Ancient pale invaders replaced China's dark aboriginals.

how china became chinese.

Last year, I picked up Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). The book has been blasted, from the left, right, and center as outdated, inaccurate, and environmentally deterministic. Still, I wanted to read the book as a test. Was it well written, in spite of the errors? Would it be convincing from a layman’s perspective? Could I spot the inaccuracies myself, given my amateur knowledge? Rather than presume that I had all the answers to Diamond’s thesis, and dismiss it without reading it, I wanted to confront it and be able to defeat it point-by-point.

Diamond’s family is thoroughly Jewish, and his environmental determinism is a religious commitment coming from the Boasian school of anthropology. These facts gave me no indication that Professor Diamond was racist, and I decided his book was worth reading. Diamond covers wide ground, ranging from America to Australia, Africa to Europe. But his most surprising chapter, by far, is on China.

To my surprise, Diamond proposes that China was founded by pale invaders from the north. I’ve heard all sorts of crackpot conspiracies about Chinese civilization: that it was founded by Scythians, Tocharians, Greeks, Atlanteans, Aryans, or Lemurians. All of these theories come from the theosophical tradition or Nazi occultism. Robert Sepehr is the most recent iteration of these types. But never in a million years did I expect to hear such ideas peddled by a mainstream Marxist like Jared Diamond.

To prove that I am not exaggerating, I will quote from the 2017 edition of the book. Diamonds points are as follows:

1. There are genetic, racial differences between northern Chinese and southern Chinese.

2. Northern Chinese are “taller, heavier, paler, with more pointed noses.”

3. Modern Asians are almost all descendants of these pale invaders, to varying degrees. The highest level of “pale” ancestry is concentrated in the Yellow River Valley, and then spreads out in decreasing concentric circles toward the south.

4. Native Asians, prior to 500 BC, were dark skinned and curly haired, like the Negritos of the Philippines. The Chinese expansion from the Yellow River resulted in a genocide of these peoples, much more extreme and complete in scope than the European conquest of North America, where at least a few Indian reservations still exist.

   

   What China looked like before the Pale Invaders, 500 BC.

chinese genetics.

Diamond begins by dismissing the idea that Chinese are genetically homogenous. “While a coarse racial classification of world peoples lumps all Chinese people [together] as so-called Mongoloids, that category conceals much more variation [emphasis added] than the differences between Swedes, Italians, and Irish within Europe.” (pg. 309)

Swedes and Italians are clearly distinct populations, different nationalities, with physical differences stretching back tens of thousands of years. Greek and Roman writers noted that northern Europeans were taller, blonder, and fairer skinned than residents of southern Europe.

Swedes are largely descended from three main populations: Western Hunter Gatherers, who split off from Middle Easterners over 40,000 years ago; Yamnaya Pastoralists, who are descended from a mixture of Caucasian and Ancient North Eurasian populations; and Early European Farmers from Anatolia. Italians also have this mix, but have a higher percentage of Anatolian farmer ancestry.

When white nationalists hear about these distinctions, they tend to equivocate and imagine that terms like “Anatolian Farmer” and “Western Hunter Gatherer” are just euphemisms for “farming white person” and “hunting white person.” In actuality, the genetic distance between the Early European Farmer population and Western Hunter Gatherers is equivalent to the genetic distance between Europeans and Asians.

Today, no vast genetic distance exists between Italians and Swedes, because they both are descended from a mixture of those three ancestral populations. Still, there are measurable differences in ancestral frequencies. Even in Britain, the proportion of EEF to WHG ancestry is measurable between Scotland and England, which are two of the most genetically similar national populations in Europe (who today speak the same language, although that was not true 1,000 years ago).

For Diamond to claim that there is greater genetic distance between north and south Chinese than between Swedes and Italians is to say that the distance is more akin to the distance between Swedes and Turks. In the same way that we would not say that Turkish immigrants to Sweden would result in a “homogeneous” population, it is in no way possible, in Diamond’s view, to call China “homogeneous.”

Diamond explains exactly what groups north Chinese cluster with. “North Chinese are most similar to Tibetans and Nepalese, while South Chinese are similar to Vietnamese and Filipinos. My North and South Chinese friends can often distinguish each other at a glance by physical appearance”. (pg. 309)

the himalayan urheimat

If we are to run with Diamond’s theory, that north Chinese are descended from the ancestors of both Tibetans and Nepalese, then it seems reasonable to suppose that this Ur-Sino-Tibetan population originated somewhere within the borders of the Himalayas.

The reason for this is simple: it is much easier to run down a mountain than up it. While that may sound entirely silly, it does have relevance on a long enough timescale. For example, the mountains of the Caucasus are home to a plethora of different language families: Indo-European, Kartvelian, Circassic, and Altaic. The Circassic languages, sometimes blandly called the “Northwest Caucasian Languages,” are a language isolate which originated in the Caucasus.

Some Altaic languages, such as Nogay, Kumyk, and Kalmyk, hug the coast of the Caspian Sea, and are clearly not native to the area. Others, such as Balkar and Karachay, hug the northern border of the mountain range. Why does the region have such esoteric linguistic diversity? Why have larger languages in the region, such as Turkish or Russian, not swallowed up or assimilated these small cultures? Well, it is hard to walk up a mountain. The cost of conquering a mountain, such as Switzerland, means that the juice is not worth the squeeze. Therefore, these small peoples have been largely left to their own devices, to maintain their cultures without pressure from outside.

There are two popular explanations for the origins of the Indo-European peoples: out of Ukraine, and out of Anatolia. A lesser known hypothesis, which acts as a kind of middle-way between the two, is the out of Armenia hypothesis. If this hypothesis is true, then the mountains of the Caucasus are the homeland of Earth’s most widespread language family.

Using this out-of-Armenia hypothesis as a template, it is possible that the Sino-Tibetan languages originate from a mountainous region, like the Altaic languages, Indo-European languages, and Northwest Caucasian languages. This “out of Tibet” hypothesis corresponds to two mythologies. The first is the Mahabharata, which calls the Himalayas the realm of the Gods. This implies that the cultures which proceeded from the Himalayas were considered to be the ancestors of many subsequent populations, as Gods in primitive religions symbolize the archetypal ancestor.

The second myth comes from China, which states that the Yellow Emperor (founder of Chinese civilization) met with Guang Chengzi (a God) in the Kongtong mountains. Although the Kongton mountains are not in the Himalayas, they represent a mid-point between the Yellow River valley culture and the Himalayan mountain culture, both in terms of distance as well as altitude.

In summary, there are four dominant linguistic groups on earth at present: Indo-European, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, and Afro-Asiatic. Indo-European dominates the Americas, Europe, India, and much of Africa. Altaic was once dominant during the Mongol Empire, but now exists in central Asia and Turkey. Sino-Tibetan is dominant in China. Afro-Asiatic, which was historically called “Semitic,” extends from Iraq to Arabia and northern Africa. It is unknown whether Afro-Asiatic could also have originated from the Zagros mountains of Iran, or the Taurus mountains of Turkey, or even the very same Caucasus from which Indo-European originated. That would require further analysis. At the very least, it seems plausible that the earth, at present, is dominated by languages that ultimately derive from mountainous cultures. This runs in contradiction to the idea that “river valley peoples” created civilization.

Conclusion

Diamond concludes this chapter with the following: “So overwhelming was this Chinese steamroller that the former peoples of tropical Southeast Asia have left behind few traces in the region’s modern populations. Just three relict groups [..] the Semang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islanders, and the Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka—remain to suggest that tropical Southeast Asia’s former inhabitants may have been dark-skinned and curly-haired, like modern New Guineans”. (pg. 318)

Much more could be said about the population replacement of dark-skinned aboriginals by white-skinned invaders. When exactly did this occur? What is the latest genetic evidence to substantiate or contradict these claims? At the very least, the possibility of such a genocide casts a very different moral light on the actions of Europeans during the colonial period. It seems possible that Europeans are not the only colonial force in history, and in fact, were not even as violent or effective as the Chinese. It may be time to dispense with the idea of the Chinese as a “native” or “aboriginal” people, and to stop singling out Europeans as uniquely evil for the crime of colonialism.