Originally Posted by
TIDE-HSV
Oh my, where to start. "Oriental" is of Latin derivation and refers to the area roughly from the Dardanelles to the Pacific. "Asia" is originally of Greek origin and refers to exactly the same area. There have been quibbles over time about the western boundary (it's not truly geographic), there has never been any disagreement about the eastern boundary - it is the Pacific Ocean. To use "Oriental" as a substitute for "Eastern Asian" and insist that it's more specific is, well, silly. "Oriental" could mean anything from an Iraqi Arab to native Siberian. Those two groups do not share either dry ear wax or a paucity of aprocrine glands. In fact, the contrary is true. I'll just have to stick to "Eastern Asian," since it is the term which is really descriptive, not "Oriental."Now, to the yawning fracture line in your reasoning. You freely admit that Eastern Asian peoples ("Orientals" just for you) have dry ear wax, as a group, whereas you seem unable to grasp the concept that this same group also shares the characteristic of having the fewest apocrine glands of any population on earth. In Koreans, they are sometimes completely absent. To postulate that it just happens that the same ethnic group shares both a sparse number of apocrine glands and dry ear wax and it's all just an accident and does not pertain to location and ethnic grouping staggers the imagination. Under the skin, we're all Africans, having departed the motherland around 100K years ago. The theory is "ROA," (recently out of Africa), to which I subscribe. However, we have had time to evolve different variations, lighter skin for manufacture of vitamin "D," etc. For some reason, we've evolved other adaptations. Native Africans have retained a much higher number of both eccrine and apocrine glands. The high number of eccrine glands is understandable, since they are directly involved in cooling. The oily-secretion apocrine glands, which output combines with skin flora to produce distinctive odors are more of a mystery - specifically as why they should have decreased in number, the further away from Africa the particular population has moved. That is particularly true since there is less DNA variation between a Chinese native and a Caucasian than any two African village inhabitants. Anyway, bottom line, only as a group, there are going to be mass differences in body odor, for reasons incompletely understood. OTOH, there can be huge variations between any two individuals in a particularly ethnic group and body odors can also be attributed to diet and other factors...