Another race question

[Good Idea]

The previous race thread got me to wondering about something. If you look at Track & Field records you will find that the vast majority of the fastest times ever recorded in the sprints from 100m to 400m belong to people who can trace their ancestry to west Africa. The events from 10,000m thru the marathon are dominated by people from east Africa. This is fact, you can look it up.
I'm guessing that this may be because the dense vegetation in west Africa required the indigenous people to be able to run quickly and with great agility over short distances. While in east Africa with it's huge savannahs and long distances between water sources, people had to cover long distances but not necessarily run fast in a sprint. The people in both groups are "black" but their physical predispositions are totally different.
In the previous thread the question was "Are whites smarter than blacks?" or something like that. What I'm wondering is how can we label a "race" as something as general as "black" and assign it an intelligence value when there are such differences within the "black" race?

Regards,
G.I.

[Hopey]

Thank you, Jimmy the Greek.

[Prodigy54321]

I believe they were confining this to a statistical average, so the question is still valid.

It pertains to the defferences in the specific genetic mutation (of white people actually I believe), and not factors independent of this mutation..such as region where a specific race developed.

I'm not sure that a study could be done of such magnitude to come to an accurate conclusion on this, but if it could be done..it would still be a valid statistic.

[mostsmooth]

im pretty sure the long distance runners are benefitting from running/training in the high altitudes then competing in lower altitudes

[Rduke55]

The point you are making about differences between the groups in a race is a fantastic one. A poster made a similar point using that example in an earlier thread about intelligence and race (that thread unfortunately looked pretty much the same as the recent one).

[Rduke55]

[ QUOTE ]
im pretty sure the long distance runners are benefitting from running/training in the high altitudes then competing in lower altitudes

[/ QUOTE ]

I think there are some proposed evolutionary differences as well. Often a comparison people will make in class and articles about human evolution is comparing the inuit body structure to the east african structure.