http://popups.lib.uliege.be/3041-5527/index.php?id=4531 Publications de Auteurs Milford H. Wolpoff fr 0 http://popups.lib.uliege.be/3041-5527/index.php?id=5984 The systematic morphological variation between human geographic groups is widely and quite correctly attributed to climatic and cultural adaptations. Certainly, the main distinguishing characters of race as socially defined have clear adaptive significance. These features include skin color, hair color and form, and stature and body proportions. However, the forensic bases for racial identifications involve skeletal features whose variation is often without obvious adaptive significance. The adaptive advantage prognathism vs. orthognathic faces, shoveled vs. flattened incisors, rounded vs. squared orbits, and others remain unknown. Multiregional evolution provides an explanation for the distribution of these non-adaptive variants. This paper discusses the Multiregional explanation, focusing on the center and edge hypothesis to account for the initial distribution of regional features such as these, and tracing the evolutionary history of regional continuities in several different areas. The point we wish to establish is that history as well as adaptation is an important cause of modern human variation. Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:34:44 +0100 Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:36:28 +0100 http://popups.lib.uliege.be/3041-5527/index.php?id=5984 http://popups.lib.uliege.be/3041-5527/index.php?id=4530 Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:15:29 +0200 Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:17:53 +0200 http://popups.lib.uliege.be/3041-5527/index.php?id=4530 http://popups.lib.uliege.be/3041-5527/index.php?id=1984 It is hard to believe that opinions about any fossil sample could vary as wildly and completely as opinions about Neandertals and their place in human evolution (compare Wolpoff et al. 2004 & Tattersall 2002). The Neandertal sample is more than adequate, and evolutionary theory is the universally held explanatory principle, so there must be more to the story. Part of this is the role Neandertals have come to play in our culture, but even this post-modernist explanation will not suffice. The most compelling explanation of how Neandertal studies landed in so deep a quagmire is that in determining how different Neandertals were from the human condition, the wrong question was being asked. Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:41:58 +0100 Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:37:06 +0100 http://popups.lib.uliege.be/3041-5527/index.php?id=1984