There are many cranio-facial traits that separate us Humans from Neanderthals such as our spherical crania and small tucked in face. Just as skull dimensions can be used to divide the Homo genus into different species, they can also be used to divide our species into different races. In a landmark analysis called Cranial Cluster 28 Groups, Harvard anthropologist William W. Howells found that the many skull dimensions of 28 diverse human populations all fit nicely and neatly into just three categories which have historically been known as Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid. In Howell’s tree Negroids would include Africans, Andaman Islanders, and Australoids. Caucasoids would include Caucaoids (duh!) and Amerindians and Mongoloids would include Japanese, Asian, Ainu, Guam, Eskimos and Polynesians:

The above dendrogram should not be confused with a family tree because the cranial distance between populations does not necessarily reflect the time since their ancestors diverged (though there’d be a correlation).

For example Africans and Andaman islanders have virtually no cranial distance even though they have enormous chronological distance (70,000 years since they last shared an ancestral population).

Many people think of races as huge families so they would object to grouping populations that don’t share recent ancestry. However my attitude has always been, it’s not how recently you share a common ancestor, it’s how much of a common ancestor you share.

Unless their similar morphologies evolved independently, Africans and Andaman Islanders clearly share the Negroid phenotype which thus must have pre-dated the ancient African exodus 70,000 years ago.

The White supremacists hate this because they want to claim blacks only left Africa in chains. The Afro-centrists love this because they want to believe blacks were a pioneers who spread as far as Australia.

White supremacists cite DNA to argue that Africans and Australoids are among the most genetically distant populations on the planet, so how dare African take credit for colonizing Australia, but what they don’t understand is that much of our DNA has no impact on our phenotype and serves only as a molecular clock. Any accomplished race will by definition divide into distantly related families because colonizing distant lands for long periods of time is the very definition of evolutionary success, as long as those distantly related families genetically preserve the phenotype of their common ancestor. If we only defined taxa by DNA similarity, then by definition there would be no successful races or species because as soon as you existed or dispersed long enough, neutral DNA (a mere measure of time) would redefine you as a new taxa.