My dad had curly hair and dark, he also had lots of freckles and certainly carried red hair but on his body was virtually hairless (maybe because of red hair genes) so had dark curly hair but fair skin blue eyes and carried red hair. I have red baldness and hairy men live mainly around mediterranean. Now its possible to have red hair men who are very hairy and blond hair men depending on genes. Its possible hairy ancestors lived somewhere in Europe and genes have passed to other groups. Some dark hair men have no body hair at all. It might be due to environment maybe those living by coastal areas were more hairy but certainly its similar to whats happened in hair and eye colour so is bsldness and even within areas maybe all these genes are present?

What I would disagree on things are only explained by mass movements. Hunter gatherers had complex social network. In reality you only have to have a mate from a neighbouring population for a gene to spread so if a female with blond and blue eyes mixed with a darker haured population a gene or set of genes could spread elsewhere rather than a huge movement which surely would completely change a population. Not saying hunters didnt move but they could move in a territory and gradually pick up genes

I totally agree with you. I would like to add in Europe especially in the north meat was the few sources of food unlike elsewhere in the world so this can affect skin tone. I read of a European hunter gatherer with blue eyes yet darker skin. Now Inuits have darker skin despite living in the arctic but most is from fish diet. Once agriculture entered diet changed to dairy and other products this must have had a impact on biology. Most of the world is lactose intolerant. This requires certain genes. Genes can be passed on as there is an advantage to them for a certain set of circumstances.

That YouTube video took lorenz comments out of context. He said the samples were contaminated with The scientists European DNA. Because they could not replicate those same results. Also, the skulls were Sinodont and and within the variability of Native American morphology.

Does anyone know why he looks more Negroid than Khoisan? My impression was that negroid features were a much later development in West Africa.

It is a good thing to throw out, shred or use as toilet paper any studies and reports before the current date. Why? Because they are based on old data, old ideas and old paradigms. So Brace et al, Angel et al… garbage.

- At one time, before the last ice age, northern Eurasia was home to a population that was ancestral to present-day Europeans, Amerindians, and East Asians.
- Kennewick Man and the Ainu seem to be very close phenotypically to this archaic Eurasian population, probably because they lived in coastal refugia during the last ice age.
- Ancestral Amerindians seem to have branched off during the last ice age but before the peak or perhaps they moved eastward in response to this peak.
- Ancestral East Asians seem to have branched off by moving southward, while remaining within a subarctic or boreal environment.

Wasn’t the Mal’ta specimen found to be unrelated to East Asians?

So have the oldest specimens been found in NE Asia dating to the ice age, or are people just guessing or assuming that Mongoloids evolved in NE Asia during the ice age? Have people just found East Asian and Amerindian specimens and assumed that they must have evolved in NE Asia during the ice age? In which case, what’s the basis for this assumption?

Natural Law proponents make similar claims about Protestantism, that its rejection of natural law leads to fatalism, relativism, and moral nihilism. In the Catholic natural law tradition, natural law complements agent based, virtue ethics and the salvific power of works. Whereas, according to natural law proponents, Protestantism’s rejection of natural law and reduction of morality and salvation to a contractual relationship and faith alone leads to fatalistic views such as predestination and eventually moral relativism and nihilism.

Does this mean that the Windover Hill remains had West Eurasian genes (European) unique from other modern Amerindian populations? Was the testing done by Joseph Lorenz a false positive? I just read an article claiming that the testing done by Lorenz showed DNA too close to his own to rule out contamination. But I understand there was a lack of funding for further testing.

First, I would like to apologize for my use of the word silly. I was the one that was silly plus I was rude.

Second, I would like to make it as clear as I can that I was dwelling upon the idea that cats torment and torture; not that they don’t have some bio-chemical reinforcement mechanisms that influence their behavior. I do not know how instincts are formed and reinforced; it may be that pleasure is the main mechanism.

I know that cats have a predator’s instinct to chase, catch and kill. I am just trying to point out that the play with crippled prey will allow a cat to become better at executing that instinct. It serves a legitimate purpose in their existence.

I also think that humans have a predator’s instinct as well. Whether that derives from a common thread that runs through all predators I don’t know. We execute this instinct in varied ways and I don’t mean just by killing Cecils.

Let me give you a scenario that will very clearly illustrate what I mean. If this doesn’t work, I will stop trying.

Suppose my mother cat brings back a crippled chipmunk and lets her kittens play with it until it is finished off by one of the kittens. I do not consider this to be torture. I do not intervene.

Instead, suppose I take the wounded chipmunk and decide to have some fun. I break a leg and see how far it can get on three legs. Then I poke out both eyes and have a good laugh while watching a three-legged blind chipmunk try to get away. I would be engaging in torment and torture.

I make a very clean, completely unambiguous distinction between what I did and what the kittens did. You can consider them the same if you want.

Natural selection has favored cats that feel intense pleasure when they catch and kill mice. End of story.

Natural selection has favored cats that are the best at catching prey. Practicing on crippled prey hones some of the skills that make a good predator. Mother cats bring crippled prey to their kittens and let them chase and catch in order to teach them how to catch prey. I have watched them do this for over sixty years. Cats do not experience pleasure, nor do they torment or torture, those experiences have been reserved to humans.

I wrote “subsequent in-migration.” The word subsequent means “at a later date.” After the depopulation at the peak of the ice age, other people began to move in from the south, when the climate began to improve.

So wouldn’t this mean that the Mongoloids evolved south of northeast Asia, either in Asia or the Americas or both? And if both, that there was convergent evolution?

The broader natural law tradition, derived largely from the Catholic natural law tradition, is derived from Plato and Aristotle, as well as the later Stoics. The Stoics are often credited as originating natural law, but the tradition has been based on Plato and Aristotle as well.

Protestantism tends to eschew or depart from, either directly or indirectly, classical philosophy and tends to reject natural law, whereas natural law is a major foundation of Catholic theology. This can lead to quite different conceptions of morality.

Ok, but you don’t seem to have a point here.

This is a link to an old Science Channel Special that claims the DNA was of pre Colombian European origin. The special is a bit old so maybe they have done more accurate testing as of late. The Wikipedia account did list that the human remains had haplogroup X which I understand has been hypothesized to be of west Eurasian and possibly Iberian origin as it virtually does not exist in Siberia or East Asia.

I believe Dr. Joseph Lorenz of the Coriell institute made the determination the DNA was of European origin.

No actually they do it because when the cat delivers the killing bite it is exposing vulnerable vital areas like eyes to a mouse attack . Mice like other animals freeze totally when a cat gets them, and many animals will turn and attack a predator when they can’t get away. Tom has to make sure Jerry is dead. So to get cats to avoid injury, they have been selected to enjoy torturing mice.

Cats are trying to improve their owners’ hunting skills by bringing them half dead mice. Having never seen their owners catch anything the cat brings them a prey animal to get the idea across, just as the mother cat did with them. Anyway, stop pestering busy people with irrelevant issues.

The depopulation doesn’t seem to have been total, however. The ancient DNA from 17,000 years ago still looks like something between Europeans and Amerindians, but there does seem to have been subsequent in-migration of people from the south.

If the area was depopulated and there was in-migration from the south, wouldn’t that mean that they evolved elsewhere before the migration?

Also, why would they move north during an ice age, the peak of an ice age no less, where it’s colder and there’s less food?

It just killed for pleasure.

This is silly.

They do it because the cats that do this improve their hunting skills. It trains their young to be better hunters and their descendants will continue with this behavior. The non-descendants of cats that did not do this are not here. There are probably experts in this field that could tell us a lot more. I would guess that repeated activation of the chase and kill behavior has all kinds of benefits for the hunter.

You are an anthropologist. Go get some examples of warrior castes practicing killing on the slave and peon classes before going into battle against other warriors.

If you pick up on minor points of people’s comments it opens the door for others to pick up on yours. For example, they do not accept the Trinity so Unitarians are not even Christians, let alone Protestants.

Alasdair McIntyre makes a good case that the past is another country for morality.

There were odd looking people in the north too. In what was now Sweden 8000 years ago was the Motola hunter gatherers who were of diverse skin colour and 4/7 had the Asian EDAR mutations, which has effects on appearance including hair, teeth, ears, breasts and sweat glands so the Motala people looked (and smelled) unlike any group of modern Europeans.

Interesting. Thanks for the post. Given this information, I found the following news article amusing. I know the people at the Motala site 8000 years ago are different than the people there today, but I still found it amusing :

http://www.thelocal.se/20150419/ugly-swedes-offered-total-makeover

now seems to be a kind of postmodern Unitarianism that promises salvation to everyone and everything.

3And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

4But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

5For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.

What’s your point? Thomism isn’t just one aspect of Catholic theology, but a central part of it, and it has a longer history than Protestantism itself.

Also, the Catholic view of a moral universe with natural law predates Aquinas. You’ve never heard of St. Augustine?

Great article!

Mr. Frost,

I was curious as to your impressions of the Windover Hill Bog Mummies of Florida. To my understanding the DNA retrieved from these Bog People was or European origin as well as their skeletal characteristics. Was this due to error in DNA sampling? Or were they different then Kennewick man. How did European DNA get to Pre Colombian Florida? Could they give life to the supposedly dead Soloutrean Hypothesis? Or could they simply show decent from the same population as Mal’ta specimen near lake Baikal?

Morality is something that humans impose on an amoral world. It originally was the set of rules for proper living among humans of the same tribe. It has since become universalized by various religions, i.e., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Bahai, etc

.
Thomas Aquinas’s guide was Aristotle, who referred to non-human creatures as “other animals”. I think you are taking Thomism as a timeless Catholic position .

This is corroborated by archaeological evidence. There seems to have been widespread depopulation in northeast Asia at the peak of the last ice age.

But you said in your previous comment that “The current appearance of Amerindians and East Asians seems to have developed during the last Ice Age in northeastern Asia.”

If NE Asia had depopulated during the Ice Age, how could they have evolved there?

I’m surprised that several commenters have challenged my belief that the universe is fundamentally amoral. This was what I was taught in Sunday School. God’s covenant is only for humans, and only for those who welcome Jesus into their hearts. There now seems to be a kind of postmodern Unitarianism that promises salvation to everyone and everything. Even your kitty cat will get to go to heaven …

Perhaps that is the Protestant view? In Catholicism, the universe is not fundamentally amoral. There is a moral universe, and its Natural Laws can be determined by Reason, like the physical laws. Also, faith in Jesus is not sufficient for salvation in Catholicism.

You misconceive the point of the is/ought distinction. True that science cannot prescribe an ought which is not already in the logical formulation, though it can sometimes tell you what you ought to do if, for moral or other reasons, you wish to achieve a particular end. But that is to concede you were addressing the right point.

The relevant point to address is whether there is any other source of morality than that which our scientific thinking can easily convince us is the source of moral codes, namely what human groups living together agree on as the rules which maintain tolerable social peace and stability and seem to work because adherence has gone with a flourishing tribe or wider ethnic group. It obviously could take some repeated harsh lessons for people who remembered good times when they had been very happy worshipping Baal….

“Kennewick Man. His skull looked European, yet genetically he was closer to Amerindians.”

No, genetically he is NOT related to an American Indian/”native” American group. (They’re not native, they came here from Siberia… You might call them “First Nations” folks, as the Canadians do, but then you’re not aware of the Clovis and pre-Clovis folks, who preceded “native” Americans by many hundreds of years and not by way of Siberia.)

Really good article:
===============
…
Now, though, after two decades, the dappled, pale brown bones are at last about to come into sharp focus, thanks to a long-awaited, monumental scientific publication next month co-edited by the physical anthropologist Douglas Owsley, of the Smithsonian Institution. No fewer than 48 authors and another 17 researchers, photographers and editors contributed to the 680-page Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton (Texas A&M University Press), the most complete analysis of a Paleo-American skeleton ever done.
…
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/kennewick-man-finally-freed-share-his-secrets-180952462/#gzY2SujRi5SG7Qo0.99
===============

The current appearance of Amerindians and East Asians seems to have developed during the last Ice Age in northeastern Asia.

What’s the evidence for this view? Have they found remains there? I think you’ve said before that there wasn’t continued settlement there during the Ice Age but continual die offs and resettlement from outside because it was too inhospitable.

Look at Japan during the tsunami. There was no looting or rioting, even though there was nothing to stop looting or rioting. The same in India during recent flooding.

Look at them (and any others you have in mind) before a natural disaster. They are different before, during and after.

The separation between ancestral Amerindians and ancestral East Asians is usually set in the time period of 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, i.e., after the glacial maximum.

That’s before Kennewick man, no? Wouldn’t that suggest that there was either convergent evolution or that Mongoloids evolved in the Americas and then went northwest into Asia?

Our analysis detects a genome-wide signal of selection at this locus, but instead of the signal being one of positive selection with a coefficient of 0.036 as in a previous study of ancient DNA in the eastern Europe steppe8, our signal is of weakly negative selection One possible explanation is local adaptation: that the allele is advantageous in the north and disadvantageous in the south of Europe. [!] This hypothesis is supported by the fact that our data shows that an extreme north-south gradient in allele frequencies has been maintained in Europe for the last 8,000 years (Figure 2C, Extended data Figure 3).

continued

The remaining two genome-wide signals are both located on chromosome 11 in the genes FADS1 and NADSYN1. FADS1 (and its linked family member FADS2), are involved in fatty acid metabolism, and variation at this locus is associated with plasma lipid and fatty acid concentration. The derived allele of he most significant SNP in our analysis, rs174546, is associated with decreased triglyceride levels31. This locus is therefore a plausible target of selection related to changes in diet. Variants at NADSYN1 (and the nearby DHCR1), have been associated with circulating vitamin D levels and the most associated SNP rs7940244 in our dataset is highly differentiated across closely related Northern European populations suggesting the possibility of selection related to variation in environmental sources of vitamin D.

If natural selection has made closely related north European populations highly differentiated in their vitamin d metabolism people, then those adapted to “environmental sources of vitamin D” (ie UVb) near the equator would not do too well, because they are completely lacking the fine metabolic adaptation and light pigmentation. Yet there are black Africans growing up and living in countries like Sweden who are suffering no ill effects at all. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies took years to compile an authoritative report on D for the US and Canadian governments, it recommended no special vitamin D requirements for blacks, even in northern Canada. What the paper is saying is wrong.

So Swedes are mainly Yamnaya. OK how did Swedes get to have their distinctive pigmentation? If it was just living in the latitude of Sweden how come there were 1/7 dark people in Motala. Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe line 75-92

The derived allele of rs12913832 at the HERC2/OCA2 locus is the primary determinant of blue eyes in Europeans, and may also contribute to light skin and hair pigmentation25-28. Our analysis detects a genome-wide signal of selection at this locus, but instead of the signal being one of positive selection with a coefficient of 0.036 as in a previous study of ancient DNA in the eastern Europe steppe our signal is of weakly negative selection (

That’s very funny.

Both Swedes and Irish are ~50% Bronze Age steppe, but much of the rest of their ancestry is somewhat different.

Also, their more recent ancestry is somewhat different, with Swedes no doubt having a higher proportion of Corded Ware ancestry.

On the other hand, Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Bronze Age steppe origin That is why Swedes look so much like west coast Irish, because THEY ARE BOTH MAINLY YAMNAYA?

Another question. Does farming make people more sedentary, and less war-like? And are hunter gatherers more aggressive and roaming?

Generally speaking yes but

1) if there is a particularly valuable static food source, for example a lake, that can support a sedentary HG population then the local HGs may become sedentary to hold onto it so in that regard they are like farmers already. I think any population that made the jump from HG to farmer are likely to have started that way – sedentary HGs.

2) there’s being war-like as an individual and war-like as a group. I think dense sedentary populations need to become less war-like on an individual basis for social peace however if farming creates larger populations then the farmer group gains an advantage in numbers and that advantage can compensate for being less war-like on an individual basis.

Intuitively, the answer seems to be yes, and yet all I hear about early history is that farmers spread and took over everywhere.

Farming produced larger numbers so they greatly outnumbered the HGs and (imo) simply pushed them off any territory that could support farming.

However there was a lot of territory that didn’t support farming where the HGs survived for a time and long enough on the periphery of the farming spread for them to adapt and bounce back in numbers.

Did hunter gatherers ever take over farmers territory?

There may be one or two examples but generally no – hunter-gathering supports too few people per square mile. On the other hand the HGs that turned into herders on the edge of the farming zone did it a lot as (imo) they had the same war-like traits combined with larger numbers.

#

The point about selection for body heat is very interesting. Mobile HGs without a nice warm house might need more of it than sedentary farmers.

There’s no need to limit this discussion to pigmentation SNPs, because we have information from hundreds of thousands of neutral SNPs, both genome wide and Y-chromosome, which clearly show that these massive population turnovers did take place.

That is impossible to argue, because Middle Neolithic Western and Central Europeans did not resemble modern Europeans in the context of modern West Eurasian/European variation.

They were just too western, and that’s because they lacked steppe ancestry. You can see this in any half decent analysis.

But it’s also important to note that the steppe invaders had a very high ratio of European Mesolithic ancestry; higher than most Europeans today.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-homo-sapiens-became-the-ultimate-invasive-species/

This suggests hunter gatherers have nothing to fight over, but experiments in south Africa suggest coastal shellfish exploitation can mean 4000 plus calories for an individual hour’s work. The shellfish grounds were first thing worth fighting over, and that these valuable resources triggered territoriality in early human groups. Here you say

I suspect its origins go back to a unique Mesolithic culture that once existed along the North Sea and the Baltic (Price, 1991). At that time, an abundance of marine resources drew people to the coast each year for fishing, sealing, and shellfish collecting, thus creating large but fluid settlements unlike anything seen in other hunter-gatherers. Social interactions would have largely involved non-kin, and there would have thus been strong selection for mechanisms that could enforce social rules in the absence of kin obligations.

Hmm, as hunter gatherers they would have nothing to fight over, but in the Mesolithic cooperation to ensure food for the family might have required rather more nefarious activities than food processing. The group would need to be big enough to defend the coastal resources, but the members would have to not run away. http://prospect.org/article/evolutionary-roots-altruism

A shorter version comes from a paper he wrote with another famous Wilson, Edward O.: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

But consider for a moment some real human instances. After stealing vast tracts of land from Native Americans, largely slaughtering them in the process, competitive Euro-Americans held land rushes in which the conquerors raced as fast as they could to plant flags and claim hundreds of acres each. This land was stolen from people who lived in far more cooperative groups, believed much less in individual property rights, and often viewed land as a resource held in common. They vied with each other before white culture came, and perhaps more cooperative groups prevailed. But faced with a less cooperative group than any of theirs, the Native Americans lost.

On the other hand, the Nazis who murdered most of the Jews of Europe were very organized indeed, much more so than the communities they destroyed. Some scientists project group replacement back through human evolution. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in A Cooperative Species, explain the evolution of cooperation as a result of what they believe was extreme group conflict, with the elimination of less cooperative groups throughout the formation of our species. [...] But altruism is safe in the end, according to Wilson, because only groups that control these disruptive forces can succeed against other groups, which will disintegrate, dwindle, or be destroyed.

Leaving aside how plausible his scenario is, we have known at least since sociologist Lewis Coser published his 1950s classic, The Functions of Social Conflict—backed by long historical experience—that group conflict tends to bring out the best and the worst in people. Sure, groups at war cohere quite beautifully. The difficulty is that the group has to be really nasty to outsiders. If you need group conflict to evolve cooperation, why don’t you need group conflict to sustain it? And if you do, the logic of group selection seems no help in getting to the kind of cooperation that includes all humanity—the group that is not at war because there is no outsider left to fight.

No, that’s not what I think. If we go back in time, we get closer to the time when Amerindians, East Asians, and Europeans were the same population. Kennewick Man was no fluke. This is a general time trend we see in prehistoric Amerindian remains.

Was there convergent evolution for East Asians and Amerindians? Or did Mongoloids evolve in the Americas?

I wish commentators would take their annoyingly combative comments over to the political ideology blogs.

Razib Khan has an excellent blog post on the Genetic Architecture and Natural History of Pigmentation here ww.unz.com/gnxp/the-genetic-architecture-natural-history-of-pigmentation/

We don’t really know why natural selection worked on the very few genes that control skin pigmentation…yet. There are several possibilities. That is the nature of science. What we do know is that very few genes control skin pigmentation and this supports Frost’s statement that replacement of one population by another has quite possibly been exaggerated because natural selection has likely worked to lighten the skin of Europeans over this time frame.

On the other hand, Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Bronze Age steppe origin, but with significant Mesolithic and Neolithic admixture from West and Central Europe.

If I’m not mistaken, Peter Frost disputes this and argues that Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Mesolithic ancestry with minor Bronze Age steppe and Neolithic ancestry and primarily cultural imposition of diffusion of the Indo-European languages.

It’s extremely unlikely that any prehistoric Europeans were dark or exotic enough to be called black.

Based on their genotype data it seems that they were mostly of different shades of brown, but quite a few, including both the hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers, probably had fair skin.

Also, it already seems fairly obvious that southern Europeans are in large part of Neolithic Anatolian origin. On the other hand, Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Bronze Age steppe origin, but with significant Mesolithic and Neolithic admixture from West and Central Europe.

When I say steppe, I mean the European steppe and forest steppe in what are now Russia and Ukraine. The people who lived there during the Early Bronze Age (ie. our ancestors) were also probably mostly brown, but also very northern in terms of genome-wide genetic structure.

In any case, it seems that when they moved west their descendants lightened up very quickly, so that by the time of the Andronovo culture, even the Asian steppe was mostly populated by Kurgan people with lots of light hair and eyes and fair skin.

If there was selection for peaceful and submissive, there would never have been any revolutions. Most of which are quite violent and some display savagery that surpasses that of your HGs.

Our scientific knowledge of the universe does not indicate that any morality whatsoever is part of the fundamental structure of the universe.

Science is limited and one of its limits is that it does not address a whole lot of things. History cannot be tested by the scientific method (no experiments) and has its own method. Morality is something that is beyond science because science addresses the “is” part of the reality and morality addresses the “ought” part of the reality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem.

The fact that science cannot detect X does not mean that X does not exist. Science is a path (a method) to the truth, not the only path to the truth. In addition, it is not an infallible method. today’s science is different than tomorrow’s science. DNA was not detected by science for longtime so, for a longtime, you could say “our scientific knowledge does not indicate that there are physical things that produce biological inheritance”.

You seem to be affected by a radical scientism, a philosophical position you are not aware of.

In addition, your position is contradictory. The assertion you base your reasoning on:

“If something is not proven by science is false”

Cannot be proven by science so it’s false by your standards and you enter into a contradiction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_contradiction). Your metaphysical assumptions are self-defeating.

The problem with people who think that science is everything and philosophy is useless is that they have a (completely contradictory) philosophy and they don’t even notice.

“The other 60-70% arrived from the East Mediterranean and Russia/Ukraine in the last 8,000 years. ”

Doesn’t that mean that if 40-50% comes from R/U then 20% comes from EM, isn’t that similar to what Peter is saying?

I find Peter’s work interesting because he comes up with plausible hypotheses that take into consideration several disciplines. Over at Eurogenes I find the discussion seems to revolve around the details of stats programmes or, a back and forth debate between statistical and linguistic perspectives. Nothing seems to be certain yet and Peter deserves credit for his holistic approach.

Regarding myths – Maciamo at Eupedia suggested that the Leprechaun myth (little people hiding precious metals) could originate with the arrival of taller people looking for copper. Then there is the Norse cow-god myth which is interesting too.

“Indirectly. Farming leads to the creation of a food surplus that can be seized by powerful individuals and used to amplify their power. They now have the means to pay for underlings of all sorts: servants, assistants, soldiers, etc. This is how states come into being. All states originate in gangs of warriors who monopolize the use of violence. The result is a pacification of social relations, which leads to selection for individuals who are more peaceful and submissive.”

That’s the hidden meaning of the Adam and Eve myth (I hypothesize): http://goo.gl/uikvFb

“Morality is something that God gave only to human beings, and not to the universe.”

And in Genesis at least, if you read it literally, a humanoid-looking creature was fully human if only if it “feared God.” See here for details: https://goo.gl/kO3Wzk

“Southern Europe and the Middle East were initially home to dark African-like people, who were then replaced by European-like people, apparently from the north, beginning around 12,000 ago. The process of replacement was still incomplete, however, during the time of those northern Greek farmers 7,500 to 5,500 years ago. That last date is very close to the dawn of history.”

Don’t the Indo-European speaking peoples come into play here?

What would induce hunter/gatherers to take up agriculture? I read that some of the Iroquois who were still into hunting but had started growing corn also were able to militarily dominate neighboring tribes who hadn’t. Maybe because they had a portable food supply they could take with them in the field?

“Indeed, if we look at pre-Columbian America, we see that farming first developed in Mesoamerica and then spread north through cultural diffusion.”

Do you think this might explain why some of the surviving art objects in the Mississippian cultures have a kind of Meso-American look? At least they strike me that way.

“a human is not a chimp with a body shave”

Good line. You should assemble some of your pieces into one or more Kindle books, like I did: http://goo.gl/C4k2H7

,

Ok, I was too harsh.
“I am questioning the degree of replacement and whether it originated in the Middle East.”

Two separate teams have sampled Neolithic Anatolian genomes and have confirmed(with abstracts) they were of the same ancestral stock as Neolithic Europeans. Both teams made it clear they think Neolithic Europeans were from Anatolia after looking at the data.

“Personally, I believe that about 20% of the present-day European gene pool comes from those Middle Eastern farmers”

All of Europe except the Eastern and Northern edges were inhabited by “WHG” in the Mesolithic. Those WHGs-folks contribution to modern Europeans peaks at 30-40% in North and SouthWest Europeans. The other 60-70% arrived from the East Mediterranean and Russia/Ukraine in the last 8,000 years.

Parental markers and Ancient DNA also make it clear the WHG-folk were mostly replaced.

“The genes that make Europeans look European are a tiny subset of the genome. One can look African and still be European when one looks at the whole genome.”

There’s a lot of variation within single populations. You can’t always tell someone is European by looking at their skull. Sometimes the skull might look African, but in life the person looked European.

I have to say. There’s no way Neolithic Greeks looked anything like Africans!! I just don’t see why you think this is likely. Middle Easterns and Europeans share many of the same features, despite sharing little common ancestry in the last 7,000 years.

I mean look at Sardinians!! Once Neolithic Anatolian and Greek genomes are published, we’ll see Sardinians trace 80%+ of their blood to those people. Sardinians have the same basic features as Europeans and Middle Easterns do. Sardinians could actually probably blend in with Middle Easterns if they immigrated there. No surprise, they have shared very ancient Middle Eastern ancestry.

I know you like the idea that physical appearance changes a lot overtime, and that our ancestors looked totally differnt from us. But often this isn’t the case.

“Just as Kennewick Man looks European while being Amerindian when one looks at the whole genome.’

Native Americans and East Asians share a lot of the same features. Do you think they evolved independently in America and Asia? So, Kennewick man is an exception. There certainly were early Americans with the same features as modern ones running around in that era.

“Three of them had white skin, three of them had inconclusive data, and one had dark skin. ”

We can’t predict skin color at all with DNA. A lot more research is needed. There are plenty of Middle Easterns with the two Light skin mutations and they have Brown skin. My brother and I lack one of the mutations and are pale like any-other Europeans. We don’t know what skin color the Motala HGs had. To pronounce it as fact that we know the skin color of each individual isn’t logical.

We can be confident some did have Red hair and therefore pale skin. This is because it has been proven Red hair can be predicted 80%+ of the time.

Our scientific knowledge of the universe does not indicate that any morality whatsoever is part of the fundamental structure of the universe.

Not all scientists would agree with that particular cosmology:

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/#.VdD_iEU0u7Q

So Plato made up the myth of Atlantis. Doggerland?

“Are those African-like people remembered in European myths, legends, and folk tales?”

The short answer is no, Europeans don’t have myths relating to the Indoeuropean migration (oral memories tend to go only a few generations back), so they hardly have memories of the people they replaced.

Your assertion implies that those to whom you are communicating that ‘scientific knowledge of the universe . . . Biological evolution including human history has no moral meaning” is a truth at we are obliged to assent to, to believe.

Do you not realize how the very objective you have expressed of conveying truth to others and the implied obligation of others to accept such contradicts what you are asserting?

You would be on much more secure ground if you were to merely assert that ‘certain focuses’ or ‘certain methods’ or ‘methodologies’ leave moral considerations aside because such does not pertain to their horizons, starting points, etc.

“As late as 8,000 years ago, only the hunting peoples of northern and eastern Europe had white skin and a diverse palette of hair and eye colors.”
As Scandinavian mythology has it, trolls had dark skin and green eyes. Ancient North Eurasian DNA was in Motala, and admixture with dark ANE influenced trollish folk explains why one of the Motala seven was actually dark. (The dark skinned Swede sinks the reduced melanin for UVb skin synthesis of vitamin D theory.)

Late Mesolithic coastal fishing practices: the evidence from Tybrind Vig, Denmark [2007] : Also suggestive of net fishing at Tybrind Vig is a wood-en float with a single perforation. The form of this float is analogous to the type used in traditional net fishing (e.g. Nelson 1899 ). Similar Mesolithic examples were found at Antrea/Kamennogorsk (near Lake Ladoga in Russian Karelia)

The use of traps and weirs is interesting too. The climate was a few degrees warmer than now, but wading about in the water up there would be require a lot of Thermogenin. The greatest food resources were fish for those who could exploit it . (Neolithic Danish eel spear just like modern ones here).

I think the African-like people would have been found away from the coasts in forested areas. European myths, legends, and folk tales talk about wood-sprites.

The moral codes of the great majority of human cultures in practice strongly distinguish between members of the group and outsiders.

Our scientific knowledge of the universe does not indicate that any morality whatsoever is part of the fundamental structure of the universe. Biological evolution including human history has no moral meaning. This is something that is very hard for many people to accept. It is not at all a “pagan” view as pre-Christian pagans, at least in classical civilization, certainly conceived of their gods as moral agents.

“I would also venture to say that the universe cares little about our notions of morality. There is only survival or extinction.”

Isn’t the main benefit of morality to promote the survival of the group in which such behaviors develop and is often at the expense of outsiders?

“. . . one genocide doesn’t justify another. I would also venture to say that the universe cares little about our notions of morality. There is only survival or extinction. Everything else is sophistry.”

While these conjectures about genetic diffusions, replacements and assimilations are very interesting, there seems to be a contradiction latent in this sequence of extracted assertions.

Peter Frost,

No offense but a lot of what you say is simply wrong.

http://www.forumbiodiversity.com/showthread.php/41453-Eurogenes-v3?p=1202944&viewfull=1#post1202944

Ironically or otherwise, the groups now subsuming Europeans and their descendants are gaining their hegemony solely through overbreeding.

And certainly less ironically, but tragically, the same descendants of old-time Europe are facilitating their own extinction. In any other time, groups which overpopulated so far beyond the bounds of sustainability would meet with famine.

Europeans and their descendants, however, are giving–not even selling, but giving–Africans, Latinos, and Asians the rope with which they themselves will be hanged.

The Pelasgians were extant in historical times. Most sources on them aren’t mythical. They were linguistically distinct from Greeks. There are undeciphered incriptions in languages that don’t seem Indo-European that were probably left by them. But, as far as I know, the Greeks who wrote about the Pelasgians never described them as being visually distinct.

There is an inscription on Lemnos in a language that resembles Etruscan. The Etruscans in Italy left a lot of pictorial representations of themsleves. They looked modern Mediterranean.

Living a farming lifestyle has a selection pressure on the population. If farming spreads through cultural diffusion to a neighbouring population, who have similar roots, then similar selection pressures will occur, making them more similar to the original farming population. How can you distinguish between this kind of change, and the other kind of change – physical takeover, war etc?

Another question. Does farming make people more sedentary, and less war-like? And are hunter gatherers more aggressive and roaming? Intuitively, the answer seems to be yes, and yet all I hear about early history is that farmers spread and took over everywhere. Did hunter gatherers ever take over farmers territory?

They might be the Pelasgians of the Greek myth, there was people speaking Etruscan-like language in some Greek islands well into the Classical period.

” I would also venture to say that the universe cares little about our notions of morality. There is only survival or extinction. Everything else is sophistry.”
That’s a neopagan worldview. The “universe” you are believing in is obviously an “universe” which doesn’t include a Christian god or a Christian heaven. Well, you are entitled to your own worldview, but don’t mix that up with science, please.

The way that this article reads, it seems that you believe that there are only two options: violent total replacement, or peaceful cultural diffusion. I doubt that you believe this. The third (and probably most common) option is violent partial replacement, which you seem to be lumping in with cultural diffusion.

Take the Norman invasion for example. Apparently DNA studies don’t show the English having much Norman DNA but we know (just look at surnames) that there was an influence. The Norman invasion turned England away from the Germano-Celtic way of life towards the French and resulted in some big cultural changes.

I assume that farming spread north from Mesoamerica in the same way, with the second sons moving a little farther north each generation and marrying into the local populations, with the mesoamerican DNA getting diluted at each stage of the journey.

There were odd looking people in the north too. In what was now Sweden 8000 years ago was the Motola hunter gatherers who were of diverse skin colour and 4/7 had the Asian EDAR mutations, which has effects on appearance including hair, teeth, ears, breasts and sweat glands so the Motala people looked (and smelled) unlike any group of modern Europeans.

The Motala people are only known from an unfortunate group that ended up with their heads mounted on stakes. The time frame suggest Doggerlanders.

THERE would have been huge population shifts,” says Clive Waddington of Derbyshire-based Archaeological Research Services Ltd. “People who were living out in what is now the North Sea would have been displaced very quickly.” Some headed for Britain. At Howick in Northumberland, on the cliffs that run along Britain’s northeast coast and would therefore have been the first hills they saw, his team has found the remains of a dwelling that had been rebuilt three times in a span of 150 years. Among the earliest evidence of a settled lifestyle in Britain, the hut dates from around 7900 B.C. Waddington interprets its repeated habitation as a sign of increasing territoriality: the resident people defending their patch against waves of displaced Doggerlanders

Myths and legends don’t come better than Atlantis.

[…] color. Those character and personality traits impact culture, which in turn has impacted biology. This article by Peter Frost is a great explanation of how biology, culture and environment work on one another simultaneously. […]

Lower light levels! I give up.

http://dienekes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/prehistoric-farmers-from-northern.html

“Prehistoric farmers from northern Greece had lactose intolerance, brown eyes, dark skin”

Somewhat coincidentally I have just stumbled onto this article: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150805-neanderthals-strange-large-eyes, which states that there is a correlation between latitude and eyeball size in modern humans. They reference this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21795263/, which states it is an adaptation to the lower light levels in higher latitudes. It seems that light eyes also confer this trait of enhanced light sensitivity – see https://www.dukemedicine.org/blog/myth-or-fact-people-light-eyes-are-more-sensitive-sunlight and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22527312 for instance.

I think these data suggest that an environment-related selection for blue eyes in northern latitudes is more than plausible, and this might explain the north (>80%) to south (<20%) cline that we see in Europe today a lot better than sexual selection does (unless blue eyes only sexier in the snow?).

I expect the extent Yamnaya conquest varies according to the region

… and so a theory whereby Yamanya killed all the men and only mated with the whitest women doesn’t really hold when considering a phenotype found all over Europe, does it?

You are doing that thing again where you chain a whole bunch of unsubstantiated speculations to make a claim that is at odds with the data. Looking at the hundreds of Neolithic to Bronze Age samples we have there is clear evidence of selection across the board, not just in female-heavy populations, not just in Yamnaya-related populations – but in pretty much all populations, regardless of culture or ancestry, over an extended period of time. This is not very suggestive of sexual selection, which requires specific cultural practices and population structure, and which works much better in small populations than large expanding ones. Yes, it’s possible to weave a series of imaginary conditions by which sexual selection is still technically possible in post-Neolithic Europe, but the only reason for doing this is a pre-held belief, it’s not a rational or logical interpretation of the data at hand. You’ll have to excuse me if I stick with the explanation suggested by the evidence.

The man can take two wives or twenty if the women are providing for themselves and their children, as in traditional African agriculture . He doesn’t close off his choice by taking another wife and the only problem is keeping them all satisfied! It is where the woman has to get a man to make a final choice of her over others that you get selection. White skin is about monogamous marriage, which is why the darkest skin in the world is found in west Africa, which has the most polygyny.

From what I have read the Yamnaya would have taken most of the conquered women but few would have been given a position that would let their children survive. The Yamnaya appear to have sometimes sacrificed women, like dogs. The founding myth of Rome (gang of young men associated with wolves capture women) is quite consistent with Yamnaya type conquest being at the origin of nobility in European societies.

The analysis of the Yamnaya root language discloses many words for ‘patron’, ‘guest’ and ‘feast’. So after the Yamnaya conquest of parts of Europe, it was a hierarchical society with chiefs who controlled surplus resources. A woman who got married to a chief would have hit the jackpot in on-going reproductive fitness terms.

The Orkney Isles suffered a similar conquest with the place names all being Norse, they are 60% Norwegian Y chromosomes but 25 % Norwegian overall . I expect the extent Yamnaya conquest varies according to the region. Serbia would be a good bet for high Yamnaya ancestry.

A rolling one off conquest event over Europe is unlikely. Elite dominance, confirmed by them imposing their language, would mean selection over many generation. Even today a beautiful young woman can reasonably expect to marry a millionaire. It is true that white skinned women (the type that go nightclubbing) get a tan to look sexually attractive, but being taken as a wife by a Yamnaya and having their children acknowledged as nobles would require more than looking sexy enough to impregnated. White skin may be related to eliciting care and provisioning. It’s not clear that tanned skin is being selected for or does more than advertises sexual availability, it only appeared in the modern permissive environment, where birth-rates are not high by the way.

http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/are-women-changing-color.html

Tibet has pale skin yet the elevation there means UV there is as strong as the equatorial African. Tibet has polyandry.

I think you accept selection for the modern Europe phenotype in the Neolithic could well have been the Yamnaya conquerors killing the men and ignoring the excess women without the modern Europe phenotype.

I believe I said “it’s certainly a possibility” – I don’t accept it as a fact. There a number of issues I have with it, firstly the scenario is probably overexaggerated- if all the Neolithic European men really were killed then all modern Europeans would have >50% Yamnaya ancestry and they don’t, indeed there is a cline of Yamanaya ancestry falling to <10% in the extremes and the DNA data suggest a strong resurgence of Hunter-Gatherer DNA into modern Europeans sometime after the Yamnaya incursion. "They killed the men and took only the white women" seems too simplistic to explain the evidence on hand.

Furthermore selection takes a much longer time than such a theory accounts for. Studies have stated that selection for SLC24A5 was one of the strongest selections ever seen in modern humans with the sweep taking maybe as little as 100 generations – that's about 2,500 years, minimum… for sexual selection this means a consistently monogomous, male-scarce population in a host of widespread cultures from the Yamnaya incursion to well into the Bronze Age, and I find this very hard to believe.

The essential point is it’s not speculation that Loschbour’s eyes can only be sexual selection

Well “only” is a strong word – it’s possible it’s just random drift and it’s also possible there’s a yet undiscovered functional benefit (there’s a fishwife theory that blue eyed people make better marksmen for instance). On the balance of probability though, I’m happy to accept it was primarily driven by sexual selection. Note also that Loschbour and the other WHG’s don’t have all the blue eye alleles, Hirisplex gives them about a 60% chance of having blue eyes, and about 75% of non-brown.

I personally think the vitamin D synthesis/ diet explaination is no longer tenable, and the only selection left is male choice.

Again, “only” is a strong word. There is a degree of correlation between skin colour and latitude and we find the extremes of depigmentation not only in modern Europe, but in Mesolithic Europe and modern East Asia. Explaining this by sexual selection means “male choice” was identical in 3 very different times and places, yet at the same time not in related South Asian populations. I can understand how the theory might work in Mesolithic hunger-gatherers, with small populations and extreme conditions providing unstable gene pools, but in the post-Neolithic world there’s simply too much variation and too much cultural change to allow the necessary prerequisites for sexual selection to last long enough to drive an allele to fixation (and I note neither eye nor hair colour has been similarly driven). An environmental cause is much more likely. Ultimately though it’s probably a moot point – while we can detect *if* a selective sweep occurred, it’s always going to theoretical as to *why* it occurred, and we could argue about it forever.

Women can always get a man, unless the women are in excess and men have a choice

In which case the man usually just takes two.

It’s a situation analogous to a woman trying to make a living in showbiz. (” Choose me!”).

… and yet over 30 million Americans have deliberately darkened their skin in order to get laid: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/29/indoor-tanning-increase/5028431/… go figure.

I think you accept selection for the modern Europe phenotype in the Neolithic could well have been the Yamnaya conquerors killing the men and ignoring the excess women without the modern Europe phenotype.

About the pre Neolithic I have a series of speculations; yes, but those were byways. The essential point is it’s not speculation that Loschbour’s eyes can only be sexual selection. There is no other explanation for a dark skinned people with light eyes in the Mesolithic. Motala had 75% modern Europe phenotype in pre-Neolithic northern Europe and hence, whatever the selection was in the Neolithic, it wasn’t the first time the modern Europe phenotype was selected for. Call me parsimonious, but I think there needs to be a good reason to think the selection pressure was not the same both times.

I personally think the vitamin D synthesis/ diet explaination is no longer tenable, and the only selection left is male choice. Women can always get a man, unless the women are in excess and men have a choice, because then innate algorithms are paramount (ie the men become very picky in a non idiosyncratic way). It’s a situation analogous to a woman trying to make a living in showbiz. (” Choose me!”).

http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/08/19/15-black-celebs-caught-whitening-their-skin/6/

I’m really not sure how to respond to this Sean, you seem to be connecting a series of speculations and treating them as fact while dismissing genuine empirical facts as if they were just speculation.

Rather than attempt to correct each of your unfounded assumptions, I’ll just point out that this kind of chained circumstantial reasoning becomes less likely with each assumption. For instance, your “White Doggerland” theory requires 4 separate contested assumptions:

1. That Motala were beheaded (when they could from be a funerary or ancestry ritual)
2. That there were a large number of Doggerland refugees at the time of Motala (when Doggerland was probably depopulated by then)
3. That Doggerland refugees evacuated over the sea to Sweden (when they could easily have evacuated over land bridges to England, France and Germany)
4. That Doggerlanders were white-skinned like Motala (when just as likely they were dark-skinned like Loschbour)

There is simply not enough evidence to state any of these 4 assumptions as fact, they are just possibilities – but your theory requires ALL of them to be true. While it’s impossible to realistically assign probabilities to these points, even if we assign them all a bipartisan a priori probability of 50% (and I’d argue that points 2 and 3 should really be way below this), that only gives a probability of your theory being correct of around 7% – there’s a roughly 93% chance that one of these assumptions, and hence your whole idea, is incorrect.

I’m not going to tell you that you should stop believing it, but I feel the need to point out that the only reason for believing it over any other alternative is a preconceived belief of what the outcome should be – and it’s unreasonable to expect an objective and rational person to accept all of these assumptions just because they are possible. How would you react for instance, if a “Black Doggerland” believer told you that the Motala skulls are from a targeted minority, similar to albinos in African populations, and so only represent a tiny fraction of the Motala population – the rest of which where dark-skinned? There’s no factual evidence to suggest they were murdered by invading Doggerlanders as opposed to murdered by an internal ethnic cleansing… it’s only a preconceived idea of a “White” or “Black” Europe that would lead to an automatic assumption of either.

What is really important are the facts, which you casually denigrate to speculation with “Then we are told…” as if somebody has just made it up. Regardless of any speculation about what happened earlier, selection for the modern Europe phenotype in post-Neolithic populations is a fact, there’s no avoiding that.

“[T]he Mesolithic samples with the “full suite” don’t have genetic continuity with modern Europeans.” and “The younger and younger examples being found of European ancestors *without* the full suite confirm Razib’s hypothesis”

The person(Magdalenian woman) found with the earliest impacted tooth from jaw reduction for delicate (ie feminine) features is at least 13,000 years old. So the total modern appearance of north Europeans, which includes delicate features, goes back to the late glacial maximum from what we know so far. Delicate feature correlate with light eye colour, and we know from Loschbour that even as late as the Mesolithic some people only had the light eye part of the weak features plus hair/eye skin suite, thus making a connection between light eye colour and anything to do with vitamin D most unlikely.

It seems that your main argument is the Motala skulls are not an ancestral population of modern north Europeans. Be that as it may, we know from Motala that all the elements of the full suite existed in a single north European population long before the Neolithic.

The Razib Khan hypothesis requires the eye and maybe hair colors to be selected in separate contemporaneous Mesolithic populations (within Europe) for them to be common as they seem to have been. Then we are told the separate populations each having one component of the modern north European appearance (delicate features, light diverse hair /eyes and skin colour) came together in such a way that the non-modern, and non Motala, north European aspects of appearance disappeared in the mix. If that did happen to any extent in shows humans see non suite features as undesirable, although the preference only shows up when men can choose between a selection of surplus women. The Yamnaya being relatively few but having their choice of conquered women, which you seem to accept as a possible source of selection for some or all full suite alleles did not happen among the Yamnaya when they took women from their own society (SLC45A2 did not go to fixation in Yamnaya) would indicate that this full suite acts on an algorithm in men, and that is what why full suite women originally appeared.

Motola-type populations (for we only know about Motalo from a fluke) such as the Doggerlanders were maybe untypical of European hunter gatherers outside northern Europe. Anyway it is known hunter gathers in that region had technical devices such as traps and there appear to have been dogs that pulled sleds in Mesolithic Denmark 8ooo years ago, so we could call them more advanced and likely to expand at the expense of other peoples such as the Loschbour types.

The original Cro-Magnons found in France were massive. That is selection for what can be called sexual selection (ie male-male competition) -violence according to Wrangham. The Magdalenian era saw a marked reduction in size and selection for delicate features as in Magdalenian woman .

Selection for height among the Yamnaya explains why SLC45A2 did not go to fixation in Yamnaya; sexual selection can only work in one direction at a time, and the Yamnaya were selected for male-male competition. Once the Yamnaya had conquered large areas of Europe and, as they appear to have done, killed the indigenous men, they wouldn’t have had to fight each other for women. Then there may have been some of this Neolithic selection of (women for the aspects of the full suite that they lacked such as fully) white skin, but that certainly doesn’t mean the origin of the full suite was in the Neolithic.

We’ve been over this before, the Mesolithic samples with the “full suite” don’t have genetic continuity with modern Europeans. The younger and younger examples being found of European ancestors *without* the full suite confirm Razib’s hypothesis, and the two statements of mine that you quote, that this pehonotype was selected for in modern European *after* the Neolithic and post-Neolithic admixture events.

“I believe current theory is that both the farmers and Motala (and Karelia/Samara) got it from the population where it originally appeared, which as Canfield says is most likely in the “the Middle East, broadly defined””.

The basic structure of the ‘current theory’ (actually a hypothesis) that is being knocked from pillar to post by older and older examples of full suites of modern north European appearance alleles in individual found in north Eeurope seems to be first expounded in Razib Khan’s Phenotypic Whiteness as an Outcome of Neolithic Admixture. Neolithic. We are now arguing about the Mesolithic. So the aforementioned hypothesis is being forced to give ground, which shows there is something wrong with it.

(Re my questioning why did SLC45A2 not go to fixation in Yamnaya?) “I don’t think we really know the answer, but my guess would be “time” – they’d only acquired the allele relatively recently and the samples we see are midway through a selection sweep. We know that it went to fixation in their descendants over the next few thousand years”.
Compare:
<“For a selection pressure to have an effect there needs to be an allele work on. [...] The evidence that selection pressure (UV or otherwise) *was* in effect in the Mesolithic is how quickly the depigmentation alleles rose once they were introduced into the various populations. “

You appear to think you can interpret studies better than the IOM

When I see something that sounds implausible I like to look into it myself – 9 times out of ten it’s been sensationalised or overstated in the reporting and the original research is less dramatic or less certain than is represented. In this case I have read the original paper they cite as well as a number of more recent papers on a similar topic I found with google. I couldn’t (and still can’t) see how they arrived at the conclusion they did from the data in the paper they cite, and I didn’t find any other source that independently verified the claim. Given that it’s published by a reputable source, I haven’t thrown it out the window but would like to understand how they arrived at the conclusion they did to see how applicable it is to the argument you are making – I have emailed the authors and will let you know if I get a reply.

But if farmers contributed SLC24A5 why did Motala, have SLC24A5

I believe current theory is that both the farmers and Motala (and Karelia/Samara) got it from the population where it originally appeared, which as Canfield says is most likely in the “the Middle East, broadly defined”.

One final thought: why did SLC45A2 not go to fixation in Yamnaya?

That’s a good question, and I note that early farmers also had it at a lower frequency (~20%). I don’t think we really know the answer, but my guess would be “time” – they’d only acquired the allele relatively recently and the samples we see are midway through a selection sweep. We know that it went to fixation in their descendants over the next few thousand years.

Report on vitamin D commissioned by the US and Canadian governments from the National Academies Institute of Medicine – Page 104. “Kimlin et al. (2007), using computer modeling, concluded that it may no longer be correct to assume that vitamin D levels in populations follow latitude gradients. Indeed, the relationship between UVB penetration and latitude is complex, as a result of differences in, for example, the height of the atmosphere (50 percent less at the poles), cloud cover (more intense at the equator than at the poles), and ozone cover. The duration of sunlight in summer versus winter is another factor contributing to the complexity of the relationship. Geophysical surveys have shown that UVB penetration over 24 hours, during the summer months at Canadian north latitudes when there are many hours of sunlight, equals or exceeds UVB penetration at the equator (Lubin et al., 1998).”

You appear to think you can interpret studies better than the IOM. Ozone holes over the Arctic are not the reason Canadians don’t need extra vitamin D, The reference was about factors common to all northern latitudes. This fog thing is a clever marketing gimick From glam macs to Mission: Impossible, America loves London fog. There is normally no UVb capable of skin synthesising vit D in the Arctic circle.

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (ie a panel of world authorities) 2011 report on vitamin D was requested by the Canadian government and it concluded there was no evidence that Canadians (who get little synthesis because they go about clothed) needed extra vitamin D. In fact the amount of vitamin D that you can get from twenty minutes in the sun in Europe is more than 10X the RDA for dietary vitamin D. Europeans like everyone else have a mechanism for switching off vitamin D synthesis after 20 minutes, or sooner as the exposed skin is heated. Yes, natural selection has provided Europeans with a very efficient mechanism for switching off vitamin D synthesis, yet the reason for the UV hitting the surface of northern Europe in summer being comparable to sea level Equatorial Africa is the length of the days .

Loschbour-like DNA still exists in modern European populations, in some cases up to around 50%. The first farmers in Europe definitely didn’t replace the indigenous population, they merged with them.

But if farmers contributed SLC24A5 why did Motala, have SLC24A5, and if Yamnaya contributed SLC45A2 why was Motala closer to fixation for SLC45A2 than any Yamnaya population we know about? The answer is perfectly obvious: Motala was largely descended from the time of the full white skin suite of alleles, the farmers or Yamnaya were not. One final thought: why did SLC45A2 not go to fixation in Yamnaya?

This is natural selection in action, is it ?

Well it’s hardly the work of an intelligent designer, is it?

Seriously though, skin cancer doesn’t usually impair the individual until after breeding age, so it’s not necessarily a functional constraint from an evolutionary point of view.

“Canadian north latitudes” – yes Canada is in Europe for latitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_parallel_north

Canada ranges from lattitudes 41 to 83, meaning the 54th parallel is in *southern* Canada. The midpoint is the 62nd parallel, north of both Stockholm and Motala, and “Canadian north latitudes” are higher again than this. If you read the original Lubin paper (here) and more recent studies (like this one) you can see that factors like cloud and ozone cover are quite different between Canada and Europe, and it’s really only at extreme Arctic areas that there’s a significant increase in UV due to there environmental factors.

Moreover, there doesn’t appear to be anywhere in either of these two papers where it says this Arctic increase brings UV up to equatorial levels (indeed the second one states “Mean UV index values in summer range from 1.5 in the Arctic to 11.5 over southern Texas” which is quite the opposite!). Perhaps you can see something that I’m missing, but I suspect the National Acadamies book has misinterpreted the Lubin 1998 data – there’s no statement or graph in it I can see that shows Arctic UV being higher than at the equator… perhaps they thought the graphs in Fig 11 were UVR measurements, not a comparison of 2 UVR measuring methods?

Or the Loschbour population got killed off.

Loschbour-like DNA still exists in modern European populations, in some cases up to around 50%. The first farmers in Europe definitely didn’t replace the indigenous population, they merged with them.

Anyway, Loschbour’s skin colour was ideal from the point of view of natural selection.

As “ideal” as could be using the alleles found in that population – but as soon as a better alternative became available, natural selection jumped on it. This indicates to me that the pressure was already there, it just needed something to work with.

The Interplay between Natural Selection and Susceptibility to Melanoma on Allele 374F of SLC45A2 Gene in a South European Population: “Interestingly, the homozygous genotype for the 374L allele was absent in all the melanoma samples. We found the L374F SNP to be significantly associated with melanoma, with the 374F (the “light” pigmentation allele) constituting a risk factor for melanoma (Cochran-Armitage Trend Test assuming an additive model, p-value: 4.36E-06).

This is natural selection in action, is it ? You don’t have to be in Spain to get cancer from those alleles “Canadian north latitudes” – yes Canada is in Europe for latitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_parallel_north and in the summer it gets as much UV as the equator.

“The evidence that selection pressure (UV or otherwise) *was* in effect in the Mesolithic is how quickly the depigmentation alleles rose once they were introduced into the various populations. When Loschbour mixed into Stuttgart’s ancestors, Loschbour’s skin colour virtually disappeared “ Or the Loschbour population got killed off. Anyway, Loschbour’s skin colour was ideal from the point of view of natural selection.

Luxembourg is not isolated the Spain ones also got by with none of the light skin alleles though. Humans had been in north Europe for 20,000 years by this time. There cannot possibly have been any UV related pressure for lighter skin on much of the population of Europe as represented by the Luxembourg and Spain types

For a selection pressure to have an effect there needs to be an allele work on. If a functional depigmentation allele is a rare event (and by “functional” I mean that doesn’t have a side effect of reducing lifespan, as say albinism does), and I suspect it is rare as the obvious on/off melanin genes like MC1R and OCA2 are not the ones selected for (and given that skin cancer is some 20x more likely in SLC24A5/SLC45A2 carriers it seems evolution had to settle for a less than perfect solution anyway), then it’s possible that it took a while for a suitable mutation to arise, and when it did it would only be in one population and would take time to circulate. The evidence that selection pressure (UV or otherwise) *was* in effect in the Mesolithic is how quickly the depigmentation alleles rose once they were introduced into the various populations. When Loschbour mixed into Stuttgart’s ancestors, Loschbour’s skin colour virtually disappeared – in the absence of selective pressures we’d expect a frequency more in line with the admixture ratios, not a nearly instant rise of one allele to virtual fixation. Populations like Motala and Samara that already had the alleles had them in high frequencies, so we know there were selection pressures operating over a range of times and cultures.

Luxembourg and Motala were both major surprises for the conventional wisdom that you are espousing.

I think you’ve read too much into what I’m saying – I’m not espousing any particular theory, I’m pointing out that Peter’s theory is inconsistent with the data. Neolithic allele frequencies mean that the skin colour of modern Europeans cannot be the result of sexual selection in a Mesolithic population from Scandinavia.

I don’t rule out sexual selection per se but I think an environment based pressure (like, but not necessarily, UV) is a better fit as there are multiple sweeps in multiple locations across multiple cultures – including a sweep for lighter skin in different alleles on the other side of Eurasia entirely. It *could* be due to multiple independent pressures and the correlation with latitude is just a happy coincidence, but I don’t think this can be the default position in the absence of any solid data.

Right at the beginning I linked to a review by the US National Academies showing that northern Europe is not a low UV area

Funny, I read it as “Canadian north latitudes” – is Canada in Europe now?

In particular, allele 374F was significantly more frequent among the individuals with lighter skin. [...]

Funny, that “[...]” that you snipped says: “Further genotyping an independent set of 558 individuals of a geographically wider population with known ancestry in the Spanish population also revealed that the frequency of L374F was significantly correlated with the incident UV radiation intensity” (emphasis mine). You didn’t like that bit so you ignored it?

Seriously though, whatever time and for whatever reason these alleles came about, the genome sequences we have show that they accumulated in the immediate ancestors of modern Europeans from the start of the Neolithic onwards, and were subject to selection in the last 7,000 years or so – not in the LGM, nor in the Mesolithic.

The Interplay between Natural Selection and Susceptibility to Melanoma on Allele 374F of SLC45A2 Gene in a South European Population In particular, allele 374F was significantly more frequent among the individuals with lighter skin. [...] To assess the meaning of 374F within the evolutionary history of Europeans we decided to estimate the selection coefficient and the age of expansion of this allele. [...] The age of the expansion of the allele in this case was estimated to be of 16,480 years (95% CI, 10,680–36,070).

None of the alleles are coming up as from the Mesolithic. Putting SLC24A5 to one side for the moment, finding people with the full suite in north most Europe and others with the light diverse eyes in the south west Europe 8000 years ago indicates a Late Glacial Maximum origin between the aforementioned regions.