Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1082 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Sat 02 May 2009 23:38 Post subject: Re: The native people of Greenland
Whatareyou? wrote:
What race are they considered to be?
Not sure what you mean by "race," since biological races do not exist in humans. They were originally an Inuit, or Eskimo, people. Now, the population is largely of mixed Inuit and Danish stock.
Posted: Sun 03 May 2009 04:17 Post subject: Re: The native people of Greenland
William wrote:
Whatareyou? wrote:
What race are they considered to be?
Not sure what you mean by "race," since biological races do not exist in humans. They were originally an Inuit, or Eskimo, people. Now, the population is largely of mixed Inuit and Danish stock.
Thanks, I don't know what terminology to use besides race? What are the Inuits categorized as?
Posted: Sun 03 May 2009 11:12 Post subject: Re: The native people of Greenland
Whatareyou? wrote:
What are the Inuits categorized as?
It depends on who is doing the categorizing. According to their government, they are citizens of Denmark.
There is simply no way to categorize the vast and bewildering diversity of our species into just five or six groups, and scientists abandoned the effort to do this many decades ago. Depending on your reason to classify people, then by looking at blood types, DNA, language, and culture it is possible to categorize humanity into tens of thousands of overlapping populations. In this sense, as William said, Greenlanders are a mixture of Inuit and Scandinavian genes, language, and culture.
As a historian of the U.S., I often classify past Americans by which side of the U.S. color line they were on (Black or White). Greenlanders are neither--they are not Americans. As a molecular anthropologist, I often study the relative Afro-Euro-Native American admixture of New World inhabitants, and that is why I wrote that Greenlanders are a mixture of Inuit and Scandinavian genes, language, and culture.
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