Rap & Hip Hop: Our homie Del the Funkee Homosapien is releasing a new album. Thoughts?

I'd love to know what research you read, which suggested indigenous Australians are not fully Homo sapiens. I don't know of any mainstream anthropological researcher in the last 90 years who has suggested Australian Aboriginals are not fully modern humans. Or possibly you misinterpreted the author's argument.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands communities in Australia are certainly beset with severe social and economic problems. This should concern all Australians. The problems in Aboriginal society are not caused by any biological or developmental factors.

They are the direct result of extreme dislocation, dispossession, economic exclusion and racism from the broader Australia society for over 200 years. Many of the problems facing Aboriginals closely resemble the problems faced by indigenous peoples in other areas: Inuit and Canadian Aboriginals in Canada, Native Americans in the US, Papuans in Indonesia, Dayaks and Punan in Borneo, Tribal peoples in India, and Maori in New Zealand - to name a few. They all face (in varying degrees) comparable problems of poverty, broken families, unemployment, drug use and criminal violence.

If these 'dysfunctional' aspects of Australian Aboriginal society are caused by organic or biological factors such as human species or stage of human evolution, then we'd have to assume all the other dispossed indigenous peoples were also aberrant subspecies of Homo sapiens. From the biological angle, Australian Aboriginals are totally modern humans. In fact there are no human species or subspecies anywhere in the world today, apart from modern humans.

All humans alive today are closely related - we are ALL descended from a small group of people who lived in East Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago; in fact everyone alive today can trace their ancestry back to a single woman, who lived around 200,000 years ago (see 'Mitochondrial Eve' link, below). It is true that Australian Aboriginals have a small amount of Denisovan DNA (> 4%), the same as Melanesians and many peoples in South East Asia. But Europeans likewise have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, but no-one argues Europeans aren't fully modern humans.

It's good that you are concerned about the issues facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. But you are setting yourself up for failure and ridicule, if you start with this pseudo-biological approach. It has absolutely no scientific basis, It also assumes that indigenous Australians are the cause, rather than the victim, of their problems.

A more realistic and practical place to start is to look at the things have been done *to* them. I strongly recommend you look at the book "Indigenous Australians for Dummies", written by Professor Larissa Behrendt (and with a foreward by Malcolm Fraser). It's part of the popular "... for Dummies" series; and gives a readable, accessible overview of indigenous culture, history, politics and current social issues.

It is very politically incorrect to call them anything other than H sapiens. If you try, you will be compared with Hitler... But then... we do have to ask why it is that all human skulls (from Africa, America, Europe and Asia) looked the same, sans skin. And the aborigines skulls are different (Play kids song here: one of these things is not like the other...) Oh, and then there is evidence (check this for yourself because the study I read was a small test group) that their brains are measurably smaller than Caucasian brains.

Frankly, I think the aborigines deserve their own classification.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.