally, I keep coming back to ecology." It's been said that the lack of raw materials and low quality of the material was a restraining factor on Levallois, but I guess the only progress in this field is actually dependent on findings of another field, genetics, which can at least in theory let us know which way(s) modern and prehistoric populations arrived into East Asia, either via Central Asia which seems to have Levallois or via the southern coastal route which seems to have forgotten it. "particularly since they should derive some or most of their ancestry from Africa/West Asia." Only some? I agree that shoveled incisors are perhaps a trait "Mongoloids" got from erectus, but the erectus component overall should be very low based on what we know from genetics. Not one phylogenetically-distant sample of mtDNA and Y-Chromosome have been discovered yet. All fall into a sub-set of East African/Eurasian lineages. My theory on how the above seemingly contradictory situation can happen is this: 1. The erectus admixture must've occurred in a very small population. 2. The uniparental markers died out in this bottleneck but the autosomal genes remain. 3. The shovelling trait was selected in severe ecological conditions. 4. This "Mongoloid" population at some point started to expand exponentially.

Prof. Hawks, what do you think about the contrast between Levallois (Shuidonggou) and non-Levallois (Xiachuan) cultures/blade technologies existing close by. Is this a case of control origin but lost of transmission, cultural spread of blade technology but not Levallois, or parallel adaptation, in your opinion?

Sorry, in the comment above I meant "common origin" but typed "control origin".

Mark, thanx for posting a 10-year old political article. What are you really contributing here in all your posts every time something about the Chinese gets posted by razib? Do you ever ask yourself that? I see the same White guys (who live in China, Taiwan, etc.) writing the same type of posts in all the China forums. What do you really get out of it?

razib, I would disagree that mutual intelligibility is always a good thing. It does reduce diversity of culture. Heterogeneity was an essential ingredient in creativity in America, in Renaissance Europe and the following eras of Western and world civilization. The history the Mediterranean world was so creative because of an interaction of so many civilizations. In fact Western civilization was so robustly creative because it inherited many different layers, from Summer and the Egyptians to Rome. Most of what China has to offer as a civilization were created during the Spring and Autumn/Warring States period. The same can be said for Greece. If it were just one state instead of many competing city-states, I doubt we can refer back to them as the fathers of Western Civilization. In the New World the Meso-American phenomenon is no different. And this is so perhaps even in South Asian civilization.  
 
If we McDonaldize the world with people all speaking English, or Mandarin, or Hindi, we will get stagnancy, like much of America in-between the two coasts.

AG, Cantonese language and identity came about way later than what you said. Cantonese seems to come about from a sudden wave of migration into the Pearl Delta from a northern Guangdong village in the 12th Century. In the Pearl Delta, they experienced a demographic explosion, which saw them replacing (linguistically) and assimilating older "Han" layers ?possibly Min) and Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien people. 
 
As for Canontese characters, we are referring to certain words which only exist in Cantonese, not that the whole script is a different creature from Kanzi. Mandarin has its own unique characters. 
 
Most of them were invented in modern times, while some were vernacular forms that were invented as the literary form became further and further away from actual speech.

Shnugi, the Fujianese, or more precisely the Minnan (Southern Min) group of Fujian have an excellent seafaring tradition, and thus they make up the majority of overseas Han communities. 
 
They are poorly known in the English-speaking world, but in fact Minnan (and all Min speech forms) are farther away from both Mandarin and Cantonese in terms of linguistic phylogeny.

razib, the idea of a newly created Han identity is nothing but a false illusion created by Western "Sinologist" Orientalists, who while admiring Chinese (Huaxia) civilization, also see it as a threat to their personal Euro-centered egos. I'd apologize for being so condescending, except for the fact that what Mark Houston said has been so oft-served up as some Western Sinologist wisdom, as stale as 10,000-year old fortune cookies. The fact is that the common ethnic identity was formed before linguistic intelligibility issues. No modern governments tried to convince different ethnic groups that they were the same "Han". Referring back to a past discussion, "Tang" and "Han" are just different dynasties of the same Huaxia civilization. Southerners like to use "Tang" because that's when the South was colonized. Southerners were Tang people in relation to aborigines.

There is a very simple reason why cities were demographic sinks in ancient China. Most prominent cities in China, although having thousand-year histories, can only trace continuity back to the Ming, like Xian. If a city was lucky enough to escape being massacred and burnt down during one invasion, it wasn't lucky enough during the next revolution. If I remember correctly, Xian was basically rebuilt from ashes during either the Ming or Qing. This is also why when you visit China, all the cities basically look like they are McDonaldly franchised with the same modern urban planning and concrete buildings.

Mair is another Orientalist who has a lot of theories that can't be substantiated. For example, his claim that the Tao Te Ching is basically a translation of some as yet unknown Tocharian oral masterpiece. 
 
Some of his exploits are even more entertaining, such as translating the word "qing" (ancient Chinese word for "dark" that has come to slightly mean "green" in modern usage) so that he ended up claiming the Yellow Emperor had green eyes instead of the accurate translation that the emperor had dark, cruel eyes. 
 
It's amazing this guy teaches at the Ivy Leaque level. 
 
Anyway, if the chariot and bronze can imply IEs, then Ancient Egyptians must've also been. For bronze, there was a culture in Qinghai which seemed to have bronze earlier than the Xia-Shang, and mtDNA analysis show them to exhibit all East Eurasian lineages, with some closeness to Tibetans. So, the Xia-Shang complex got bronze through intermediaries, and I imagine the chariot was the same way.

Ask any linguist about the Oracle Bone language of the Shang and they?ll tell you it?s definitely Sinitic and most definitely not Indo?European?I?ve looked at it myself to know that much?Archaeological-wise? besides the chariot what is Indo-European about the Xia-Shang-Zhou? It?s basically a Neolithic Liangzhu ?actually in the Yangtze Delta? which makes it Southern? core with Dawenkou and Hongshan influences? 
 
His claims are pretty far out? biased? and follow a long tradition of Orientalists making outrageous claims on Chinese civilization? He should?ve stopped at IE loan words such as ?horse??

Two articles: 
One, a fair reporting by Gordon Fairclough of the WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124741318419528477.html 
The other, a piece of crap by NYT's village idiot in China Edward Wong: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/world/asia/13uighur.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp 
, who is also famous for writing other stupid articles, such as about the sirprising Caucasoid mummies of Xinjiang.

As a Chinese American in China, I can say that this article pretty much reports on a non-existing issue. Although regionalism can sometimes be strong, Han anywhere are fiercely nationalistic and loyal to the country. Han do not have different identities but alternate identities of what it is to be Han. This is an important notion that Westerners (with their equation of language with ethnicity) do not understand, because it doesn't exist in the West. 
 
The thing that is unreliable about reporting from China is that even reporters who are fluent in the language and have lived there for years do not have meanningful interactions or relationships with the locals, so they never know what is really going on in China. I've met expats who've lived in China for ten years, are fluent in Chinese, and have never had any deep, meanningful conversation with Chinese. Many expats think Chinese don't engage in meanningful conversation, but I've had plenty of such talks during the short time I've been here. These journalists/China experts live in a self-imposed (unwillingly perhaps) distorted, segregated world while they are in China, which perhaps increases their sense of alienation and prejudice their reporting about China. Chinese press is pretty much bland, brainless propaganda, but reading American newspapers while in China lets you know that American press is pretty much American propaganda as well; the New York Times articles become science fiction as soon as you stop reading the paper and step onto the Shanghai street.

Being actually someone who has touched "Afro hair", I can tell you that though it may look hard and fuzzy, it's the softest, thinnest of all hair types, for good reason (heat dissipation). 
 
I sincerely believe the paper or razib made the typo and what it meant to say was that African hair was 50% thinner and European hair was 30% thinner than Asian hair. 
 
The old anthropological works seem to bare that out.

Actually, Cambodians (Khmers) are just as admixed, if not more so, as the Japanese. The fact is in the numbers of mtDNA studies. For example, if neighboring Thai mtDNA says anything, Khmers are heavily "aboriginal negrito" on their maternal side. Thailand used to be part of the Khmer territory before Tais took over and assimilated the people, so the Thai numbers should be roughly equivalent to Khmer make-up. 
 
The relevant studies are linked in this post, http://z6.invisionfree.com/man/index.php?showtopic=1584.

Peter, not to mention that tonal languages post-date this or any other development... 
 
Since the days of Karlgren, Chinese (Sinitic) has been recognized to have been non-tonal at the time of the first dynasties, which is 1500 B.C. Later, Haudricourt demonstrated that Chinese tones were no more than 2,000 years old.

Oh yeah, we even have the case of a tonal Chinese language (Wu Chinese) evolving into a non-tonal sub-dialect in the city of Shanghai in the last 50 years. As I've said before, this new ASPM variant could even be shown to make people eat cheese, so let's call it more accurately the cheese gene instead of the chopstix gene.

John, a non-tonal early phase of Sinitic has been established for half a century. Karlgren noticed it. Haudricourt gave us a time of 2,000 years ago.