Human Evolution Recognition

So I was thinking today about how people can general say that they are better at recognizing features of people of their own race and ancestry. So a question popped into my head. Is this difference in facial recognition fundamental to the nature of that person or a product of their being surrounded for most of their lives by a certain type of person? This could be discovered by comparing people of a particular ancestry that had different geographic and social conditions during their development. we would want to see the degree of activation of the brain, specifically the FFA (fuciform face area) during the stimulus of people of different degrees of genetic separation from that person. Then if it is true that people have a fundamental ability to recognize their own ancestry, perhaps even there is a correlation between a person's genetic separation and ability to recognize. Then if that is true, maybe we can use human computation to measure genetic difference further down the line.

we can clearly think of what the face of an ape look like. We can recognize that it is an ape. we can even think clearly about and visualize several different structures found on the ape's face. But since genetic separation between humans and apes is not insignificant, we can not bring it to light with the same detail another human's eyes and nose and cheeks and chin and hair appears in our minds.

With that we can jump to another end and think about our recognition of dogs and cats. Still mammals, we can see a dog's smile and have strong empathy for them when hurt. Further down the line we come to birds which have faces and features that we can recognize as being related to our own. we can see a beak is a mouth and a bird's eyes are like our own. We can picture the world from a bird's eye view as we glide across the sky from tree to tree to light pole. Then we can jump to an ant. We know it has a head. We can see it has some kind of eyes that are less like our own than the bird's. We can barely make out the features beyond that that the ant has that we share. Through all these, we would hopefully see the difference in activation within the brain. Our significant difference block our ability to recognize and have true connections with them.

But then again perhaps these differences in recognition further back in the chain of human life are merely about geography rather than genetics. If we grow up in a certain area and our ancestors grew up in another area, and the grandparents of someone else grew up somewhere else, then would it be the case that we could recognize better the things our ancestors saw which would be different from the things another person's ancestor's witnessed. This would mean that the differences we could find further down the line may just be because our ancestor's saw less of those sorts of animals. For instance, many people have a good grasp of the differences between trees just as their parents had and their parents before them. So even though the genetic split between humans and trees is enormous, human interactions with trees over thousands of years has increased our ability to recognize the features of trees and our interactions with cats and dogs has increased our ability to emote with cats and dogs.

But the funny thing is, if the second is true, it would be a way of self distinguishing people's fairly local ancestry and if the other is the case then it would be a way to self distinguish people's long term ancestry.

but either way do they all look the same?

We Are Not I

We are the family
We are the friends
We are the city
We are the state
We are the continent
We are the human race
we are nature's way
we are tired for days
we are endless pain
we are lesson's learned
we are timeless, burnt into the ways of every piece of everything

but we are not I