If you have not read the book by Audrey Smedley, "Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview" it is really worth picking up. Most Americans think they know that people belong to distinct "races" with distinguishing characteristics that go deeper than skin pigmentation. In truth these differences are entirely cultural, minor differences like sickle cell anemia aside. It's hard to summarize a three hundred page thesis in a sentence, but Smedley basically proves that race is a culturally perpetuated myth (with very real social consequences) built on the British-American worldview and spread around the globe by first British and then American cultural influence.
Detailed mitochondrial and nucleic DNA studies, done in conjunction with the sequencing of the human genome, have proven that the first humans migrated from Africa out to all corners of the globe only 150,000 to 300,000 years ago. I know I read somewhere else that some European ethnic groups differ more genetically from other groups of Europeans than they do from native Africans. Regardless, one of the distinguishing features of Europeans some continue to cling to is this silly idea that Europeans interbred with Neanderthals to create the Caucasian "race" and that this hybrid combination is somehow superior to the native African "race".
The pure fiction of Neanderthal interbreeding is even propogated in one of this summer's blockbuster hits! In X-Men 2, Jada Pinkett Smith explains to a tour groups in a matter-of-fact way how "modern science" has shown interbreeding between humans and Neandethals led to the evolution of modern man. Completely bogus, but said as if it were the fact the fiction of the X-Men mutants are somehow based on. It just goes to show how widespread the belief is in this truly bogus concept. Here is yet another report dispelling the Neandethal interbreeding myth:
Cro-Magnon man won out over Neanderthal man, but without genetic mixing, Italian researcher Giorgio Bertorelle and his team report in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The report lends evidence to the theory that anatomically modern humans emerged from Africa some 150,000 years ago and eventually displaced earlier humans, such as Neanderthals in Europe, but without mixing.
They extracted DNA from the skeletons of two anatomically modern Cro-Magnon men (Homo sapiens sapiens), who inhabited Europe between 23,000 and 25,000 years ago.
The DNA was compared with extracts from the anatomically archaic Neanderthal who lived approximately 29,000 to 42,000 years ago.
Cro-Magnon humans differ widely in their genetic makeup from Neanderthals studied. That finding, according to the researchers, suggests modern man's ancestors has no links with genes from Neanderthal man.
"This discontinuity is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that both Neanderthals and early anatomically modern humans contributed to the current European gene pool," researchers conclude.