#14, Yes, that jumped out at me too – the Taiwanese Aboriginal’s facial features are very like some Amazonian rain-forest dwellers, especially the Xingu.

#12, Being Irish, one can be seen as a “blow-in” even after 500 years…

1) a few hundred years is definitely enough for me to say they’re natives of taiwan. but then, i think of myself as american despite only a few decades!

2) from what i have read the gap between taiwanese aboriginals and han is like that between malays and han. it exists, but compared to the papuan outgroup they’re still a pretty tight clade. i wanted to focus on heads of state cuz their images are always public domain, perhaps should have picked malaysia or something.

One criticism of your inclusion of the current President of Taiwan to represent Taiwanese people is that the majority of Taiwanese are of very recent – last few hundred years – Han Chinese descent.

The Taiwanese Aboriginals are the people who are most like the Papuans genetically. Here are some images of them:
1. Taiwanese Aboriginal – male

2. Taiwanese Aboriginal – female

http://thestudyofracialism.org/forum/store/aussie-kids1.jpg

Forgive me for asking a stupid question, but does this “African outgroup” pattern hold true with North Africans? Or is it a Sub-Saharan phenomenon?

I read the paper yesterday or two days ago and I decided that I could not understand neither the method nor the conclusions if any. In fact in fig. 2, which seems central, almost all quadruplets show excess of “mean number of parallel divergent SNPs” above the simulations. They argue this indicates that:

“For all but one divergence comparison, more parallel divergent SNPs than expected were observed, indicative of parallel adaptation”.

But I understand that it probably means that the simulations are wrong to begin with and, in any case, the one (or rather three) cases where they approach or give lower results than the simulations are the interesting ones – the rest are just the norm.

So I eventually decided that the paper was some kind of “mad scientist ranting” and decided to ignore it altogether.

Regardless, going to your example, I’d say it is a very bad one because it is not as much convergent adaption what makes the Papuan and the Tanzanian look similar in some very obvious traits but conservation of shared ancestral traits. IMO these are the dominant common traits of the ancestral humankind.

It’d be much better to illustrate convergent evolution to show the Emperor of Japan along the Queen of England, because both lines probably evolved convergently but separately towards white skin color.

Here is a Tasmanian aborigine with the kinky hair type:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Lanne.jpg

Here are mainland australian aborigines with the wavy or straight hair type:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Lanne.jpg

I find it interesting how the revered indian spiritual leader who died recently (Sathya Sai Baba) sported an afro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqrXVOsOUzo

Indians aren’t generally known for having afros, which makes his appearance (see url link) unusual.

we don’t know now. we may at some point. but the hair texture of east asians, very thick shafts which are very straight, may be evolutionarily novel if recent selection on the EDAR locus pans out.