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Is the physical appearance of Europeans solely or even mainly an adaptation to climate?
The Russian online magazine Kultura VRN has published an article I wrote on the “puzzle of European hair, eye, and skin color.” The following is the original English text.
Most humans have black hair, brown eyes, and brown skin. Europeans are different: their hair is also brown, flaxen, golden, or red, their eyes also blue, gray, hazel, or green, and their skin pale, almost like an albino’s. This is particularly the case in northern and eastern Europeans.
How did this color scheme come about? Perhaps the same genes that lighten skin pigmentation also affect hair and eye pigmentation. Yet the genes are different in each case. Our skin became white mainly through the replacement of one allele by another at three separate genes. Our hair acquired a diverse palette of colors through a proliferation of new alleles at another gene. Our eyes acquired a similar palette through similar changes at yet another gene.
This color scheme is puzzling in another way: it is stronger in women than in men. Women are naturally more variable than men in hair color, redheads in particular being more common. They are likewise more variable in eye color in those populations where blue eyes are common. Finally, throughout the world, women are fairer-skinned than men, as a result of cutaneous changes at puberty.
While women are more diversely colored in their hair and eyes, this greater diversity has a different cause in each case. In the case of hair color, women have more of the intermediate hues because the darkest hue (black) is less easily expressed. In the case of eye color, women have more of the intermediate hues because the lightest hue (blue) is less easily expressed.
If hair color and eye color diversified in ways that differ physiologically but are similar visually, then the common purpose of this diversity must be visual. Furthermore, in both cases, this diversity concerns visible features on or near the face—the focus of visual attention.
Sexual selection?
Why would a facial feature become more colorful in one sex than in the other? The likeliest reason is sexual selection, which occurs when one sex has to compete for the attention of the other. This kind of selection favors eye-catching colors that are either bright or novel.
Bright colors stay in memory longer. If we look at the hair and eye colors that arose in Europe, we see that they are brighter than the human norm of black hair and brown eyes. Hair is carrot red but not beet red. Eyes are sky blue but not navy blue.
Novel colors hold attention longer. Attraction to novelty may explain how the European palette of hair and eye colors came into being. First, a new color would appear by mutation and be initially rare and novel. Second, its novelty would attract attention and increase one’s chances of mating, with the result that the color would become more common in succeeding generations. Third, attention would now shift toward rarer and more novel colors that had recently appeared by mutation. All in all, it was this fascination with novelty that caused the number of hair and eye colors to increase steadily over time, once sexual selection had become strong enough.
This novelty effect appears in a study on male preferences for female hair color. Men were shown a series of photos of attractive blondes and brunettes, and they were asked to choose the one they most wanted to marry. It turned out that the scarcer the brunettes were in the series, the likelier any one brunette would be chosen. Another study likewise found that Maxim cover girls are much more often light blonde or dark brown than the usual dark blonde or light brown of real life.
A preference will become a choice only if one has a choice. This is the principle of sexual selection: one sex is in a better position to choose than the other. In most mammalian species, females are in a better position because they can choose among a larger number of males on the mate market. This is because the latter are almost always available for mating, whereas females are unavailable during pregnancy and the period of infant care. Males thus tend to be polygamous.
In early human societies that lived from hunting and gathering, the incidence of polygamy varied with latitude. It was highest in the tropics, where a woman could gather food year-round and feed herself and her children with little male assistance. This self-reliance made it easier for her mate to look for another woman.
Beyond the tropics, women were less self-reliant, particularly during winter when they could no longer gather food and depended on meat from their spouses. This dependence increased with longer winters at higher latitudes. In the Arctic, only a very able hunter could support a second wife.
Higher latitudes meant not just fewer men on the mate market but also fewer men altogether. Because women could not supply as much food and because the land supported less wildlife, men had to hunt for a longer time over longer distances, with the result that more of them died from falls, drowning, starvation, and cold. Women thus faced a competitive mate market and strong sexual selection. This was especially so on the continental steppe-tundra of the sub-Arctic, where almost all food came from long-distance hunting.
During the last ice age, this steppe-tundra covered more territory, stretching from the plains of Europe to Alaska. But it was continuously inhabited only at its western end. The climate was milder there because the Scandinavian icecap had pushed the steppe-tundra to the south and because the Atlantic Ocean provided warmth and moisture. These conditions favored a lush growth of grasses, mosses, lichens, and low shrubs, which supported large herds of herbivores and, in turn, a large human population. The climate was less favorable east of the Urals, in Asia, where the steppe-tundra was colder and drier because it was located farther north and farther from the Atlantic’s moderating influence. As a result, the human population was smaller and more vulnerable to extinction, particularly during the glacial maximum.
In sum, the European steppe-tundra was a singularity among the many environments that confronted early humans as they spread around the world. Food was abundant but accessible only to males of hunting age, whose ranks were thinned by hunting deaths. A surplus of single women developed, partly because men were fewer in number and partly because men could not easily bear the cost of providing for a second wife and her children. Women thus had to compete against each other for a smaller number of potential mates, the result being strong sexual selection for those women with eye-catching characteristics.
Ancient DNA
Today, this is the same region where the skin is whitest and the hair and eyes most diversely colored. Here, too, the earliest evidence of this color scheme has been found in ancient DNA from human remains. Initially, it was thought that blue eyes arose among the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic and white skin among the farmers of the Neolithic. This view has been challenged by genetic evidence of white skin, red hair, blonde hair, and blue eyes in the remains of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Scandinavia and Russia. It seems that some people already had the European color scheme at that early date, but only in the north and east of Europe.
But when exactly did this color scheme develop? Probably earlier still—sometime between the earliest Mesolithic evidence (8,000 years ago) and Kostenki Man (circa 37,000 years ago), who still had dark skin, dark eyes, and an African facial shape. As we retrieve more ancient DNA, we may narrow this timeframe, perhaps to the last ice age (circa 10,000 to 25,000 years ago) when steppe-tundra covered the plains of northern and eastern Europe … and where men were a critical resource in limited supply.
That is a big change over a short time. If sexual selection had not been the cause, what else could have been? The need to adapt to weaker sunlight and a colder climate? Why, then, did this evolution not happen among indigenous peoples who live just as far north in Asia and North America? In any case, why would a northern climate favor a proliferation of new hair and eye colors?
Future research
We cannot go back in time to see why early Europeans changed so fast and so radically. But we can question “witnesses” from that time. As we have seen, one witness is ancient DNA, and this research is ongoing.
Another witness is sex linkage. If sexual selection had acted on early European women, it should have directly modified their physical appearance. Since most genes have little or no sex linkage, this selection would have also indirectly modified the appearance of early European men. But there should still be some signs of sex linkage. We know, for example, that blue eyes are associated with a more feminine face shape. Other examples probably remain to be found.
Finally, there is the witness of culture. Single women, typically virgins, hold an unusual importance in the myths, folklore, and traditions of Europe. In this, we may see an echo of a time when many women never married and became oriented toward communal tasks, such as tending camp fires or acting as seers, sibyls, oracles, and the like. That period of prehistory may have influenced the subsequent course of cultural evolution, thereby giving women a greater role in society at large than they otherwise would have.
Frost, P. (2015).Загадка цвета кожи, волос и глаз у европейцев,Куьтура ВРН, July 7, translated by Dr. Yuri Lozotsev.
http://culturavrn.ru/world/15780
Our colour vision lets us read emotions, see here. It likely is tuned to pick up on cues to sex, like ruddiness. WQeaker UV in the north is very dubious. 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).”
The 7700-year-old Swedish hunter gatherers with white skin genes (SLC24A5 and SLC45A2) plus HERC2/OCA2 for blue eyes and blond hair are not explained by weak UV, and they have common ancestry with the Yamnaya. A recent article in New Scientist is quite specific about the Motala hunter gatherers having ancestral DNA in common with the Yamnaya. As I see it that is explained by Ice Age steppe-tundra hunter Europeans having followed the reindeer herds north as the Scandinavian icecap melted and the steppe tundra receded. Some of the steppe tundra hunters who went in a different direction at the end of the Ice Age and mixed with other peoples to became the Yamnaya.
The Yamnaya were a strongly male aristocratic orientated ‘heroic’ society. I suppose the slow clawing back of female influence in society can be seen as a long delayed revenge on the Yamnaya wolf cult of rape and murder raids that destroyed most of northern Europe millennia ago. Countries like Germany especially seem to have been increasingly influenced by women’s opposition to any prospect of another war into opposition to even the potential capability for nuclear weapons conferred by atomic power stations. The female influence on society increasingly takes the form of green politics and a refusal to see nations as being legitimate.
light skin and eyes originated in the baltic region, germany, poland, scandanavia, western russia etc.
That region is an unusual region in that it is high in latitude but also quite warm considering how far north it is (due to the gulf stream and other factors).
Before agriculture arrived, they ate a lot of animal flesh, and got vitamin D that way.
Then several thousand years ago, farming arrived.
They started living off grain. It was warm enough in that baltic region to grow grain, even though it was far north. So after they started living off grain, they ate less flesh. So they needed a source of vitamin D. They got it from the sun via lighter skin, which came with lighter eyes.
So, it was because of the grain diet, combined with the far north region, which had little sunlight, but which was warm enough to grow grain in primitive agricultural conditions because of the gulf stream.
A mutation gave them lighter skin and eyes. Those with the mutation thrived.
Also, women have fairer skin because they need more vitamin D from the sun to make the baby.
Risking laughter….it takes brain power to discern/recognize beauty. Higher IQs in the North therefore meant that the pearls of beauty were not thrown before swine, consequently leading to more and more beauty in the North thru sexual selection
Arguably, Whites are the most physically beautiful, with north Asians the runner-ups, and the rest just more or less ugly and stupid.
Joe Webb
“Before agriculture arrived, they ate a lot of animal flesh, and got vitamin D that way.
Then several thousand years ago, farming arrived.”
I’m no expert, but I didn’t think farming was the way people subsisted in this area till relatively recently. And I’m talking like 2500 years. And the mutations appear to predate that. Hunting/gathering and herding was about it for that area about 5000 years ago.
If I’m wrong, I don’t mind being corrected.
I thought this was true. After all, fish eating Eskimos are dark, since they get their vitamin D from the seafood. But I’m not sure the grain farming timeframe matches the blonde DNA timeframe. Perhaps blondness was once more widespread, and the Scandos only retained because it of less sunlight and grains.
I think the Gulf Stream does not reach the baltic region, how could it? But it actually reaches the northern sea, which is the reason why western european regions at the same latitude like the baltic region are warmer than the baltic region
“Arguably, Whites are the most physically beautiful…”
Is that why you guys/gals like to expose yourselves so much, and are looking to “love” your neighbours *wink*, all the time
Unless I am missing a logical link somewhere, how can sexual selection account for more genetic variation in monogamous societies compared to polygamous ones? Wouldn’t the spoilt-for-choice alpha males in polygamous societies pick the most eye-catching females (which, in your account, would have been the females with lighter skin, eyes, and hair) to mate with, while males in monogamous societies would have to pick whoever was available? Assuming the entire world was “dark” at some point in time, and if the mutations for light skin/eye/hair color happened randomly, then polygamous societies ought to be “whiter” today, no? I am not satisfied with your assertion that tropical climates encouraged polygamy and arctic ones encouraged monogamy, but even if we assume that to be so, sexual selection might have the opposite of the effect you posit.
“In sum, the European steppe-tundra was…Women thus had to compete against each other for a smaller number of potential mates, the result being strong sexual selection for those women with eye-catching characteristics.”
(Peter Frost)
———————-
Why different groups of NE Asians still all have black hair while facing the similar sexual selection pressures (not all groups but some of them ought to face the similar pressures)?
Talking about eye-catching characteristics for sexual selection of different colours of eyes and hair, why not other perhaps more “eye-catching characteristics” such as big tits, tiny waist, etc instead of colours of eyes?
If the far nodic region was a major reason, why Eskimos, Siberians didn’t develop blue eyes?
Logically it seems more to do with some ancient gene mutations(cats, wolfs etc have coloured hair and eyes too, was that because there were much fewer male cats and wolves left as well which made female cats and wolves crazy? ROFL. Or they all lived in the Nordics originally and only? ), which was significantly magnified by sexual selection later, instead of sexual selection being the original main reason.
On sexual selection and eye catching:
–Why no blue hair, golden eyes with a HUGE ar$e? that would be equally if not more “eye-catching”. LoL
–Living in the old weather high altitude, furry Pandas faced the similar selection pressures such as “eye catching”, why only black-white pandas, instead of blonde pandas with grey/green eyes?
The depigmentation alleles in SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and TYR have very different distributions and so likely very different origins. SLC24A5 (which has the strongest effect of the three) is widespread throughout North Africa and South Asia as well as Europe and was already present at high frequencies in the early farmers moving into Europe from the Levant 7000ybp. It’s very unlikely that it originated in Europe, more likely somewhere in south west Asia.
SLC45A2 is first found in high frequencies in the North and East of Europe, but is absent in closely related contemporaneous populations in Central and West Europe. It has an East to West trajectory and while it’s possible it may have originated in Eastern Europe, it’s also possible it originated further East, in Central Asia. We will need further aDNA to know for sure where it first appears.
TYR is pretty much only found in Europe, and given modern distributions, probably originated somewhere in the North.
The current European “white” phenotype is a combination of at least 3 separate mutations with different probable origins. It didn’t become fixed in Europe until relatively recently, with Bronze Age samples only 3-4,000 years ago still showing varying frequencies. Your theory of small male hunter populations and thus increased sexual selection in females probably has some truth to it, but it is *way* too simplistic to explain all the known facts, and doesn’t really fit with the timeframes involved (eg. it happened after farming was widespread).
@Joe Webb: I find attitudes like yours both ugly and stupid, but there’s no accounting for taste hey?
THIS IS NO PUZZLE AT ALL, IF YOU REALIZE THAT THE OUT OF AFRICA THEORY IS BOGUS; WHITES ARE FROM SIBERIA; BLACKS FROM AFRICA, CHINESE FROM CHINA.
The whole “out of Africa” theory that says that all humans evolved in Africa and then moved out into Eurasia is wrong.
How many people moved out of Africa? And the ones who went to Europe, how did all of them, each and every one almost, turn white? And the ones who remained in Africa, or the ones that went to South India/Austrlia, how come then each and every one of them, almost, remain black? And the ones who went to China, how come each and every one of them developed Oriental features? This is not possible.
This “out of Africa” theory that claims that whites and orientals evolved from Blacks is wrong.
The fact of the matter is that whites appeared in Eurasia (Siberia), then moved west to the Pontic Caspian Steppe and from there moved further west and south, to Europe, Iran and India (called Indo-Europeans). The Orientals evolved in China. The blacks evolved in Africa and did move along the eastern coast to the Middle East, Indus Valley, thence South India, and thence SE Asia and Australia (aboriginals). The Dravidians of India and the Australian aboriginals (black people) are genetically related to African blacks. Yes, they did mix with the white people coming down south from the Steppe and that is why we have many brown people in the Middle East, India and SE Asia. A few blacks also entered Southern Europe and mixed with the white people, resulting in the darker hued Italians and Greeks of today.
This is called the multi-regional hypothesis and most of the evidence supports it, compared to the Out of Africa theory which keeps running into problems.
The out-of-Africa theory is a left-wing scam designed to fool people into thinking that “we are all the same” and to glorify blacks and denigrate whites and brainwash them into thinking that “blacks are our ancestors.”
So what exactly is your theory? Did whites evolve from albino apes roaming around in Scandinavia?
Women (white or black) don’t think black men are physically unattractive. Whites are better or worse looking depending on the sex you focus on.
But why was the Mesolithic La Braña man from Asturias, Spain, dark-skinned (yet blue-eyed)? Or the Upper Paleolithic Kostenki 14 from Russia, or the Upper Paleolithic Siberian Mal’ta (dark skin and eyes both)?
Eurasians came from Africa. But it is worth clarifying that “blacks” are not the primordial inhabitants of that continent. The San are not black-skinned. Black Africans are descended from the admixing of anatomically modern Eurasian return migrants and African archaic hominins.
Tarim mummies
High-quality images of Tarim-basin mummies
“The depigmentation alleles in SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and TYR have very different distributions and so likely very different origins.”
Peter has an explanation (high mortality of steppe-tundra hunters) for why and how the genes became common, and it’s consistent with the unique diversity of hair and eye colouring in Europe. If the alleles for white skin (and and the one(s) for gray, green, brown and blue eyes and red, golden, ash, honey blonde and brown hair) had different origins as determined by their distribution now, the further back we look the less often we would find them together in an individual in a remote part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Especially the allele you say came from south west Asia. “SLC24A5 (which has the strongest effect of the three) is widespread throughout North Africa and South Asia as well as Europe and was already present at high frequencies in the early farmers moving into Europe from the Levant 7000ybp. It’s very unlikely that it originated in Europe, more likely somewhere in south west Asia.
SLC24A5 was in Swedish hunter gatherers 7700 years ago. That is very powerful evidence for that allele having an origin in the steppe tundra hunters of the north European plan who went north at the end of the ice age. I don’t know about TYR but Motala had HERC2/OCA2 for diverse eye and hair colours.
Out of Africa doesn’t mean Eurasians evolved from Africans.
Blacks aren’t a pre-condition for the developement of whites or Asians in the past or
in the future.
I am not an expert at all on this (but it does interest me), so this will likely be a stupid question. Regarding why the North Asians did not evolve these hair colours, it is possibly this is simply because of a freak mutation that happened to a single European common ancestor via random luck while this mutation did not occur to any Asian common ancestor ?
GENETIC EVIDENCE CONTINUES TO WEAKEN THE OUT-OF-AFRICA THEORY.
Thanks for your comments. I will try to answer as follows:
1. According to biologists, there are only 3 races—Caucasoid (whites), negroid (blacks) and oriental (Chinese). Besides skin color, there are other anthropomorphic differences (such as whites are tall and slender and have a skull shape of a standing egg; blacks have prognathism, etc). Some modern humans are a mixture of multiple races.
2. The out of Africa theory defies common sense, and much of the newer fossil record and genetics contradict it.
Common sense: Besides the fact above that how could all Africans in Europe suddenly become white but the ones who went to South India (Dravidians) remained black, there are others:
a. Ancient humans migrated because of better access to critical resources like water and better weather. Most ancient civilizations settled along the banks of rivers (Euprahes/Tigris, Nile, Indus Valley, Oxus Civilization, Proto-Indo-Europeans along the Volga) or lakes (Pontic Caspian Steppe) in order to have access to fresh water. They migrated TOWARDS fresh water and for better weather. That is why the Indo-Europeans migrated south-west and south-east—to escape the bitter cold winters.
So why would Africans migrate to a much colder harsher climate like Europe or Siberia? No, they did not. They would have frozen to death along the way and died of thirst.
b. Regarding skin/hair/eye color, the white skin color, blonde hair color and blue eye color are not due to the presence of any particular gene but rather due to ABSENCE of melanin, due to the absence of genes that code for melanin. There are almost 20+ genes that produce melanin, given the various grades of skin color. These melanin genes are dominant, not recessive. Thus, white skin color, blonde hair and blue eyes are recessive traits.
It is not easily possible for a group to mutate from black to white, but the opposite is more likely. As soon as one of the Africans who came to Europe mutated into a lighter color, that change would have disappeared through interbreeding and the darker melanin producing genes would have again dominated. There is no genetic evidence showing that white Europeans carry all the melanin genes like blacks, but they are non-functioning due to some mutation in each of them.
2. The fossil record also continues to contradict the out-of-Africa theory. I do not have time or space to detail them all here, except to say the Siberian Mal’ta man was found near Lake Baikal, which is the easternmost corner of Russia, close to China, and the Orientals could have migrated there. He did have oriental features. The Kostenki 14 man has been given a dark skin color by some in the media; I am not aware of any genetic evidence proving his skin color but just the liberal media’s imagination. There is no mention of his skin/hair/eye color in the scientific papers I could find.
3. Modern genetics contradicts the Out of Africa theory. For example, see the paper:
“Re-Examining the “Out of Africa” Theory and the Origin of Europeoids (Caucasoids) in Light of DNA Genealogy” which states that:
“The finding that the Europeoid haplogroups did not descend from “African” haplogroups A or B is supported by the fact that bearers of the Europeoid haplogroups, as well as all non-African haplogroups do not carry either SNPs M91, P97, M31, P82, M23, M114, P262, M32, M59, P289, P291, P102, M13, M171, M118 (haplogroup A and its subclades SNPs) or M60, M181, P90 (haplogroup B), as it was shown recently in “Walk through Y” FTDNA Project (the reference is incorporated therein) on several hundred people from various haplogroups”. See:
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=19566
The fossil record, genetics and common sense all contradict the out-of-Africa theory. The 3 races evolved separately in 3 different places (Caucasian in Central Eurasia/Western Siberia, Orientals in China and blacks in Africa).
And as the out-of-Africa theory (which is basically left-wing anti-white Afro-centric propaganda) is disproven, it would also put the “we all evolved from monkeys” theory to rest, as there were no monkeys in Central Eurasia!
the mutations that gave rise to depigmentation occurred long before the baltic area went agricultural. But once they got most of their food from grain, etc, they needed more vitamin D.
That agricultural transformation and the subsequent loss of vitamin D sources caused the spread of the depigmentation gene(s) because it then became much more beneficial.
No expertise in this area but it does occur to me that one major difference between Africans and Caucasians/Orientals is that the Caucasian and Oriental ancestors interbed with Neanderthals. Could that possibly be related to these complexion/hair and eye color differences?
I like the vit.D idea less pigmentation helps if you have to go about fully clothed. A more feminie face is equal to a more childlike face, lots of my relations start very fair [hair] and grow darker some even black hair as they mature, and all the newborns I’ve ever seen, whatever race have blue eyes, so maybe it’s a drift towards extended childhood, and was coincident with the extension of lactose digestion into adulthood. There were extensive cow/bull worshipping in these areas, and if you look at a forgotten book ‘arctic homeland in the vedas’ tilac he suggests that before the southern migration people lived on milk and derivitives during the winter. So I’d wonder if TB resistence is coincident/parallel with this trait too. Refering to the article whilst it’s true that the narritive of the past has the area spoken of as tundra take a look at the wiki. map of mammoth distribution,
these were big beasts and didn’t live on lichen, every single one I’ve read about had verbage typical of an English [or Ukrainian] spring meadow in it’s stomach/mouth. One more thing iirc there are essentially 7 male lines making up the european population which to me at least speaks to the possibility of some very succesful dynasties doing a disproportionate amount of procreation at some point, which if you look at empires anywhere seems the norm, and when you have an endless line of women to ‘get through’ a bit of variety would help.
It is almost amazing to me that this question would even be asked, but maybe that is indicative of low we have sunk. The question does, however, belie Darwin and assoc. The best answer would be: but of course it is that way. Look, you are standing on a unique piece of matter in the Universe. But, if you were asked to describe this Earth in one word, what would that word be?
To me, the word is: bountiful. You are on a planet that is a self-regulating, self-cleaning, self-maintaining machine. Right now, you are standing in the midst of a sea of life. For a hundred miles above you to a swag 50 miles below you is life, of all types. You can go to the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, take a cup of water, and within that cup of water are more individual life forms than there are human beings in the known universe. And, of all the animals alive on the Earth today, 40% of them are ants.
Nature obviously doesn’t do things half-assed. So why wouldn’t there be different human beings?
The problem with that is reality. homo sapiens sapiens are tied to a common DNA, and it had to originate somewhere from one place. People that are smarter than me, and you say it is Africa. I tend to agree.
But keep making it up as you go along. It is quite entertaining.
If this is all true, then the big mystery is how other races in northern climates retained black hair and dark eyes. This would include north Asians and various Indian peoples in North America.
Or it could be that the Creator designed a great deal of genetic variability into the original pair, and after people differentiated into distinct genetic lines, they tended to prefer the ones that looked like themselves.
And this explanation has the advantage of reflecting exactly what we see today: People do tend to prefer mates that look like themselves.
Peace, love, truth,
The Grate Deign
Yea, I go to the Wal-mart in DesMoines just to check out all that hefty beauty.
Please keep the jokes coming. ;^)
Aren’t you skipping 20 or 30 thousand years here?
Excellent post, Peter Frost. You are on a mini-roll, two in row. Keep it up.
How does a group of people with black skin evolve white skin? First you need a random freak mutation (not albinism). Obviously extremely rare and something we’ve never observed. But let’s say such a mutation occurs in one individual. What happens next? The white skinned individual breeds with a black skinned individual (since everyone else is black skinned) and has mulatto colored children. The mulatto colored children will then breed with black skinned individuals and the extremely rare white mutation has become meaningless in two generations.
If Out of Africa is true, then Europeans would have descended from East Africans, not West Africans. Most of us are more familiar with West Africans, which is what black Americans are descended from. But my impression of Ethiopians, Somalis, Kenyans, etc. is that they do indeed look far more Caucasoid.
According to biologists, there are only 3 race
Wrong.
The out of Africa theory defies common sense
Translation: common prejudice.
The fossil record, genetics and common sense all contradict the out-of-Africa theory.
Demonstrably false.
“Genetic studies and fossil evidence show that archaic Homo sapiens evolved to anatomically modern humans solely in Africa between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago,[1] that members of one branch of Homo sapiens left Africa at some point between 125,000 and 60,000 years ago, and that over time these humans replaced other populations of the genus Homo such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans
But it’s good you made this post. For all the heredetarians trying to squid ink their way into subtle (and ultimately trivial) definitions of “race” and etc., it’s good that people like you demonstrate what the normal heredetarian believes. The other heredetarians believe it too, they just like to obfuscate.
The fact that different DNA regions code for light eyes vs light hair vs light skin might still support the vitamin D theory if the light eyes and light hair enhanced the primary light skin mutations. But if they don’t, then mr frost’s hypothesis seems sound.
Sean, your statement–or at least the implication of your statement–is not true. (The white women part.)
It’s a bit hard to separate out because i don’t think there’s a lot of data on asking women just about physical attractiveness of men by race.
However, the data from dating sites is quite clear: Most white women do *not* want to date black men, and more women are open to white men as “cross racial” dates than any other group of men. (And if you ask a lot of white women, most really do not find black men appealing. )
You are however obviously on to something. I think that “something” can best be stated as “Women find black men masculine.” The have–on average–lower % body fat and higher % muscle mass than whites. They are more aggressive, violent–masculine traits. For women whose need for masculinity runs primarily toward the “savage” … black men may appeal. But that is not the majority of white women. For similar reasons black women do not appeal to non-black men.
So a simple way to say this is that the black racial set “skews masculine” compared to the white or Asian. Black men appeal more to other races than black women.
And the white feature set skews–at least relative to blacks (not so for East Asians)–more feminine. White women being appealing to non-white men pretty much across all races.
But then, that’s Frost’s point. He’s arguing here that it was sexual selection–on white women–that drove the more distinct and unique aspects of the white feature set.
“This color scheme is puzzling in another way: it is stronger in women than in men. Women are naturally more variable than men in hair color, redheads in particular being more common.”
The only reason it may appear that blondism and gingerism is more common in White females than it is in White males is because of hair dye. You eliminate hair dye and blondism and gingerism will be pretty evenly distributed between White males and White females or if brunet White men started dying their hair blond and red at the same rate that White women do. There is no genetic component it is all hair dye for why there are more blonde/ginger White females than blond/ginger White males.
I have met so-called “blonde” Persian women yet I have never met a blond Persian man. I have met so-called “blonde” Lebanese women yet I have never met a blond Lebanese man. Why are Middle Eastern Caucasoid women way more likely to be “blonde” than Middle Eastern Caucasoid men? The answer is hair dye not genetics.
The sexual selection hypothesis seems to be trying to explain contemporary blonde and fair women with very gracile facial features, rather than simply hair and eye color diversity. I’m not sure how strongly it would be proposed if we were trying to explain more robust types with color diversity. The hypothesis seems to be trying to explain contemporary blonde bombshells and blonde Victoria’s Secret models and presumes that all the traits exhibited by them evolved in tandem at some time in the past. These traits include light coloration and facial gracility.
The gracile facial features seem to be Caucasoid, rather than European specific, and more characteristic of Mediterraneans/Middle Easterners, who don’t exhibit eye and hair color diversity. Some of the classical physical anthropological literature describes the Nordic type as a “bleached Mediterranean” type to describe the light coloration coupled with gracile facial features. The Alpine type on the other hand is a European type with eye and hair color diversity, but less gracile than the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern type. Compare, for example, Brendan Gleeson to Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir:
Al-Jubeir is “prettier” than the very fair Gleeson.
Here’s a comparison of European hunter and farmer phenotypes, with the hunters having lighter eye and hair coloration but more robust facial features, and the farmers with dark coloration but very gracile facial features:
It would seem then that the contemporary blonde models would be the product of some past hybridization events of these two types with traits that may have developed separately and not in tandem as the sexual selection hypothesis seems to presume. Very robust, blonde female “Helga” types who seem to retain the more robust facial features persist today, and they’re generally not regarded as very attractive despite their light coloration and would not themselves be likely to motivate a sexual selection hypothesis.
So how many sub-Saharan men were available for selection in Northern Europe about 20,000-30,000 years ago?
Bear in mind black skin is under positive selection in the tropics so as soon as people moved out of the tropics into the mid-latitudes then random mutations ought to eventually lead to brown skin just by chance. So the question is why brown to white.
Yeah we have. There are lots of them.
The gene will still exist in some of their offspring.
What it needs is some reason to spread among the population and that means it needs to help with survival in some way so the people with that gene have more kids than the ones who don’t
Or it could be a passenger, a side-effect of a gene that helps with survival for example gene x protects against a disease and gives slightly lighter skin, the lighter skin would spread because of the disease protection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiotropy
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If the skin lightening genes are related to latitude then they may have originated in different places among different populations around northern Eurasia and may have only come together relatively recently i.e. most white people were just lighter brown until all the different skin lightening genes merged – although that still begs the question why did they spread so dramatically.
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NE Asia is a bit of a mystery here as you’d think you’d have redhead Koreans / Mongols as well. My guess is they probably used to but the HGs in NE Asia were swamped by dark haired farmers whereas in Europe the HGs survived until much later.
Seriously? Have you ever heard of something called a “gene”. It’s not paint mixing. The children and grandchildren of mutation boy, will also be whiter *if* they inherit the gene.
Half the children of your white mutation will on average have the mutated gene. Half of the children of those children who inherited it will inherit it too. If the effect of the gene is neutral it will either just bump along at very low frequency–if there’s population growth of the breeding group–or perhaps die out–esp. if there’s population decline\collapse.
However, if the white skin mutation is *beneficial* then those that carry it will have an advantage, tend to survive, have more children and the frequency of the gene will grow in the breeding population.
For instance this one gene contributes a pretty large fraction of the Caucasian skin lightening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLC24A5
Frost is postulating this is (mostly) sexual selection. Could be. (Lighter skin definitely has it’s attractiveness, including being able to more easily read physiological responses–like “blushing”.)
Personally i think the skin lightening thing is more than just sexual selection. The East Asians developed a completely different skin lightening mechanism. That could be similar sexual selection–not impossible. But it could also be that there really is a direct–health\survival–advantage to lighter skin in medium-high latitudes.
The strongest determinate of what is perceived as beauty seems to be symmetric features underlying , of course cultural expressions like this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation
The symmetry is a simple test for genetic flaws.
Peter has an explanation (high mortality of steppe-tundra hunters) for why and how the genes became common, and it’s consistent with the unique diversity of hair and eye colouring in Europe
But a) the timing is out – the strong selection for Europeans to become “white” didn’t happen until after farming was widespread, and b) the idea of “novelty” selection doesn’t make sense with a fixed trait like European skin colour – at the point when 80% of the population has become white, then it’s the black individuals that now have the novelty advantage and the derived allele could never reach fixation. The idea might work for traits like hair and eye colour where minor alleles have persisted to the present day, but something else must have happened in regards to skin colour.
SLC24A5 was in Swedish hunter gatherers 7700 years ago.
Yes, but it was also in Early European Farmers (like Stuttgart) arriving from the Levant at the same time. While all modern Europeans show a large whack of EEF ancestry, they show little or no genetic continuity with the Motala samples – the “HG” component is better represented by the dark-skinned WHG samples (like Loschbour) than the light-skinned SHG. While these Swedish HG’s may have had the modern European phenotye, it’s unlikely that modern Europeans inherited it from them:
It’s possible that the other main depigmentation allele, SLC45A2, came from the SHG, but EHG (eg Karelia/Samara) also had it and we know modern Europeans have EHG-related ancestry mediated through Yamnaya, so this is the more likely source. Where EHG got it we can’t know until we get some older aDNA, so it’s possible it originated in an earlier Scandinavian population and spread east, but it’s also possible that it originated further east and spread west. EHG have an increased affinity to the Mal’ta boy so we know they have significant ancestral links through Central Asia and Siberia – whether this ancestry includes that SLC45A2 variant only time will tell.
I thought Europeans were the only people who still had any Neanderthal DNA. That’s something I’d have given a passing glance.
You are one of the most ignorant people i habe ever met on internet
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A wart on the chin with a big ole hair growing out of it is also “eye-catching” and “novel”.
“Eye-catching” and “novel” explain nothing.
“A few blacks also entered Southern Europe and mixed with the white people, resulting in the darker hued Italians and Greeks of today.”
Italians and Greeks have about as much Negro ancestry as Rachel Dolezal. Even Mexicans have more Negro ancestry than Italians and Greeks.
Mexican celebrities George Lopez and Eva Longoria both tested positive for Sub Saharan African admixture.
Tom_R says:
1. According to biologists, there are only 3 races—Caucasoid (whites), negroid (blacks) and oriental (Chinese).
Which biologists? The long debunked “HBD” favorite Carleton Coon? lol..,
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Besides skin color, there are other anthropomorphic differences (such as whites are tall and slender and have a skull shape of a standing egg; blacks have prognathism, etc). Some modern humans are a mixture of multiple races.
You really ought to recheck your “HBD” science there ace. There are plenty of Africans with a skull shape like a “standing egg”. But carry on nevertheless..
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2. The out of Africa theory defies common sense, and much of the newer fossil record and genetics contradict it.
Absolutely right- the newer genetics “contradict” it. As can be seen down beow “the liberals” are “hiding” the “truth”:
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Common sense: Besides the fact above that how could all Africans in Europe suddenly become white
Which one of mystical “liberal” scientists say Europeans “suddenly became white”? Do tell..
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a. Ancient humans migrated because of better access to critical resources like water and better weather. Most ancient civilizations settled along the banks of rivers (Euprahes/Tigris, Nile, Indus Valley, Oxus Civilization, Proto-Indo-Europeans along the Volga) or lakes (Pontic Caspian Steppe) in order to have access to fresh water. They migrated TOWARDS fresh water and for better weather. That is why the Indo-Europeans migrated south-west and south-east—to escape the bitter cold winters.
Gasp! So African peoples did not “migrate” towards fresh water? Who woulda thunk? UP above you mention the Nile River. Do realize that the Nile River is in Africa- and indeed the whole Nile Basin is in Africa, and extending all the way from Egypt down into, and as far east as the DR Congo? The Nile Basin drains about 10% of Africa, so there is plenty of “fresh water migration” to go around, no? Here’s a map to help you find “fresh water” Ace…
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So why would Africans migrate to a much colder harsher climate like Europe or Siberia? No, they did not. They would have frozen to death along the way and died of thirst.
Uh, I don’t know if your “hereditarian” science realizes it, but there is such a thing called CLIMATE VARIATION? But yeah, mere variation in climate is an invention of “the liberals”…right?
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b. Regarding skin/hair/eye color, the white skin color, blonde hair color and blue eye color are not due to the presence of any particular gene but rather due to ABSENCE of melanin, due to the absence of genes that code for melanin.
Uh, ace, I realize your “hereditarian science” frowns upon such things, but actually, white people do have genes that produce melanin.
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It is not easily possible for a group to mutate from black to white, but the opposite is more likely. As soon as one of the Africans who came to Europe mutated into a lighter color, that change would have disappeared through interbreeding and the darker melanin producing genes would have again dominated.
But you are contradicting yourself again Ace. Up above you say Africans did not migrate to “colder harsher climate” of Europe, but now you say Africans who came to Europe mutated. How could they not migrate, but yet migrate at the same time to “mutate”? Your HBD “logic” is astounding.
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2. The fossil record also continues to contradict the out-of-Africa theory. I do not have time or space to detail them all here, except to say the Siberian Mal’ta man was found near Lake Baikal, which is the easternmost corner of Russia, close to China, and the Orientals could have migrated there. He did have oriental features. The Kostenki 14 man has been given a dark skin color by some in the media; I am not aware of any genetic evidence proving his skin color but just the liberal media’s imagination.
lol, Ace, recheck your “hereditarian” textbook. Actually, “the liberal media” does not establish that Kotenski man is linked with a tropical population that looked like Africans, credible scientists do. Peter up above says: “Kostenki Man (circa 37,000 years ago), who still had dark skin, dark eyes, and an African facial shape.” Peter is correct, and it has nothing to do with “the liberal media” but hard science:
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3. Modern genetics contradicts the Out of Africa theory. For example, see the paper:
“Re-Examining the “Out of Africa” Theory and the Origin of Europeoids (Caucasoids) in Light of DNA Genealogy”
lol. Ace your “supporting reference” is a private paper put out by some blogger, its “hereditarian” origins given away by the dubious title word “Europeoids.” What else you got? “Swedoids”? OH and the blogger/author is “affiliated” with the so-called “Academy of DNA Genealogy, Newton, USA.” This mystical entity doesn’t even seem to exist. When Google is called up, search results points to the same blogger, who, apparently is “affiliated” with himself.. Ooohh, that’ real credible…
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“The finding that the Europeoid haplogroups did not descend from “African” haplogroups A or B is supported by the fact that bearers of the Europeoid haplogroups, as well as all non-African haplogroups do not carry ..
lol, strawman rubbish that does nothing to support your claim. Ace, which one of “the liberal” scientists say that “Europeoid ” haplogroups come from haplogroups A and B?
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The fossil record, genetics and common sense all contradict the out-of-Africa theory. The 3 races evolved separately in 3 different places (Caucasian in Central Eurasia/Western Siberia, Orientals in China and blacks in Africa). And as the out-of-Africa theory (which is basically left-wing anti-white Afro-centric propaganda) is disproven, it
Laughable rubbish.. but carry on with “hereditarian” “science”.. and “supporting” HBD references.. lol
I think Peter’s hypothesis deserves more respect than it is getting from a lot of the commenters here spouting off on the Vitamin D theory, etc. Tobus’s and Sean’s comments excepted. One thing in favor of Peter is that he writes with extraordinary clarity and logic. If those who disagree would write as clearly and logically it would help uninformed readers such as myself judge the merits of what they have to say. Tobus?
Wrong. Actually much more than Rachael Dolezal. No one doubts Greeks are European, but Greeks have a recognizable amount of African ancestry depending on the markers used in analysis. And Greeks share certain cystic fibrosis mutation with Africans as well..
If there was an alligator with perfectly symmetric features, how many humans would want to mate with it?
Motala hunter-gatherers work as a replacement for the dark-skinned WHG as far as North Europeans are concerned. It wasn’t in recent published works, but you can download Reich lab’s ADMIXTOOLS software that can be used to produce similar fits and try out various combinations with Motala specifically taking place of WHG. It will work equally well or even better as long as the population you’re trying to fit is from the northern side of the Alps.
When you think about what Haak et al. said about Motala (they are easily modelled as simple WHG+EHG mixes) it’s really impossible to tell Motala/Scandi-HG heritage apart from WHG and direct EHG and Yamnaya input.
Mexicans have much more Negro ancestry than Greeks.
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Perspectives_1/blacks_and_mexicans_101472.shtml
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/09/genomic-ancestry-of-mexicans.html
http://rootsrevealed.blogspot.com/2013/06/african-americans-and-mexicans-are_9.html
Your average Mexican is 4 percent Sub Saharan African. You will not find any Greek people with that much Sub Saharan African admixture.
[…] The Puzzle of European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color – The Unz Review […]
That comment has no place on this page. It’s not based on any science. It is just trolling but I’ll bite. A tall, buff, and cut black male with a 300 pound landwhale white woman, any hair color, red, black, brown, blonde, just pale skin. To you, that’s evidence that black men are attractive to both white and black women? Anecdotes prove nothing. You’re statement is based on biased observation motivated by pride or hate. This article tries to use science or pseudoscience to address a sensitive issues and you’re either trolling or not paying attention.
THERE ARE ONLY 3 BASIC RACES–CAUCASOID (WHITES), NEGROID (BLACKS) AND ORIENTAL.MONGOLOID (CHINESE); SKULL ANALYSIS.
I disagree with most of your points, which has basic errors, but I will rebut 2 of your main points.
The anthropomorphic analysis of skeletal remains is a WELL ESTABLISHED science and skull differences such as Caucasoid skulls being like a standing egg, the presence a narrow nose, lack of prognathism (mouth sticking forward), body differences such as taller height, etc. are well established in the scientific literature and are used not just in anthropology, but in forensics day after day.
See:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/humanAnatomy/yuan/craniologyISlides.pdf
It is 95% accurate in determining race from skeletal remains:
2. The fact that there are 3 elementary races is a well established fact mentioned in most basic biology books and in medical books. In fact, there are tons of medical papers on the racial difference in effects of medicines, in prevalence of diseases, etc.
3. There is no evidence that Kostenki 14 had black skin and black eyes. This is just the author’s imagination. There is nothing in his DNA analysis to suggest that. I have searched online and found NO objective evidence in his DNA to tell his race. In fact, his skull may be Caucasoid, just going by the photo.
4. The out-of-Africa theory keeps collapsing as there are skeletal remains found all over the world that predate the supposed time of the out-of-Africa event. So instead of realizing that the theory may be wrong, the proponents try to make their data fit the theory.
[SLC24A5 was in Swedish hunter gatherers 7700 years ago.] Yes, but it was also in Early European Farmers (like Stuttgart) arriving from the Levant at the same time.
Motala is 1000 KM from Stuttgart
You cannot be seriously suggesting that the Motala hunter gatherers (who were descended from the steppe-tundra hunters of the Ice Age) got SLC24A5 from Early European Farmers who did not arrive in Motala for another millennium? Motala had both SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, plus HERC2/OCA2 for diverse eye and hair colours.
It’s possible that the other main depigmentation allele, SLC45A2, came from the SHG, but EHG (eg Karelia/Samara) also had it and we know modern Europeans have EHG-related ancestry mediated through Yamnaya, so this is the more likely source.
Motala had Ancient Eurasian Hunter Gatherer ancestry in common with the Yamnaya. I don’t see any explanation for that other than Yamnaya ancestry included some European steppe-tundra hunters who wandered east at the end of the ice age and mixed with other peoples. I think it is becoming clear that the Yamnaya killed off an awful lot of farmers in central Europe so that may be confusing things.
Peter: “estimates of the time frame when European skin became white: 11,000 to 19,000 years ago according to Beleza et al. (2013) and 7,600 to 19,200 years ago according to Canfield et al. (2014).”
The Interplay between Natural Selection and Susceptibility to Melanoma on Allele 374F of SLC45A2 Gene in a South European Population , Here “allele 374F was significantly more frequent among the individuals with lighter skin.[...] The age of the expansion of the allele in this case was estimated to be of 16,480 years ”
The estimates for when clearly implicate the Ice Age as the casual factor.
Sure there has been Black influence in Mexico for centuries, but also the Greeks, as the DNA studies posted above demonstrate. This does not mean the Greeks are not primarily European, just as it does not mean the Mexicans are not primarily indigenous American, with the usual Spanish influence.
The highest allele frequency for the 374F allele is observed in Denmark, which also has the most feminine digit ratio in the world, and the politics are very female (family orientated). The Danes had a blip when they implemented immigration restriction policies, but 1n 2011 they elected Helle Thorning-Schmidt who had been an outspoken advocate for immigration. Denmark was soon admitting more non European immigrants than ever. What Can We Learn From Denmark? by the US Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vermont).
“In Denmark, there is a very different understanding of what “freedom” means. In that country, they have gone a long way to ending the enormous anxieties that comes with economic insecurity. Instead of promoting a system which allows a few to have enormous wealth, they have developed a system which guarantees a strong minimal standard of living to all — including the children, the elderly and the disabled“
the mutations that gave rise to depigmentation occurred long before the baltic area went agricultural. But once they got most of their food from grain, etc, they needed more vitamin D. That agricultural transformation and the subsequent loss of vitamin D sources caused the spread of the depigmentation gene(s)
You’re arguing that the alleles for white skin were already present before farming, but at a low prevalence. Farming then made these alleles more advantageous, so they became more prevalent.
If that were the case, the chances are slight that we would find prehistoric hunter-gatherer DNA with the allele for light skin. Yet most of the hunter-gatherers from Scandinavia and Russia had alleles for light skin. Just a matter of luck?
But a) the timing is out – the strong selection for Europeans to become “white” didn’t happen until after farming was widespread, and b) the idea of “novelty” selection doesn’t make sense with a fixed trait like European skin colour – at the point when 80% of the population has become white, then it’s the black individuals that now have the novelty advantage and the derived allele could never reach fixation.
The timing is correct. The alleles for white skin seem to have already reached fixation before farming, among the hunter-gatherers of Scandinavia and Russia.
Why didn’t sexual selection diversify skin color as it had hair and eye color? Because there was a pre-existing sexual dimorphism for skin color. In all human populations, women are lighter-skinned than men, and there seems to be a hardwired mental algorithm that identifies lighter skin as being more feminine.
See:
Frost, P. (2011). Hue and luminosity of human skin: a visual cue for gender recognition and other mental tasks, Human Ethology Bulletin, 26(2), 25-34.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/256296588_Hue_and_luminosity_of_human_skin_a_visual_cue_for_gender_recognition_and_other_mental_tasks/file/72e7e5223eb2c3eb3b.pdf
So any selection for women with novel skin color would have been countered by a general pressure of sexual selection for lighter-skinned women. Over time, the second selection pressure would have steadily pushed the mean skin color toward lighter and lighter shades, thus eliminating the possibility of diversifying selection.
Yes, but it [the allele for white skin] was also in Early European Farmers (like Stuttgart) arriving from the Levant at the same time. While all modern Europeans show a large whack of EEF ancestry, they show little or no genetic continuity with the Motala samples – the “HG” component is better represented by the dark-skinned WHG samples (like Loschbour) than the light-skinned SHG.
Those early European farmers themselves had progressively admixed with the hunter-gatherers they replaced. It’s also likely that even though they came from the Middle East, they had earlier been part of a demographic expansion out of Europe. Before 12,000 BP, the Middle East was inhabited by a people whose physical appearance was more African than European.
If we look at hunter-gatherer DNA from elsewhere in Europe (outside Scandinavia and Russia) we see a mix of new and old features, i.e., dark skin and non-brown eyes. It is likely that these new facial features diffused outward from the north and east of Europe.
A wart on the chin with a big ole hair growing out of it is also “eye-catching” and “novel”.
“Eye-catching” and “novel” explain nothing.
I was talking about brightly colored facial traits. In other animals, sexual selection is the most common cause of such traits, although there are other causes.
If this is all true, then the big mystery is how other races in northern climates retained black hair and dark eyes. This would include north Asians and various Indian peoples in North America.
It was only in Europe that we find evidence of humans continuously present in large numbers throughout the last ice age. If we look at the Eurasian steppe-tundra of that time, we see that it ran farther south in Europe than in Asia. It was also drier in Asia and much less influenced by the moderating influence of the Atlantic. So there may have been a similar process of sexual selection in northern Asia, but it was harder for new alleles to arise and spread because the population was smaller and subject to periodic extinction.
Unless I am missing a logical link somewhere, how can sexual selection account for more genetic variation in monogamous societies compared to polygamous ones? Wouldn’t the spoilt-for-choice alpha males in polygamous societies pick the most eye-catching females (which, in your account, would have been the females with lighter skin, eyes, and hair) to mate with, while males in monogamous societies would have to pick whoever was available?
It’s not genetic variation in general. In fact, we see more genetic variation in sub-Saharan Africans (who have long had a high rate of polygyny) than in Europeans (who have long had a much lower rate).
In a high-polygyny society, women are in short supply. It’s the men who have to compete for the women, and not vice versa. What you’re saying applies more to class-stratified societies, where upper-class males have the pick of the women.
It is 95% accurate in determining race from skeletal remains:
You don’t seem to understand the difference between successful classification based on arbitrary criteria and meaningful classification.
The fact that there are 3 elementary races is a well established fact mentioned in most basic biology books and in medical books.
You, like most HBDers, enjoy making things up.
(3) and (4) are borderline retarded.
there are suggestions that modern slc24a5 is most diverse in SW asia
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24048645
The anthropomorphic analysis of skeletal remains is a WELL ESTABLISHED science and skull differences such as Caucasoid skulls being like a standing egg, the presence a narrow nose, lack of prognathism (mouth sticking forward), body differences such as taller height, etc. are well established in the scientific literature and are used not just in anthropology, but in forensics day after day.
Conveniently, you can provide no credible sources for your assertions above. Saying it is “well established” doesn’t mean much for you could have “well established” but bogus information. WHich current, credible source for example says your “Caucasoid” skulls are like a “standing egg”? If it is well established, you should be able to post a credible citation. But you still can’t.
It is 95% accurate in determining race from skeletal remains:
What credible source gives this 95%? You, as usual, don’t say. And while forensic scientists can determine “race” in certain circumstances and certain areas with basic accuracy, in other circumstances they fail miserably. One study for example racially “matched” up Nubian samples with people as far afield as Japan, Hungary and Eastern Island (Williams 2005- Forensic Misclassification..)
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2. The fact that there are 3 elementary races is a well established fact mentioned in most basic biology books and in medical books.
This is obsolete as far as modern science. And forensics may assert “3 races” but these assertions only work with well defined reference groups in certain areas. In many parts of the US South for example you will usually only have 2 “races” to work with- easy enough enough to pin a label on. But then where do they put an Australian Abo? Are they “Mongoloid”, “Negroid” or “Caucasoid”? And Hispanics? What little check box do they fall into? And if they are “mixed” what skeletal features tell you someone is “mixed race,” and to what “percentage mix”? Anyone can slap an arbitrary label on something. Simply sticking them into a pre-defined category with a label does not make either the category, the label, or the procedure of sticking them into a category necessarily accurate. Human diversity is a lot more complex than simplistic “3 race” sorting.
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3. There is no evidence that Kostenki 14 had black skin and black eyes. This is just the author’s imagination. There is nothing in his DNA analysis to suggest that. I have searched online and found NO objective evidence in his DNA to tell his race. In fact, his skull may be Caucasoid, just going by the photo.
So you say, but can produce no credible evidence of your assertion, whereas I have already cited credible scientists, and Peter’s reference is embedded in his writeup. As for photos, that is “eyeball anthropology” and can go in any direction. But let’s go with your claim for a moment- let’s say its true. As can be seen in the forensic reconstruction below, many early Europeans did indeed look like Africans, or to use your 3-race formula- they were clearly “Negroid.” You have won the argument.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/romania/5273654/Scientists-reveal-face-of-the-first-European.html
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4. The out-of-Africa theory keeps collapsing as there are skeletal remains found all over the world that predate the supposed time of the out-of-Africa event. So instead of realizing that the theory may be wrong, the proponents try to make their data fit the theory.
Wrong again. You need to recheck your HBD sources. The location of skeletons predating anatomically modern humans, say 60-70kya does not at all mean the skeletons do not derive from earlier African migrants. Archaic hominids are found worldwide that also derive from an earlier African source.
The timing is correct. The alleles for white skin seem to have already reached fixation before farming, among the hunter-gatherers of Scandinavia and Russia.
wasn’t fixed. segregating.
http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/03/13/016477.full.pdf
figure 2 panel B. SHG = 65% derived. lower than the early neolithic farmer range of 80-90%…. EHG both had SLC24A5, but N = 2 from what i recall. so not enough to say whether it is fixed (this is one of those situations where N = 2 can prove converse pretty well though, so WHG homozyg for ancestral is really suggestive).
with better sequence coverage we could see whether it is the same haplotype, or different. SLC24A5 has VERY LITTLE VARIATION, suggesting that it’s from a single variant, not ancient standing variation. we don’t know enough about EHG to say much…
P.S. SHG had a lot of “east asian” EDAR. the finnish % of derived east asian EDAR tracks their east asian admixture, so it’s not old. so it’s all confused.
“P.S. SHG had a lot of “east asian” EDAR. the finnish % of derived east asian EDAR tracks their east asian admixture, so it’s not old. so it’s all confused.”
That is not necessarily the case. The study which found EDAR in SHG did not take into account that Komis who unlike Finns do not live near SHG areas and have more Siberian admixture than Scandinavians, Finns or ethnic Russians of any region have no EDAR.
http://alfred.med.yale.edu/alfred/mvograph.asp?siteuid=SI663326A
Since the haplotype of modern EDAR and SHG EDAR is the same, it being SHG survival remains a possibility.
According to Dienekes:-
“Low frequency of HERC2 derived “blue eye” allele and a lower frequency of the SLC45A2 “light skin” allele”, but they still had it. My bet is the Yamnaya had been in contact with an east wandering steppe-tundra hunter group, and that’s where the Yamnaya picked up a low frequency of HERC2 derived “blue eye” allele and a lower frequency of the SLC45A2.
Ice-age Europeans roamed in small bands of fewer than 30, on brink of extinction (Horizon magazine)
Anyway, as Yamnaya seem to have been fixed for SLC24A5, they must have had it already, so it was likely present in Ancient North Eurasians at some level (possible due to pale skin enhancing parental care and infant survival). I think it a good bet it was around in the European hunter gatherer population, and later the Motola people had it around for an expansion and with other light skin genes the last Ice Age. (Motala has Ancient North Eurasian ancestry as do the Yamnaya). By that time it was being selected for the reasons Peter proposes.
Razib, while you seem to have a point about SLC24A5, it does not obviate Peter’s proposed explanation for white skin.
for the record, i don’t believe that 30 europeans were wandering around all of the continent. i’m 99% sure she said that for exaggeration. it captures the sense of the dynamic of extinction and re-population.
Anyway, as Yamnaya seem to have been fixed for SLC24A5, they must have had it already, so it was likely present in Ancient North Eurasians at some level (possible due to pale skin enhancing parental care and infant survival). I think it a good bet it was around in the European hunter gatherer population, and later the Motola people had it around for an expansion and with other light skin genes the last Ice Age. (Motala has Ancient North Eurasian ancestry as do the Yamnaya). By that time it was being selected for the reasons Peter proposes.
the siberian mal’ta boy did not have the derived variant fwiw. though might have arisen sometime in between, and not all ANE had it. amerindians don’t have it, and they are 30-40% ANE.
I would not vote for Scott Walker.
“Sure there has been Black influence in Mexico for centuries, but also the Greeks, as the DNA studies posted above demonstrate. This does not mean the Greeks are not primarily European, just as it does not mean the Mexicans are not primarily indigenous American, with the usual Spanish influence.”
Mexicans have more Negro ancestry than Greeks, this is 100 percent fact. Mexicans on average have 4 percent Sub Saharan African admixture, where there are ZERO studies that say Greeks have 4 percent Sub Saharan African admixture.
18 percent of Greek people have blue eyes
http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/topic/4581457/1/
If Greeks had significant Negro ancestry, blue eyes would be a lot more rare in Greece. Blue eyes is quite rare in countries where most people are at least of partial Negro ancestry.
Very light coloring is associated with psychological problems. Also, light coloring has competitive disadvantages–fair-skinned/light-eyed people are easier to “read.” Arguably this is advantageous for a people building a civilized society (less corruption?) but not so great individually.
There’s a reason the color of eumelanin (black) and the color associated with power (black) are the same color.
The Yamnaya would be the patriarchal influence. The Kurgan burials were of men, while women were killed to keep the warrior company, which does not sound like women had much say in the matter. In central Europe where the conquered women were plentiful (the native men all having been killed presumably) several women and servants were killed for the burial of a single warrior.
Modern culture seem to be harking back to prehistory.
Didn’t you read about the Hyborian Age? And Cimmerians are the descendants of Atlantean colonists.
Totally true history!
I think people are focusing on “white” when it’s actually about “lighter”.
There are a bunch of genes that make skin lighter but not white so they may have arisen in different regions for the same reason – maybe vitamin D, maybe something else – but whatever it was they didn’t need to be white to get it just lighter.
Once these genes had arisen in their respective regions then selection to combine them together might not necessarily have the same reason – maybe a phase of sexual selection in some regions as suggested here followed by a second phase of farmer diet.
(Or even fluke: isolated regions along the edge of the steppe becoming the opposite after horses.)
(This might speak to the NE Asian difference – maybe they went through the latitude pressure phase and the farmer diet phase but not the HG sexual selection phase?)
If skin and eye depigmentation were originally somehow sunlight related then boosted by sexual selection in certain regions and then boosted by farmer diet that would counter this i.e. it’s a mixture of functional + novelty acting as a booster.
That might leave hair color as the only solely novelty attractant and that hasn’t gone to fixation.
SLC24A5 coming in with the farmers did make it look for a while that these depigmentation genes may have evolved as a result of the switch to farming but their presence in the Swedish HGs pushed it back to latitude.
The interesting part of that to my mind is it implies that the farmers may have started out from somewhere adjacent to an HG population with SLC24A5 i.e. somewhere cold and/or mountainous.
.
Anyway I don’t have a strong view on the sexual selection idea or rather I think it is probably true but I don’t have a strong view on how much of skin, eye and hair depigmentation it is responsible for as there may be multiple reasons.
That still leaves plenty of scope for other possibilities like psychological traits and things like breast size.
[quote from article you referenced] The distributions of C11 and its parental haplotypes make it most likely that these two last steps occurred between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, with the A111T mutation occurring after the split between the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians.
Razib,
I agree that this “white skin” allele arose after the split between ancestral Europeans and ancestral East Asians. I disagree with the inference that it arose between the Middle East and South Asia. We have two estimates for the time of origin of this allele: 19,200 – 7,600 BP (Canfield et al., 2014) and 19,000 – 11,000 BP (Beleza et al., 2013). At that time, both the Middle East and South Asia were very different places. Before 12,000 BP the Levant was home to an African-like people and South Asia was inhabited by hunter-gatherers who looked and behaved like the indigenous inhabitants of Australia or the Andaman Islands. In short, we cannot use genetics to identify the place of origin because two much has changed on the ground.
wasn’t fixed. segregating.
I shouldn’t have said “fixation” because the sample sizes are too small and because one individual had the ancestral allele, but it’s a high prevalence. As I understand it, the Motala hunter-gatherer site in Sweden yielded DNA from seven individuals. Three of them had very fair skin, three of them had inconclusive data, and one had olive skin. If we look at sites farther east (Karelia and Samara) there may have been fixation for very fair skin, although we have too few individuals to be sure.
I’m puzzled by Figure 2. Does it reflect all of the current data?
Your – partly on-topic – pet theory requires that Scandinavians all be the same but they’re not.
The reason they’re not is the physical geography.
I think I have already said with on topic 2D:4D , pigmentation and political-sociological evidence why I consider Denmark to be the epitome of a sexual selection of women population country.
Sweden, which according to Mark Blyth is quite capitalist under a veneer of its own supposed model, is of interest mainly because it shows one of the two main white skin alleles did not come from farmers.
but you can download Reich lab’s ADMIXTOOLS software that can be used to produce similar fits and try out various combinations with Motala specifically taking place of WHG.
All modern Euro pops that I’ve tested, north or south, score closer to WHG than Motala in D-stats, eg:
Chimp Scottish Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0154 3.013
Chimp French Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0143 2.96
Chimp Belarusian Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0138 2.842
Chimp Ukrainian Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0139 2.835
Chimp English Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0137 2.755
Chimp Lithuanian Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0132 2.657
Chimp Icelandic Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0125 2.525
Chimp Estonian Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0121 2.473
Chimp Norwegian Motala_HG HungaryGamba_HG 0.0122 2.463
etc.
Since Motala models as a WHG/EHG combination it’s fully expected that it will be a “feasible” population in any qpAdm run that works with WHG/EHG pops…. but I’ve yet to see a qpAdm run that prefers Motala to WHG as a best fit (feel free to show me some). With the data we have at present it seems there has been very little, if any, SHG-specific genetic contribution to modern Europeans, even Scandinavians. The data suggests the arrival of SLC24A5 from the southeast with EEF, followed by SLC45A2 arriving from the northeast with EHG/Yamnaya a few thousand years later.
If you mean a run that includes both Motala and WHG, I haven’t seen those either. What I’ve seen is better fits with Motala in WHG’s place, but only for northern Europeans. Here are some, for comparison the French are a more southern population and their Motala fit is hence slightly worse than the WHG fit.
Chisq EN WHG EHG Han
Estonians 2.709 0.581 0.124 0.257 0.037
Lithuanians 3.482 0.582 0.157 0.233 0.027
French: 2.683 0.762 0.063 0.151 0.024
Chisq EN Motala EHG Han
Estonians 0.918 0.566 0.236 0.158 0.040
Lithuanians 1.264 0.557 0.289 0.121 0.033
French 3.132 0.754 0.123 0.098 0.025
@Sean: You cannot be seriously suggesting that the Motala hunter gatherers (who were descended from the steppe-tundra hunters of the Ice Age) got SLC24A5 from Early European Farmers who did not arrive in Motala for another millennium?
No, I am not suggesting that at all. I’m suggesting that modern Europeans got SLC24A5 from EEF. SHG and EHG may also have had it at 7000ybp (it was already widespread outside Western Europe at that time), but SHG made efffectively zero genetic input in to modern Europeans, and EHG only made a contribution in the Early Bronze Age… so the SLC24A5 in modern Europeans almost certainly came from EEF, not SHG.
“estimates of the time frame when European skin became white: 11,000 to 19,000 years ago according to Beleza et al. (2013) and 7,600 to 19,200 years ago according to Canfield et al. (2014).”
We need to careful of confusing when the allele first arose with when it reached widespread fixation, as well as when it spread into Europe – they are all different timeframes, and different for the different alleles. In terms of “when European skin became white”, we have European samples from 4000BC that don’t have all the derived alleles, so it seems Europeans became “white” as we know it today sometime after this… and likely in a step-by-step process over a few thousand years.
@Peter: The timing is correct. The alleles for white skin seem to have already reached fixation before farming, among the hunter-gatherers of Scandinavia and Russia.
Yes, but neither of these made a genetic contribution to modern Europeans until *after* farming was widespread. While SLC24A5 reached fixation shortly after the arrival of the first farmers, SLC45A2 didn’t become fixed in Europe until at least the middle Bronze Age – Europeans were already farmers when both sweeps happened.
No it doesn’t.
If SHG had it – even if SHG didn’t spread it – then it was already in northern Europe which means it probably didn’t originate with the farmers.
The data suggests the farmers picked it up from a population who would also need to have been in contact with SHG – via some chain or other.
So who might that population have been.
@anon:
It think you’re confusing “origin” of the allele with it’s “arrival” in the ancestors of modern Europeans – the data shows the frequency of SLC24A5 goes from zero in WHG populations to 90% in mixed WHG/EEF populations within under 1000 years. I don’t think there can be any serious doubt that EEF *introduced* the allele into the modern European lineage.
But I’ve never claimed the allele *originated* in EEF – as the SHG and EHG samples show it was already present to the north and northeast as well as the southeast and south (and so was presumably to the east too) of Europe at that time, and it’s ultimate origin could be any population in that zone, or further east, in the preceding 10,000 years or so. We won’t exactly where and when unless we get some widespread samples through that period and region.
Is hair colour really that important in determining how attractive a female is? I’d say most males of any race would prefer a tallish, dark-haired woman with good facial symmetry and good body shape over a short, fat blond women. And among whites, a dark-haired woman with fair skin probably stands out just as much as an attractive blonde.
If physical attractiveness was being selected for then fine facial features, good skin etc would probably take precedence over hair colour.
It may be a bit different with eye colour. I recall reading that both white men and women prefer partners and children with blue eyes, and blue eyes may be associated with other characteristics as well.
I can’t duplicate these results – a 4-way mix of EN/HG/EHG/Han fails as infeasible in all my runs, and of the feasible results, I get lower chisq and different mixes with WHG than Motala, eg best for Estonian w/HG:
HungaryGamba_HG: Chisq 5.856 %ges 0.041 0.873 0.087 0 (no Han)
Motala_HG: Chisq 12.606 %ages 0.403 0.557 0 0.04 (no EHG)
It’s probably just a matter of the “right” populations being used (I’m using Davidski’s preferred set mentioned here with Han removed since it’s in our left pops), but in any case qpAdm isn’t meant to be conclusive, it just confirms if a particular model is feasible given D-stat between the various pops.
But there’s also the matter of SLC45A2, which doesn’t appear in most of Europe until the Bronze Age. If SLC24A5 came from SHG and SHG also had SLC45A2, it seems strange that only one was selected for when they both contribute to the same effect. Taken with the D-stats above that show WHG is closer to all modern Euros than SHG, and the exact coincidence of the SLC24A5 increase with the EEF incursion, I think it’s safe to rule out SHG as the source.
Can we use the full names for populations please, the abbreviations are making it too difficult to follow the discussion
The post’s subject is about why Europeans have white skin and diversity of colour in hair and eyes. No one denies a blue (in fact diverse) eye colur allele was in central Europe before agriculture. So diversity of eye colour is 100% European. It’s possible the light skin allele of SLC24A5 originated on south east Asia, as Razib Khan (and Tobus) are saying, but that is uncertain, and a byway rather than the subject at issue.
There is no argument that 7000 years ago light skin SLC24A5 was in Southern Sweden and with the light skin allele of SLC45A2, part of a suite of alleles conferring white skin, diverse eye colour, and diverse hair colour in most of the Motala population long before any possibility of an agriculture-specific selection pressure at northern latitudes.. The European specific allele of SLC45A2 which has a noticeable effect of lightening skin colour between individuals (see above) is pre agriculture European, the eye and hair colour diversity allele is pre agriculture European too. The selection pressure that produced all this, also linked feminine features to blue/diverse eye colour. Need I say more?
I’ve always liked this theory.
Possible embellishment:
Contributing to phenotypical “whiteness”, we have a (surprisingly?) large number of recessive alleles. At some point during the lightening of the population, lighter men may have preferred lighter females (even more) for additional assurance of fatherhood. Fits with the theory’s environment of high paternal investment.
Possible alternative:
Melanin and a number of neurotransmitters share a common precursor molecule. In a cognitively demanding and scarce environment, losing pigmentation that (obviously) could be done without may have been beneficial without invoking sexual selection at all.
It’s possibly a right pop issue. That “0.041 0.873 0.087 0″ Estonian fit looks extremely odd (whether 0.873 is HG or farmer) compared to anything I’ve seen qpAdm or academics produce before – no wonder it’s infeasible.
Davidski says in the comment section you linked that he got:
Yamnaya
Samara_HG 0.535
Iranian 0.465
std. errors: 0.031 0.031
chisq 3.500
p-value for nested model: 1.81274e-22
If you can replicate that, the right pops probably are what’s making the difference.
I do think those fits I posted are trustworthy, but I will check what pops were used. Using different left pops the same man got this Estonian result: Yamnaya 0,516 EN 0,276 HungaryGambaHG 0,178 Han 0,03. Looks feasible and similar to the fits in supplements of Haak et al.
Sean already addressed SLC45A2, but here’s my two cents on it: Derived allele was sporadically present in LBK, more often present in Motala and present in both EHG’s (as was SLC24A5). This opens not just the possibility that some peoples around the Baltic could have gotten it from a non-farmer source, but that Yamnaya along with other steppe groups and their derivatives could have gotten it from HG’s and spread it all around Europe. I would not rule out contributions of any hunter-gatherers with the derived alleles, although it’s possible that EHG is the ultimate source for SHG too. I don’t think there’s a reason to assume farmers’ impact as deliverers of phenotypes was equal, never mind all-important, in every region of Europe. Perhaps if all hunter-gatherers were like Loschbour, but they weren’t.
You keep changing the spelling of your own name to defeat the “commenters to skip” feature?
We need to careful of confusing when the allele first arose with when it reached widespread fixation, as well as when it spread into Europe – they are all different timeframes, and different for the different alleles. In terms of “when European skin became white”, we have European samples from 4000BC that don’t have all the derived alleles, so it seems Europeans became “white” as we know it today sometime after this
The “white skin” alleles were already widespread among hunter-gatherers from northern and eastern Europe (Sweden, Karelia, Samara) before the arrival of farming. We see a white skin phenotype in three of the four Motala individuals (for which we have information) and in all of the individuals from the Karelia and Samara sites.
Yes, these alleles were absent in hunter-gatherers elsewhere in Europe. The physical traits that identify present-day Europeans arose only among the hunter-gatherers of the north and east.
Is hair colour really that important in determining how attractive a female is? I’d say most males of any race would prefer a tallish, dark-haired woman with good facial symmetry and good body shape over a short, fat blond women. And among whites, a dark-haired woman with fair skin probably stands out just as much as an attractive blonde.
You are right … under normal conditions of sexual selection. In other animals, we see color polymorphisms only under conditions of intense sexual selection. This is where even slight differences of physical appearance can contribute to mating success. This is also why we don’t see a diversity of hair and eye colors elsewhere in the world. That isn’t the sort of thing that would be produced by sexual selection under normal conditions.
One must consider the possibility that caucasian features may be linked to neanderthal ancestry; the jury is still out on that. So was there a mousterian/ chattelperronian/ aurignacian/ magdalenian cultural continuum? Are Neanderthal ancestors the providers of white skin, blond har, and blue eyes? Genetic analysis of archaeological remains is providing revolutionary news and insights into human prehistory.
I’d say it’s more a question of being more noticeable. If one of two equally attractive women is more noticeable for some extra reason then that gives her an edge.
People do this sort of thing artificially all the time – from smart suits to hair dye.
Sort of, I’m over-stressing the point because I think some people will take “arrived from” as “originated from” without thinking.
The reason for quibbling is if these depigmentation genes did originate among HGs in the north then it creates an interesting question – where did the farmers pick them up before expanding into Europe?
I think the puzzle is why they only had light skin allele SLC24A5 , but not SLC45A2 as well giving them truly white skin. The simplest explaination would be light skin SLC24A5 is older and one of the populations ancestral to farmers split off from the European hunter gatherers before the last and most intense phase of sexual selection during the Late Glacial Maximum
As I see it.
1)Basal Eurasians arrived in the middle east 60,ooo years ago and they move on into Europe and become European hunter gatherers 45,000 years ago. In Europe their skin started to lighten through the pressure of weakish sexual selection that expanded SLC24A5, when it appeared as a mutation.
2a) Some of the European hunter gatherers people fixed for SLC24A5 only wandered back and came into contact with some part of the basal Eurasians. That is where the basal eurasian descendant farmers got SLC24A5 from .
2b) Some of the European hunter gatherers people fixed for SLC24A5 only encounter the ancient north eurasians and the Yanmaya result, they are a population fixed for SLC24A5 only.
3) During the Late Glacial Maximum the steppe tundra hunters were under intense sexual selection and got fully white skin with the addition of SLC45A2 to the already fixed SLC24A5, plus the diverse hair and skin alleles , which somewhat further lightens skin . (Red hair which greatly lightens skin may have spread first)
4a ) The Late Glacial Maximum ends and the steppe tundra hunters follow the herds of reindeer north, leaving the European plain very sparsely populated . Time wears on and less pigmented populations move into the plain. (light skin may have been selected against for some reason at this time, but sexually selected eye colors are common).
4b) A small population of the intensively selected steppe tundra hunters encounter ancient north Eurasians, and become a minor strain within the Yanmaya.
6) Nine thousand years ago the middle eastern farmers with SLC24A5 move into Europe.
7) Four and a half thousand years ago the Yanmaya exterminate most of the farmer men in central Europe, and steal their women.
It’s almost impossible to discern what you are trying to prove, but just to be clear – races do not equate to species.
“Is hair colour really that important in determining how attractive a female is? I’d say most males of any race would prefer a tallish, dark-haired woman with good facial symmetry and good body shape over a short, fat blond women.”
Most men prefer women who looks closest to them in ethnic features/racial features. According to this study, most men in Mediterranean countries for example do not prefer blondes over brunettes.
http://www.aol.com/article/2013/08/25/blondes-vs-brunettes-what-your-hair-color-says-about-you/20504483/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25014019
Like all Evo psyche theories, too many countervailing facts have to be left out to form this coherent narrative.
All Evo psyche theories are simplifications formed by simply brushing out a host of contradictory facts leaving an artifically coherent structure.
These resultant artifical constructions then merely reflect prevailing biases.
For instance, roughly 80% of western Evo psyche theories on attraction between the s exes is contradicted by asia – a recent article in the nyt shows how Japanese men work to keep themselves super thin an avoid building muscle while cultivating a feminine look, because Japanese women actually prefer men smaller than them.
Utterly contradicts everything western Evo psyche says about female preferencrs. But no one notices in the west notices or cares, or bothers to look beyond the west, because like all dogmas that reflect prevailing social biases that pertain only to specific societies, Evo psyche is less about science than providing a basis for highly local and culture specific values in a modern idiom, in this case science.
In that sense Evo psyche is nothing less than a monumental project to provide a modern basis for culture specific western values, since religion has been replaced with a scientific idiom (as distinct from science. Evo psyche has nothing to do with actual science. It merely borrows it’s idiom in order to achieve modern credibiloty)
Therefore Evo psyche has merely anthropological value.
But I suppose every generation has to do the heavy work of translating it’s local, idiosyncratic value system into a socially credible idiom. Religious and aesthetic idioms no longer have credibility in the west, so local instinctive values that obtain nowhere else in the world must be encased in a faux scientific language to become ‘canonical’, just as God wad utilized in the old teztament.
One must consider the possibility that caucasian features may be linked to neanderthal ancestry; the jury is still out on that. So was there a mousterian/ chattelperronian/ aurignacian/ magdalenian cultural continuum? Are Neanderthal ancestors the providers of white skin, blond har, and blue eyes?
We’ve isolated the main hair-color gene (MC1R) from Neanderthal remains. It’s unlike any variant that currently exists in Europeans. We also have DNA from Kostenki Man, who lived 37,000 years ago and was one of the earliest modern humans in Europe. He had dark skin, dark eyes, and an African facial shape. So the facial appearance of present-day Europeans seems to have evolved after and not before that date.
Like all Evo psyche theories, too many countervailing facts have to be left out to form this coherent narrative.
I’m not a fan of Evolutionary Psychology. As you point out, it assumes the existence of a single human nature that assumed its final form in the Pleistocene on the African savannah.
It’s good for getting funding, though.
The only reason it may appear that blondism and gingerism is more common in White females than it is in White males is because of hair dye. You eliminate hair dye and blondism and gingerism will be pretty evenly distributed between White males and White females
Hair color is naturally more diverse in women than in men. That was the finding of a twin study by Shekar et al. (2008) on hair color. The participants’ hair was examined to see whether it had been dyed, and the age range of the participants (12 and 14 years of age) would have reduced the incidence of dyeing as well.
“Twins and their siblings were taken through the protocol when the twins were approximately 12 and 14 years of age. At each visit, the nurse classified each participant’s hair into one of the five categories: fair ⁄ blonde, light brown, red ⁄ auburn, dark brown or black. In addition, a sample of hair between 2 and 5 cm was cut from the nape of the neck. For individuals with short hair (predominantly males), a sample was taken from the crown. A sample was not taken in the case where the hair was too short or dyed.”
“Females had, on average, redder hair (P < 0.00001) and greater variation in R index scores (P 0.001) than males. [...] The parameter explaining the scalar difference between sexes could not be removed without a significant difference in fit. [...] Variance components analysis of light–dark hair color identified some qualitative differences in the sources of additive genetic influence between sexes. Interestingly, this result is consistent with the literature on gender differences in evolutionary biology. A study by Thelen (32) suggests that eumelanin in females is under sexual selection for the rarest color in a population while hair color in males undergoes natural selection for the most unobtrusive color."
Shekar, S.N., Duffy, D.L., Frudakis, T., Montgomery, G.W., James, M.R., Sturm, R.A., & Martin, N.G. (2008). Spectrophotometric methods for quantifying pigmentation in human hair-Influence of MC1R genotype and environment. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 84, 719-726
@Sean: The simplest explaination would be light skin SLC24A5 is older and one of the populations ancestral to farmers split off from the European hunter gatherers
I think your outline is broadly correct, particularly in relation to the different paths of the two SLC’s arrivals into the modern European lineage. Personally I don’t see any reason to assume Europe (over “western Eurasia”) for your geographical locations, but due to lack of evidence either way I won’t argue the point.
@Henk: Contributing to phenotypical “whiteness”, we have a (surprisingly?) large number of recessive alleles.
Which alleles are you saying are recessive? My understanding was that they are additive, not recessive – each individual allele affects the phenotype independently.
@Peter Frost: The physical traits that identify present-day Europeans arose only among the hunter-gatherers of the north and east.
Not quite. Blue eyes also arose in the hunter-gathers of the west, and one of the genes for light skin is found in the Early European Farmers from the south/southeast.
In regards to the second, we can quibble about what you mean by “arose”, but at this point there’s no hard evidence to indicate geographically where SLC24A5 originated, and it’s highly likely that temporally it preceded the populations we currently describe as “European hunter-gather” or “Early European farmer” – it will almost certainly turn out to be a group ancestral to both of these. In terms of where this was, the lack of solid evidence makes it a bit premature for such a bold statement, especially one that includes the word “only” and a reference to a small subset of downstream populations. Moreover, it insinuates that these populations are the sole source of the traits in modern Europeans, and we both know that is factually incorrect.
@Grelsson:
I get 0.526 Samara and 0.474 Iranian for Yamnaya, chisq 2.503 – similar, but not exactly the same as Davidski.
I agree with your comments about SLC45A2 – it almost certainly comes from EHG, it’s only SLC24A5 that appears to be introduced by the first farmers.
Fairer skin is one aspect of beauty but not the only.
True, “Whites” are fairer on average than North Asians but North Asians have other characteristics that may put them ahead such less body hair, more neotonic features, and “flatter” faces.
In addition, lighter hair provides fewer accents to the face. Needless to say, one of the things the human face does is communicate through facial expressions and the distinct features of the eyebrows and eyeslashes facilitate this. But without makeup, blondes and lighter haired females are at a disadvantage there.
What’s more, blondes and red-heads seem to age faster.
If Greeks had significant Negro ancestry, blue eyes would be a lot more rare in Greece. Blue eyes is quite rare in countries where most people are at least of partial Negro ancestry.
This point is weak, for blue eyes are a minority in southern regions like Greece to begin with compared to the paler peoples of the north. If blue eyes were a “litmus test” then a majority of Greeks would be “non-European.”
Utterly contradicts everything western Evo psyche says about female preferencrs. But no one notices in the west notices or cares, or bothers to look beyond the west, because like all dogmas that reflect prevailing social biases that pertain only to specific societies, Evo psyche is less about science than providing a basis for highly local and culture specific values in a modern idiom, in this case science.
Sure. Some EvoPsych writers are simply packaging their Western biases under a veneer of objectivity when asserting claims about seemingly “universal” processes or phenomena. Then there are those who try to claim a universal process as something exclusively Western, like those who claim the Greeks “invented thinking”, as if Chinese, Persians, Egyptians, etc etc were incapable of “thinking.” The Greeks articulated their own LOCAL VERSION of talking about or discussing logical thinking, and their own LOCAL LABELS AND NAMES for things, but they did not “invent” the universal human process.
.
Religious and aesthetic idioms no longer have credibility in the west, so local instinctive values that obtain nowhere else in the world must be encased in a faux scientific language to become ‘canonical’, just as God wad utilized in the old teztament.
True there is the phenomenon of western appropriation of certain things, sometimes literally as in the flesh of Egyptian mummies actually consumed by Europeans of an earlier time for medicinal purposes- a parallel with certain cultural items. But in what sense do you mean religious and aesthetic idioms no longer have credibility in the west? There are plenty of such idioms embraced at the current time- religion is far from dying out for example.
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Peter says:
We’ve isolated the main hair-color gene (MC1R) from Neanderthal remains. It’s unlike any variant that currently exists in Europeans. We also have DNA from Kostenki Man, who lived 37,000 years ago and was one of the earliest modern humans in Europe. He had dark skin, dark eyes, and an African facial shape. So the facial appearance of present-day Europeans seems to have evolved after and not before that date.
Indeed. And the skeletal evidence lends support to the DNA data.
Personally I don’t see any reason to assume Europe (over “western Eurasia”) for your geographical locations…
There were people (the Magdalenian culture) on the European plain during the ice age when it was steppe tundra. The only food was hunks of meat on the hoof (that ran away) so a woman required a dedicated husband-hunter to bring up children. As the men had to hunt the most mobile animals on earth (Reindeer) on foot, there is an explanation for why there would be a imbalance of the sex ratio at mating age. So, sexual selection, which is confirmed by the light/diverse eye colours.. The lighter skin conferred by SLC24A5 may have been partly an adaptation to elicit care and provisioning by the hunter-husbands.
If you are saying the Middle Eastern (not western Eurasian) farmers were the origin of and original fixed-for-SLC24A5 population; very well, how did they get to be that way? Farmers did not have to roam vast distances over frozen wastes to get food, so why would there be a shortage of men (and food). I suppose the lighter skin SLC24A5 could function to prevent spousal abuse and infanticide among farmers.
European hair, eye and white skin colour originated by sexual selection anyway.
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/slc24a5-has-probably-been-under-selection-in-india/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=slc24a5-has-probably-been-under-selection-in-india
The Yamnaya rolled into India too. The Yamanaya spread SLC24A5 in India by conquest which resulted in what was in effect a form of sexual selection. Sexual selection of women requires there to be an excess of women that did not have descendants. As already mentioned, the Yamnaya having killed the men and got the pick of women functioned as a form of sexual selection in the conquered territories.
Blue eyes also arose in the hunter-gathers of the west
You’re talking about two individuals: a hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg (8,000 years ago) and a hunter-gatherer from Spain (7,000 years ago). Yes, both of them had the “blue-eye” allele (or rather “non-brown-eye” allele; they could have had green eyes or grey eyes). But we also see the same blue-eye allele in hunter-gatherers from the Motala site in Sweden (8,000 years ago) and the Samara site in Russia (7,000 years ago).
Moreover, it’s only among the Scandinavian and Russian hunter-gatherers that we see the full suite of European-specific characteristics: white skin, non-black hair, and non-brown eyes.
it preceded the populations we currently describe as “European hunter-gather” or “Early European farmer” – it will almost certainly turn out to be a group ancestral to both of these.
I agree. The most parsimonious model for a group ancestral to hunter-gatherers and farmers would be hunter-gatherers living at an earlier point in time, most likely before the Mesolithic. Since it is only in the north and east of Europe that we find the full suite of European-specific characteristics, parsimony would likely point to an origin there.
it insinuates that these populations are the sole source of the traits in modern Europeans, and we both know that is factually incorrect.
It would be more “correct” to say that we have diverging interpretations of the same facts.
I remember a year ago when everyone was telling me that blue eyes arose in Western European hunter-gatherers and that white skin arose in early European farmers. I replied that both characteristics probably arose among the hunter-gatherers of northern and eastern Europe. I was then told that I was engaging in empty theorizing.
Well, now ancient DNA has been retrieved from those northern and eastern hunter-gatherers, and the data are consistent with what I predicted. Let me make another predication: we will discover that this suite of characteristics (whitening of the skin and diversification of hair and eye color) arose during the last ice age among the ancestors of those northern and eastern hunter-gatherers.
True, “Whites” are fairer on average …
This is becoming a debate as to whether some women are objectively more beautiful than other women. It’s difficult to resolve that kind of question because the word “objective” itself is difficult to define.
Notions of beauty are determined by a large number of mental algorithms, some of which are innate and others learned. Most of the innate algorithms seem to be shared by all humans, but the learned ones can vary from one culture to another. What I’m saying here is that European women are the product of a period of intense sexual selection that occurred roughly 25,000 to 10,000 years ago. Their physical appearance thus reflects notions of beauty that prevailed at that time and in that place. Some of those notions are universal, and others specific to that time and place.
Are you sure the facial gracility that people tend to find attractive in women wasn’t introduced by the farmers?
Wikepedia on Reindeer>
Can you imagine trying to hunt those things on foot in the Ice Age? Even carrying the carcass back would be difficult.
Those are two modern people (apparently handpicked by some blogger and reflecting his ideas) and we know modern people aren’t representative of ancient phenotype variation.
http://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2013/11/25/age-wisdom-teeth/
I’m sure it is just coincidence that the first known case of impacted wisdom teeth (jaws too small) occurred in Magdalenian Woman who lived in France during the onset of the last glacial maximum.
Yes, they are indeed photos of modern people, not photos from thousands of years ago. They’re not supposed to be perfect representations.
Teeth crowding and impaction seem to be affected significantly by nutrition. See Weston Price’s work:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html#ch3
The question is, did these ancients look like highly gracile, “bleached Mediterraneans”, or were they more robust?
If you bothered to look at the reference you would see Magdalenian woman seems rather robust in the reconstruction, by modern standards, and had excellent front teeth. She just didn’t have room for the wisdom one to come in, because her jaws were too small. Magdalenian girls in southern France were not exactly Audrey Hepburn, but probably more delicate than most of their ancestors.
As for the middle eastern farmers of several thousand years later who were fixed for SLC24A5, lets just look at Sardinians who are almost entirely neolithic farmer descended. I’ll avoid choosing someone for their looks, here is the only Sardinian woman I am aware of from prior general reading (ie not looking for examples of Sardinians). She looks absolutely average European level of robustness to me. Quite possibly north European hunter gatherers started off far more robust that contemporaries in other places so the end result of selection for less robustness in the north was not a massively obvious difference between north and south levels of robustness.
Contemporary Europeans are descended from the hunter-gatherer and farmer populations. Mixing may have gracilized some of the lighter types or lightened some of the more gracile types.
@Sean:
If you are saying the Middle Eastern (not western Eurasian) farmers were the origin of and original fixed-for-SLC24A5 population; very well, how did they get to be that way? Farmers did not have to roam vast distances over frozen wastes to get food, so why would there be a shortage of men (and food).
Firstly, that’s not what I’m saying – we don’t know who was fixed first (and it was probably a population ancestral to *both* the northern HG’s and the southerly farmers, so neither of them is the “origin”), and secondly that’s a classic circular argument – you assume sexual selection for white skin in one population and then say it *can’t* have originated in a second population because there wasn’t sexual selection. What if light skin arose for a different reason?
@Peter:
it’s only among the Scandinavian and Russian hunter-gatherers that we see the full suite of European-specific characteristics: white skin, non-black hair, and non-brown eyes.
Yes, but we don’t see their genetic signature in the modern European lineage until the Bronze Age, and yet we do see genes for lighter skin and eyes for thousands of years before this. So, simple as your exposition might seem, this “full suite of European-specific charactistics” cannot be the sole source for European-specific charactistics in modern Europeans – it arrives too late.
Since it is only in the north and east of Europe that we find the full suite of European-specific characteristics, parsimony would likely point to an origin there.
Yes, but again only if we ignore the fact that some of the genes for light skin and eyes appear well before any genetic contribution from the north and east. When you include the fact the one of the light skin alleles moves from 0% to 90% frequency at the exact same time as the arrival of farmers from the south, parsimony will point you in a slightly opposite direction.
I think the bottom line is that the selection for the complete European phenotype in *modern* Europeans was still underway well into the Bronze Age – even if all the depigmentation alleles were introduced from the northeast with the arrival of the Yamnaya, your theory needs to explain why a mixed-colour population became fixed for light skin in the context of the *Bronze Age*, not the Mesolithic. I can’t argue your logic as to how SHG and EHG became fixed, but it doesn’t explain why Bell Beaker/Corded Ware etc. became fixed after receiving EHG admixture… unless you believe modern Europeans are 100% SHG/EHG?
“Ginger Jihadis: Why Redheads are Attracted to Radical Islam”
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/09/ginger-jihadis-why-redheads-are-attracted-to-radical-islam/
I’m no geneticist, but I’ve also read genetic studies on Greeks finding, virtually no sub-Saharan African ancestry. One of the studies was referencing such theories as “black Aphrodite” which tried, for some reason, to find black African influence in Greece, probably to shore up opinions on African intellectual prowess. This always baffled me–there is nothing less SSA than ancient Greece in its Golden Age. Apparently the “data” about black influence in Greek genetics came from an obscure geneticist in Spain who could no longer be located. I suspect he was hired for the project.
It was a weird story.
You sound like someone called Dienekes. He’s high on his idea of what Greeks look like (they actually are not all that on the average) and Mediterraneans in general. He’s the southern Euro faction of the fussy types who divided Euros into north and south.
“Ginger” hair occurs among mediterranean people quite a lot, though not as pale skinned. Even west Asians. A memberof Indira Ghandi’s family had red hair.
An Iranian guy I knew was hesitant to marry his same-age girl friend because he thought Persian women aged eaerly. At that time, from what I saw, I thought so too. As time went on, I don’t know that most of them aged earlier more than any other ethnicity. Darker types might age differently, but not really better from what I see, looking at people I know. Some blondes and reds if they haven’t had sun damage, keep a nice light, youthful quality that is all theirs. Others have fried themselves early.
Dark skinned blacks don’t show age so much, but olive skinned caucasoids, imo, actually seem to mature faster. Fewer fine lines, but more thickening of the skins, and furrows.
East Asians don’t age much in their 30-40s, but then suddenly age drastically in their 60s.
Religious and aesthetic language is no longer credible among the intellectual elite in the West, even though many Americans remain religious. Europeans far less so at all levels.
Local, culture-specific values have to be re-cast into authoritative language, and today that is the idiom of science.
In the 19th century, Social Darwinism was the contemporary idiom used to canonize recent, highly local, and ultimately ephemeral economic conditions, and the values they depended on, in England.
Evo psyche selectively portrays the behavior of some humans in the contemporary West in order to push a values-based agenda, just as Social Darwinism sought to portray the amoral competitiveness of 19th century England as a value enshrined in nature for all time, when in fact it merely reflected highly contingent realities in the England of that time, and other societies, China’s for instance, balanced economic interests with moral considerations.
The essential thing to realize is that evo psyche isn’t descriptive – not even of modern Westerners – it is homiletic. It is a selective presentation of facts and a tendentious reading of those facts for the purpose of advancing a fashionable agenda, part of which is to reduce a complex and conflicted human reality, where passions and drives constantly war with each other, to a tidy linear narrative where humans are machine like operators designed to follow a clear path to the optimization of a few simple drives.
The reason for quibbling is if these depigmentation genes did originate among HGs in the north then it creates an interesting question – where did the farmers pick them up before expanding into Europe?
Credible scholars suggest that these genes developed independently in European and Asian populations after they exited Africa. The mutation is relatively recent. See Norton and Kittles 2006- (Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians.) Unfortunately credible scholarship is oft in short supply in the sweeping claims made on some of these issues , as demonstrated below.
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Sean says:
So, sexual selection, which is confirmed by the light/diverse eye colours.. The lighter skin conferred by SLC24A5 may have been partly an adaptation to elicit care and provisioning by the hunter-husbands.
Why would lighter skin be an adaptation to elicit care from husbands? The darker skinned Aurignacian, Gravettian, and SOultrean cultures, which preceded the Madgalenian, did pretty well in caring and provisioning. Sexual selection is a legit part of the mix of factors in lighter skin colors, and cannot be ruled out, but it is dubious to see some sort of “caring crossover” associated with it.
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I suppose the lighter skin SLC24A5 could function to prevent spousal abuse and infanticide among farmers.
ANother bogus assertion. How does “lighter skin” prevent spousal abuse and infanticide? lol
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The Yamnaya rolled into India too. The Yamanaya spread SLC24A5 in India by conquest which resulted in what was in effect a form of sexual selection. Sexual selection of women requires there to be an excess of women that did not have descendants. As already mentioned, the Yamnaya having killed the men and got the pick of women functioned as a form of sexual selection in the conquered territories.
Again dubious. The Yamnaya culture is associated with the Russian zone steppe. Alleged Yamnaya “wolf cult rapists” did not “roll into” India spreading SLC24A5. Nor did they “kill all the men” in India and picked the women. No credible scholar today supports such shaky claims.
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7) Four and a half thousand years ago the Yanmaya exterminate most of the farmer men in central Europe, and steal their women.
Even more laughable. What credible source shows all the farmers of central Europe being killed circa 2000 BC by the Yamnaya?
I’m not sure how plausible this would be for redheads though. There certainly are attractive redheaded women of course, but they tend to have more blemished and sickly looking skin compared to blonde women and generally aren’t attractive like blonde women are. This is before any tanning, which blondes generally can and do and redheads can’t do.
As for male redheads, they’re down there with Asian men in terms of sexual status. Blond men tend to have light brown hair as adults that’s less blonde than blonde women’s hair, but a small percentage retain their towheads from childhood as adults, and they tend to be down there with the redheaded and Asian men.
It seems to me all these ideas may be part right.
For example say depigmentation genes were originally for latitude reasons in the interior of Eurasia but people only needed to a be a bit lighter to get the benefit and not necessarily white so a bunch of partial depigmentation genes developed in different regions.
Particular conditions in the far north led to heightened sexual selection on the females as suggested by Dr Frost.
These conditions didn’t apply in southern or western Europe so the genes didn’t spread there until the farmer diet displaced the meat and fish heavy HG diet.
That doesn’t effect my point though which is *if* the various depigmentation genes were (originally at least) a latitude adaptation found in the far north
but one of the major ones seems to have spread into Europe with farmers from the southeast
then that implies the possibility that at some point in their past those farmers or a catalyst lived adjacent to one of those northern populations.
(This is a bit off the main topic though.)
The movies regularly cast men with blond and/or red hair as villains. It’s actually a well known “trope”. Eventually, some of these guys get curious about who is running the movie studios that are portraying them this way. When they find out, they start looking for alternatives to Judeo-Christendom where the same group has been in charge of the mythology in ancient religion and modern mass media.
It’s that simple.
“Yes, but again only if we ignore the fact that some of the genes for light skin and eyes appear well before any genetic contribution from the north and east”
No, the 8000 years old hunter gatherers in Sweden had SLC24A5 as part of the complete suite of modern European characteristics of white skin, and diverse hair and eye colours (SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 plus HERC2/OCA2) and hunter gatherers were by millennia the first ones with any of those alleles that we know about. There is an explanation for selection of those characteristics before agriculture, and before agriculture or the arrival of farmers, or the Yamnaya.
Smithsonian site that attempts to integrate all the recent data, here. Let’s break it down.
This proposed explanation is not complicated, it’s that white skin is caused by low light levels supposedly* found in northern latitudes of the globe, agriculture does not come into it because there were were blonde, blue eyed, white skinned, hunter gatherers in Sweden thousands of years before farming or farmers reached Sweden. OK, let’s look at what was in central Europe.
Blue /diversified eye colour in Mesolithic central European dark skinned hunter gatherers proves those eye colours cannot be explained as a side effect of white skin adaptations for non existant lower UVb radiation at north latitude (UVb radiation is greater at Swedish latitude*), an agricultural diet or interactions between UVb in the north and agriculture.
…this “full suite of European-specific characteristics” cannot be the sole source for European-specific characteristics in modern Europeans – it arrives too late.
I see, so the earliest humans with the alleles for white skin and light/diverse hair and eyes and the earliest with dark skin and just the alleles for light/ diverse eyes all being European hunter gatherers, is evidence for those characteristics in modern Europeans not coming from European hunter gatherers, and proof that the full suite of modern European-specific characteristics arrived with farmers who did not have most of them.
People in the north with its lower levels of UV radiation would still be undergoing selective pressures, but several scholars hold skin lightening in Europe only accelerated substantially with the transition to farming and the introduction of genes from the Middle East.
Greg Cochran holds that SLC24A5 was carried to Europe by Middle Eastern farmers. Zhou et al 2015 (A Chronological Atlas of Natural Selection in the Human Genome during the Past Half-million Years. BioRxiv ) also hold the same. They say:
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but one of the major ones seems to have spread into Europe with farmers from the southeast. then that implies the possibility that at some point in their past those farmers or a catalyst lived adjacent to one of those northern populations.
Well, when you say “southeast” or “adjacent” it makes sense if you think of these areas as the “Middle East”- which of course is a broad area stretching from North Africa (south) to Iran and more (east) Ancient DNA studies seem to back up this “Middle Eastern” connection. The ancient DNA Zhou et al refer to refer to above is a study by Mathieson et al 2015 (Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe. BioRxiv), who hold that the arrival of farming in Europe beginning around 8,500 years ago required adaptation to new environments, pathogens, diets, and social organizations, and that skin lightener SLC24A5 is fairly recent, and become strong only in the Neolithic with the advent of farming transition/migrations. Before that the scientists say, the bulk of Europe’s populations were more dark-skinned.
So the puzzle of the light skin at least in part is based on migrations to Europe from the Middle East, although as always, selective pressures in a low UV environment like the far north are always a factor on the table. The Middle East anyhow, also has those lower levels of UV compared to locales in the tropical belt further south- such as southern Egypt, which is in the tropical belt, so selective pressures would be working in the “Middle East” as well.
You’re missing the point I’m interested in.
Are you sure the facial gracility that people tend to find attractive in women wasn’t introduced by the farmers?
Farming goes back no more than 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, its point of origin being the Middle East. Before that date, the Middle East was home to hunter-gatherers with an African physiognomy.
We now have genetic evidence that the full suite of European characteristics (white skin plus a diverse palette of hair and eye colors) was already present in hunter-gatherers of northern and eastern Europe 8,000 years ago. We don’t have earlier genetic evidence partly because we have fewer human remains from that time period and partly because our attention has been focused on early European farmers. But that evidence will be forthcoming. It will be game over once we have ancient DNA from northern and eastern hunter-gatherers for the time frame of 15,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Yes, but we don’t see their genetic signature in the modern European lineage until the Bronze Age, and yet we do see genes for lighter skin and eyes for thousands of years before this. So, simple as your exposition might seem, this “full suite of European-specific characteristics” cannot be the sole source for European-specific characteristics in modern Europeans – it arrives too late.
That was my point. Those characteristics arose in a population ancestral to the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of northern and eastern Europe, most likely in the same region but during the last half of the ice age, about 4,000 to 7,000 years earlier. A branch of that earlier population expanded into the Middle East around 12,000 years ago.
You raise two interesting points:
1) Why do we see a sharp genetic divide between late hunter-gatherers and early farmers?
2) What happened to those early farmers?
First, if we look at sites where we have a more complete time series of ancient DNA, we see that the genetic divide is actually between the earliest farmers and somewhat later farmers. In other words, the genetic divide reflects, at least in part, a transition between two different regimes of natural selection, rather than population replacement.
Second, the early farmers may have succumbed to the sort of problems that plagued early farming communities elsewhere, i.e., soil depletion and erosion, antagonism from surrounding hunter-gatherer groups, inability to resolve the tensions created by a larger, more dense population, etc.
Yes, but again only if we ignore the fact that some of the genes for light skin and eyes appear well before any genetic contribution from the north and east.
Where and when? The Motala site in Sweden dates back to 8,000 years ago. Can you point to evidence of light skin and non-brown eyes before that date? Please enlighten me.
But it can be hard to sympathise with the narrative of victimhood propagated by ginger prejudice campaigners, until you recall what relentless and cruel abuse redheads are often subjected to. [...] Why are people so mean? Some scientists think it’s genetic: they say we’re wired to be attracted to rich genetic mixes
I went to school in the 1970s, and many of my classmates were redheads. I don’t recall any insults or animosity against them because of their hair color. Once I was told that redheads have a hotter temper. That was it. If you look at Playboy centerfolds from the 1970s or earlier you’ll find that redheads are, if anything, overrepresented. The same goes for actresses. Some of the most popular actresses were redheads, like Katharine Hepburn and Rita Hayworth.
I didn’t hear “anti-ginger” jokes until much later, not long after I began hearing anti-blonde jokes and seeing “evil albinos” in movies. From the late 1980s onward. That sort of thing isn’t innate. It’s learned. Once it became taboo to portray dark-skinned people as bad or stupid, we had to find an alternative. In our existing culture, the only physically different people we can safely ridicule are redheads, blondes, and albinos.
It’s really that simple … and cowardly.
… and hunter gatherers were by millennia the first ones with any of those alleles that we know about.
That’s simply incorrect. The Motala samples are dated 5898-5531 cal BCE and the Starcevo (farmer) sample is dated 5710-5550 cal BCE, both have derived SLC24A5.
I see, so…. proof that the full suite of modern European-specific characteristics arrived with farmers who did not have most of them. (sarcastically)
That’s the second time you’ve pretended that I’m saying something I’m not, please pay attention. I’m saying two things which you can verify for yourself:
1. SLC24A5 (not “the full suite”) was first introduced to the modern European lineage with the arrival of the first farmers from the south/south east and became fixed (or close to it) in the Early Neolithic.
2. SLC45A2 didn’t become fixed in the ancestors of modern Europeans until the Bronze Age, possibly triggered by population movements from the Steppe carrying Karelia/Samara-like genes.
Whatever caused both alleles to become high frequency (not fixed – they’re both ~75%) in the Motala samples took place in a hunter-gatherer context and so Peter’s explanation is a possibility.
Whatever caused SLC24A5 to become fixed (or at least >90% frequency) in the ancestors of early European farmers could also possibly have been in a northerly hunter-gatherer context and so Peter’s explanation, while starting to stretch a little, is a possibility.
*BUT*… whatever caused them to become fixed in modern Europeans took place in farming contexts – SLC24A5 after the lighter-skinned farmers mixed with the darker-skinned western hunter-gatherers in the Early Neolithic, and then SLC45A2 after even-lighter-skinned populations from steppe mixed with the central Europeans in the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age…. so Peter’s explanation doesn’t fit, the direct ancestors of modern Europeans were already farmers when they underwent selection for these alleles.
… eye colours cannot be explained as a side effect of white skin adaptations for… lower UVb radiation at north latitude
I agree, the UV explanation alone doesn’t seem to cut it. This doesn’t mean that any alternative explanation has to be correct though – the alternative still has to match the facts. Peter’s doesn’t, at least in regard to modern Europeans.
Well, quite a bit of people professing their own preferences, ridicule others’ preferences, or push certain ethnic characteristics as being universally desirable.
I know this is a little hard to get — — but until the second decade of the 20th century, “tanning” was not desired if you were a white or Asian female. Extremes tended to be celebrated in poetry, so you got lots of golden haired, or raven-haired maidens in European lit, yet few European women were really that blond or that dark. As my niece is, like most girls, a huge fan of Anne of Green Gables, I wasn’t aware that red-headed girls suffered any disadvantage. There is nothing that evokes the mythical tales of ancient Europe like long red-ish hair though Anne was greatly relieved when her freckles faded as they usually do in adolescence.
But tastes are funny. I remember a Turkish lady who liked freckles and was tickled pink over a little golden haired boy who had them. He was ok, but I didn’t think of freckles as appealing. She found them charming. Titian and other painters of the Renaissance made countless heads of reddish-hair immortal, and it was often associated with royalty, probably due to the Merovingians. It also had connotations of being “magical” and the only woman who could truly perform certain rituals was a green eyed red-head. You can read more on that sort of thing elsewhere.
Carroty red, orange hair is very rare anyway. Most “red” hair is strawberry blond or auburn, and these mixed colors have always been popular. While a rosy or peachy glow to the face was desired, care was taken NOT to tan, and until the 19th c., white enamel makeup, actually made with lead, was used. Red headed Queen Elizabeth I wore such white enamel make up. It dated back to ancient Roman times in both Europe and the middle east. I thought the pale preference was in the past for Asians, but a Chinese lady told me today that Asians “don’t like the sun”, always wear hats, etc. Paler skin does make Asian features stand out better. One Asian lady told me that whites look better with some color from the sun, but Asians looked bad with too much. I sort of agreed as much as was pc.
In the 20th century, lifestyle changed drastically. You can’t enjoy the beach if you can’t take much sun in. Maybe it’s run its course though. Heavily tanned women are looking coarse to me. I’m glad the extreme tanning is out of fashion and I’m starting to understand why pale was so popular for so many centuries.
As for blond guys, a friend’s Mexican husband told us the Latinas (the ladies) “all” (exaggerration) wanted to marry blond Americans. Occasional ambition also among various Asians. And yeah, I know not all, but it exists. It’s sort of like the “tall dark handsome” ideal in reverse.
As for the trope of blond villains in movies, it’s a reaction to the white hat vs. black hat convention, black haired vixen/blond angel, etc. That deserved an upset, but enough is enough. Hollywood is one big mind-control factory. That’s all you need to know.
Avoid most of their products like brain poison.
I’m not talking about my preferences, and I didn’t say that there are no attractive redheads. Also I specified that I was talking about untanned skin.
As you suggest, most redheads are either strawberry blonde or a shade of brunette – auburn, chestnut, reddish-brown, etc. The “true” or “pure” (or whatever you want to call it) redheads tend to have very blemished and sickly looking skin that tends to make them less attractive than blondes and brunettes.
As for the men, fortunately for blond and redheaded guys, their hair tends to brown as they enter puberty and their adult hair tends to be a shade of brown. Most blond men tend to have very light or light brown hair, and redheaded men tend to have auburn, chestnut, or reddish-brown hair. When women express interest in blond or redheaded men, they generally mean these shades of brown, not towheads or carrot-tops. The minority of blond and redheaded men that retain and have “true” or “pure” blond and red hair as adults i.e. have towheads and carrot-tops, tend to be down there in the mutants category along with Asian men in terms of sexual status.
OK, but you did say:
but one of the major ones seems to have spread into Europe with farmers from the southeast. then that implies the possibility that at some point in their past those farmers or a catalyst lived adjacent to one of those northern populations.
As noted , southeast or “adjacent” to the northern populations, fits in with what the scholars above say about the light-skinned mutation being most strongly influenced by the catalyst of the farming transition from the Middle East.
Where and when? The Motala site in Sweden dates back to 8,000 years ago. Can you point to evidence of light skin and non-brown eyes before that date?
I think you’ve misread what I actually said, which was: “appear well before any genetic contribution from the north and east”. I can (and have, multiple times above) pointed to evidence of light skin and non-brown eyes in Europeans thousands of years before the Yamnaya-like incursion into Europe.
…the early farmers may have succumbed to the sort of problems that plagued early farming communities elsewhere, i.e., soil depletion and erosion, antagonism from surrounding hunter-gatherer groups
I completely agree – after the initial arrival of the farmers there was a resurgence of WHG DNA in later Neolithic Europe, for any or all of the reasons you give. This is why I find your HG sexual selection theory wanting for modern Europeans – if a high-frequency SLC24A5 farmer population mixes with a low-frequency hunter-gatherer one, the resulting population should have a middle-range frequency of SLC24A5… but instead we find SLC24A5 essentially fixed since the Neolithic. There must have still been strong selection for it *after* the WHG/EEF admixture. The same goes for SLC45A2 after the steppe incursion a few thousand years later. Both of these selections were in primarily farmer populations, not hunter-gatherer ones.
*BUT*… whatever caused them to become fixed in modern Europeans took place in farming contexts – SLC24A5 after the lighter-skinned farmers mixed with the darker-skinned western hunter-gatherers in the Early Neolithic, and then SLC45A2 after even-lighter-skinned populations from steppe mixed with the central Europeans in the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age…. so Peter’s explanation doesn’t fit, the direct ancestors of modern Europeans were already farmers when they underwent selection for these alleles.
Where did SLC45A2 come from then? The farmers didn’t have it. The much later farmers you are talking about had the approximate skin colour of modern north Africans, because they had SLC24A5 only. The post is about where European skin hair and eye colour came from, the earliest individuals we know about who had all the alleles for, and must have had, light skin and light/diverse hair and eyes were in Sweden a millennia before the swarthy middle eastern farmers arrived. White skin requires both SLC24A5, which the middle eastern farmers could have contributed and SLC45A2 which the middle eastern farmers did not have. Crucially, you are saying western hunter gatherers that contributed to the modern European gene pool were uniformly lacking in both SLC45A2 and SLC24A5, so Middle Eastern farmers could not have got SLC45A2 from western hunter gatherers. Yet you are insisting (“the direct ancestors of modern Europeans were already farmers when they underwent selection for these alleles” ) that white skinned people found at Motala were not the ones (“then SLC45A2 after even-lighter-skinned populations from steppe mixed with the central Europeans in the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age”) who donated SLC45A2 to the farmer ancestors of modern Europeans.
Similarly although SLC45A2 was in the Motala skulls it’s being argued those did not contribute the allele to the modern population, and it was farmers who reached the southern Scandinavian peninsula who introduced it, yet SLC45A2 was introduced millennia after the Neolithic. This would imply it was selected for one reason in hunters and farmers didn’t need it for thousands of years, and then it arrived with the Yamnaya. What was the selection for SLC45A2 that did not operate for Swedish farmers to pick it up from hunter gatherers, but did operate for Swedish farmers to pick it up from the descendants of the Yamnaya?
You can’t ignore that most people of the Motala site had all the alleles for, and so had, modern European fully white skin hair and eye colours. The Motola DNA that got tested was from skulls mounted on stakes, as if they were an enemy people. It’s possible the Motola people were killed by refugees from Doggerland, a large population which had to find somewhere else to live and caused much fighting by moving into north England and Scandinavia . All these people had come north from the European plain at the end of Ice Age. The north European plain was very sparsely inhabited in the Mesolithic, as mentioned above. The former steppe-tundra area was a rich hunting ground in the Mesolithic, which was a time when marine resources were the prime target of exploitation. Doggerland was the lushest territory in Europe, and you can be quite certain people moved where the food was. Mesolithic individuals, like the ones from Luxembourg and Spain, with dark skin, prove nothing about north European steppe tundra hunters in the Ice Age.
SLC45A2 didn’t become fixed in the ancestors of modern Europeans until the Bronze Age, possibly triggered by population movements from the Steppe carrying Karelia/Samara-like genes.
A lot of this debate seems to be revolving around the word “fixation.” You seem to be saying these new physical characteristics were prevalent in the hunter-gatherers of northern and eastern Europe but didn’t become “fixed” until much later, in the bronze age.
We don’t have enough individuals from any of these time periods to say when fixation took place. Fixation means close to 100% prevalence. We just don’t have that many individuals, be they late hunter-gatherers or early farmers.
In the case of the Motala site, we have three hunter-gatherers with fair skin and one with dark skin. So that gives us a nice figure of 75%. But why not include the hunter-gatherers from the Karelia and Samara sites? That would greatly boost the prevalence. It’s too easy to fudge the numbers when the numbers are still small.
By the way, I don’t doubt that some Europeans in some places continued to have dark skin, black hair, brown eyes, and even an African facial shape right down into the bronze age. We see indications of that in some human remains.
so Peter’s explanation doesn’t fit, the direct ancestors of modern Europeans were already farmers when they underwent selection for these alleles.
Again we’re still quarrelling over the word “fixation.” I suspect these physical characteristics did not change as much as we think they did during the transition to farming. The picture is distorted by three factors:
1. The much smaller number of hunter-gatherer specimens compared to farmer specimens.
2. The bias toward specimens from large farming communities, thus excluding the people who were transitioning toward farming in smaller outlying communities.
3. The lack of DNA from hunter-gatherers who were cohabiting with farmers over the same territory.
I don’t want to insist too much on these points because I remember how people were talking only a year ago. A year from now, we’ll have much more DNA from these northern and eastern hunter-gatherers and, hopefully, specimens with earlier dates.
Correction: ‘The former steppe-tundra area was not a rich hunting ground in the Mesolithic’
In addition to more DNA from hunter-gatherers, it would be awesome to see the Near Eastern population that mixed with EHG’s to form Yamnaya. So far EHG and Yamnaya seem fixed for both SLC45A2 and SLC24A5, and if the Near Eastern population is not we can make conclusions. Yamnaya-related ancestry is, of course, important part of modern European makeup, even the largest component in the North according to the famous study that recently analyzed them.
Yamnaya-related ancestry is, of course, important part of modern European makeup
Well as the Motala skulls had SLC45A2 and SLC24A5 a few millennia before the Yamnaya existed, the Yamnaya SLC24A5 came from early European hunter gatherers and whatever SLC45A2 yamnaya had came from later European hunter gatherers who wandered off into the Ukraine. The Yamnaya wolf cult came from central Europe too, the Gravettian Předmostí site in the modern Czech Republic had wolves that showed signs of domestication (crowded teeth*) apparently kept and bred for ritual sacrifice. Dogs were kept a sacrificial animals first and began to help in the hunt much later it seems.
*Signs of domestication like crownded teeth are supposed to be a modification of neural crest cells here. Less flight or flight reaction produces crowded teeth, droopy ears (free hanging earlobe of Europeans?), and coat colours . But I suppose selection for looks (Magdalenian womans crowded teeth) could produce less adrenaline driven behavior.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/angela-merkel-comforts-teenage-palestinian-asylum-seeker-germany
The girl crying is in fact home free “I don’t know the personal situation of this young girl, but she speaks fluent German and has visibly lived here for a long time,” said the minister for integration, Aydan Ozoguz, according to the website of Spiegel weekly. “This is exactly why we changed the law, so that well-integrated youths can have a new residency permit through a new immigration law that came into force in August.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/17/teenage-reem-asylum-seeker-merkel-tv-allowed-stay-germany
“By the way, I don’t doubt that some Europeans in some places continued to have dark skin, black hair, brown eyes, and even an African facial shape right down into the bronze age. We see indications of that in some human remains.”
I find this interesting (along with the dark skinned blue eyed person from spain).
Could you say any more about this? Or give me an idea of where to look to read more?
I have to say though, it seems like people on this site assume everyone has some kind of academic thing going where they can download papers and whatnot easily.
Where did SLC45A2 come from then?
It seems to have come from EHG (Karelia and Samara samples), via Yamnaya at around the beginning of the Bronze Age. It was at around 40% frequency at that time and is now at 100% in Northern Europeans (and from memory about 80% in the south), meaning the selection for it in modern Europeans happened in the Bronze Age. The fact that Motala/EHG had it as high frequency 8000 ybp is a red herring and is confusing you – when it arrived in the ancestors of modern Europeans it was diluted to less than 50% and had to undergo significant selection to get it to today’s levels. It didn’t get there by magic.
Yet you are insisting … that white skinned people found at Motala were not the ones … who donated SLC45A2 to the farmer ancestors of modern Europeans.
You misunderstand – I believe a population similar to Motala (descended from Karelia/Samara), donated SLC45A2 to the farmer ancestors of modern European, but only at low frequencies, in line with their estimated 10-20% admixture.
@Peter:
You seem to be saying these new physical characteristics were prevalent in the hunter-gatherers of northern and eastern Europe but didn’t become “fixed” until much later, in the bronze age.
Even if the alleles were “fixed” in these northeastern HG’s, the frequency donated to modern Europeans can only be in relation to the degree that these HG’s contributed genetically to modern Europeans. If a 100% blue glass of water is mixed with a 0% blue one, you don’t get a 100% blue result. When Yamnaya entered Europe the frequency of SLC45A2 was at around 40%, it’s now at 80-100%, you tell me if the selection for it in modern Europeans happened before or after.
I suspect these physical characteristics did not change as much as we think they did during the transition to farming
I agree, which is why is makes no sense to say selection for the modern phenotype happened thousands of years earlier in populations that contributed little to the modern genome. The evolution of the early farmer phenotype to the modern European phenotype has to have taken place in a farming context, after the arrival of the farmers, no? Earlier/other populations may have been the sources of the alleles in question, but the actual selection for these alleles to get to their modern frequencies can’t have happened anywhere or anywhen else.
“When Yamnaya entered Europe the frequency of SLC45A2 was at around 40%, it’s now at 80-100%, you tell me if the selection for it in modern Europeans happened before or after”
If SLC24A5 was useful to Middle Eastern farmers going north in the in the early Neolithic, then SLC45A2 would have been selected for too. So why would the prevalence of SLC45A2 double suddenly millennia later when Yamnaya arrived, they were not farmers at all and in their conquered farming areas there was no farming?
“I believe a population similar to Motala (descended from Karelia/Samara), donated SLC45A2 to the farmer ancestors of modern European, but only at low frequencies, in line with their estimated 10-20% admixture.”
This post is not just about white skin; light skin and light/diverse hair and eyes are not a side effect of light skin, you need the alleles for them. Motala had white skin but also the alleles for light/ diverse eyes and hair, as do modern Europeans. The most likely explanation is that Motola and modern Europeans have that same suite of alleles because their ancestors originated in the same environment with the same selection pressures.
A hypothesis that posits a separate origin and a different selection pressure for the alleles is hardly parsimonious.
So why would the prevalence of SLC45A2 double suddenly millennia later when Yamnaya arrived
I don’t know, but I can guarantee it wasn’t because the men had a really hard time catching reindeer in the snow.
they were not farmers at all and in their conquered farming areas there was no farming?
The Yamnaya and their immediate descendants were pastoralists/farmers. They didn’t depend on hunter-gathering for their survival, they herded livestock and grew grain.
The most likely explanation is that Motola and modern Europeans have that same suite of alleles because their ancestors originated in the same environment with the same selection pressures.
Yes that’s the simple explanation, but the evidence shows that these alleles in modern Europeans rose in frequency in populations and cultural environments very different to and much later than the Motala samples… so the “most likely” explanation in this case is not the correct one. Motala (or a similar population) may have introduced some of the alleles to the modern European lineage, but the modern European phenotype was selected for separately, and long after, the very similar Motala phenotype.
A hypothesis that posits a separate origin and a different selection pressure for the alleles is hardly parsimonious.
A hypothesis that assumes complete genetic continuity and cultural similarity between two populations that aren’t genetically continuous or culturally similar is wrong from the start.
Well it is possible things happened the way you are saying, but since Motala had the same hair skin and eye colours 8000 years ago as we find today, by my way of thinking it doesn’t seem quite so incredible that modern Europeans with all those characteristics are descended from people who lived before 8000 years ago. Reindeer were not so difficult to catch, the Mammoth hunters and eaters of the Gravettian Předmostí site apparently considered Reindeer second rate meat and gave it to their their sacrificial wolves. Late Glacial Maximum hunters on the north European plain had to eat and they had problems locating the reindeer.
“Yes that’s the simple explanation, but the evidence shows that these alleles in modern Europeans rose in frequency in populations and cultural environments very different to and much later than the Motala samples… so the “most likely” explanation in this case is not the correct one. Motala (or a similar population) may have introduced some of the alleles to the modern European lineage, but the modern European phenotype was selected for separately, and long after, the very similar Motala phenotype”.
Hmm, people thought they knew from DNA that the lineage of domestic dogs was from grey wolves . But it isn’t. No one knows if Peter is right, but his hypothesis is certainly looking a lot more tenable than it was even a year ago.
Well that’s where the quibble lies imo. I don’t think the mutation itself was influenced by the farming transition at all. The *frequency* of that mutation in southern and western Europe (and elsewhere) may well have been mostly strongly influenced by the farming transition but – because of Motala etc – I think the mutation itself is a north Eurasian interior mutation (which includes NE Europe).
Which – if correct – leads to the question of how did SLC-whatever get into the farmers in the middle east?
Well it is possible things happened the way you are saying
It’s more than possible. The recent Lazaridis, Haak and Allentoft papers make it clear there were at least 3 ancestral population that contributed to modern Europeans since the Neolithic, each with a different phenotype. The recent Wilde and Mathieson papers make it clear that the modern European phenoype was still under selection during the Bronze Age. Both of these facts refute the idea that modern Europeans inherited their phenotype as a complete package from a selective sweep over 8,000 years ago.
Hmm, people thought they knew from DNA that the lineage of domestic dogs was from grey wolves
I’m sure further aDNA samples will extend, confuse, adjust, refine and clarify our understanding of modern human populations, but I really can’t envisage any find, or set of finds, that could completely reverse our understanding of modern European ancestry based on the data we presently have on hand. It would require some kind of systemic flaw that would render all the research done over the last 5 years or so be thrown out.
@anon:
Which – if correct – leads to the question of how did SLC-whatever get into the farmers in the middle east?
It’s impossible to say without additional, and older, samples, but Yamanaya show a mix of EHG and Near Eastern DNA, and EHG has South Asian affinity – so there is evidence of ancient geneflow/ancestry between Northeastern Europe, Central/South Asia and the Middle East to the exclusion of Western Europe. I recently ran some D-stats trying to find populations that are closer to both EEF and EHG than to WHG and the only samples that worked were a handful of Caucasian and South Asian populations (Lezgin, Kumyk, Adygei, Chechen, Iranian, Makrani, Brahui, Balochi). There’s been so much population movement and admixture over the past 1000 years, let alone the last 10,000, that these results probably don’t mean much, but I’d really like to see ancient samples from these areas to see what light they shed on the issue.
Whatever the original source population for SLC24A5 was, the fact that it was high frequency in both Sweden and the Middle East at roughly the same time implies some sort of selection that operates in both regions and cultures (and indeed in Neolithic Europe once it, and SLC45A2, arrived there). The genetic affinity between these groups isn’t very high, so once it was shared, the allele would have to have been selected for to reach the kinds of frequencies we are seeing.
Dogs are actually descended from an extinct species of wolf but they have have interbred and back bred with gray wolves so much that the DNA from modern gray wolves was deceptive. It was only when they looked at ancient grey wolves that the true origin of dogs was revealed. Motala was a surprise to almost everyone, except Peter.
Note the robustness of Luxembourg man’s skull
Luxembourg man (and the similar find in Spain) shows that light eyes are definitely not a hunter gatherer side effect of selection for whiter skin to increase the effect of UVb synthesis of Vitamin D at latitude and nor could light/
diverse eyes have spread in the Neolithic for any reason to do with vitamin D. Even the mainstream scientists in the field have commented sexual selection is not unlikely as an origin for light/ diverse eyes. (i know quite a bit about vitamin D synthesis ). Pre or post agriculture selection involving whiter skin to increase the effect of UVb synthesis of Vitamin D is now looking dubious. And absolutely no one can suggest what a non-vitamin D related selection SLC24A5 would be, if not sexual. But lets assume this selection that alters the light reflectance and absorbance of skin is actually for something unrelated to that, it doesn’t alter the fact that the hunter gatherers of Europe underwent some sort of selection that is different to the selection that absolutely everyone but Peter was suggesting until a couple of years ago.
SLC24A5 … was high frequency in both Sweden and the Middle East at roughly the same time implies some sort of selection that operates in both regions and cultures (and indeed in Neolithic Europe… That was probably an artifact of population with only SLC24A5 ,alleles taking over the middle east then moving to Europe and getting slaughtered by the Yamnaya . Why is it so difficult to believe pre-late glacial maximum Europeans moved into the middle east then became farmers and moved into Europe and got slaughtered by Yamnaya.
The original population of the Middle East was not people like the farmers with darker skin, it was a completely different people that got supplanted by interlopers who came from somewhere else, probably hunter gatherers of Europe who had SLC24A5 only, having undergone some earlier stage of sexual selection. (See blockquote above ). After the late glacial maximum period the steppe tundra population ( which may have been quite small) had more sexually selected alleles added and had fully white skin and light/diverse hair and eyes that is known for certain north European hunter gatherers had because the Motala site had people with the complete suite of alleles for those characteristics.
To the extent the Yamnaya had SLC45A2 (and the light/ diverse hair and skin alleles) they may have spread them to the surviving farmers (female) left alive after the Yamnaya conquest of central Europe, but the indigenous hunter gatherers alleles of Europe must still be a good bet for why it seemed there were suddenly a lot more people who, like Motala, had the complete suite of alleles for white skin and light/diverse eye and hair colours. Finally, politics in north Europe (eg Merkel) being so concerned with sexual equality suggests a underlying hunter gather basis to those populations.
Yes, I think it may turn out to be a useful clue in figuring out population movements.
(Peter:) Well, these estimates apply only to the ancestors of living Europeans. This individual may not have been so lucky.
In this regard it’s Motala who weren’t so lucky. All three of the dark-skinned western HG’s are closer to modern Europeans than the Motala samples are.
Why is it so difficult to believe pre-late glacial maximum Europeans moved into the middle east then became farmers and moved into Europe and got slaughtered by Yamnaya.
Because of the lack of genetic affinity between European HG’s and the earliest farmers.
The original population of the Middle East was not people like the farmers with darker skin
Really? What makes you so sure? We have no DNA from that time so I’m guessing you’re just making it up.
the indigenous hunter gatherers alleles of Europe must still be a good bet for why it seemed there were suddenly a lot more people who, like Motala, had the complete suite of alleles for white skin and light/diverse eye and hair colours.
Which indigenous hunter gatherers of Europe are you talking about? The ones we have samples for and who we know contributed significantly to modern Europeans aren’t like Motala at all in terms of phenotype.
In this regard it’s Motala who weren’t so lucky. All three of the dark-skinned western HG’s are closer to modern Europeans than the Motala samples are.
Yes Motala has ancient north Eurasian ancestry, which could be contact with north Eurasians coming into the Scandinavian peninsula from the north. That would explain the dark people among them. But as already mentioned the Motola DNA was from skulls mounted on sticks as if they were an enemy people, and it was probably waves of refugees from Doggerland who did that to them. I think the Doggerland people had white skin and light/diverse hair and eyes , because they would be descendants of the steppe-tundra hunters.
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I think the era, which was when Doggerland became unlivable, would suggest massive numbers of Doggerlanders arrived in Scandinavia in the century before the Moala skulls date from. Whoever beheaded the Motala people preferred their own women, as the skulls included females. So, unlike most conquests such as the Anglo Saxons in England of the Norsemen in the Orkneys, but like the Talheim Death Pit, the killings were not a Yamnaya-style army killing the men and taking the women, they were whole peoples fighting over land. I think the population represented by the Motala skulls was killed off by the Doggerlander invaders who had even more white skin and light/diverse hair and eyes than the Motala people (who had been in contact with north Eurasians).
Do you not understand what “regularly” means? Do you not understand statistical representation?
James Earl Jones of course played the voice of Darth Vader, who was portrayed as a very pale white man:
Sean, since you are so interested in the Yamnaya, here are some recent thoughts on the IE dispersal question by Jim Mallory, the doyen of IE researchers. He casts doubt on all the existing narratives. You should find it interesting.
Motala has ancient north Eurasian ancestry, which could be contact with north Eurasians coming into the Scandinavian peninsula from the north. That would explain the dark people among them
aDNA tells us Motala got their ancient North Eurasian (ANE) from the eastern hunter-gatherer populations like the Karelia and Samara samples, who had light skin. Their western HG relatives are the ones who had dark skin.
Doggerland was flooded gradually, over some 10,000 years, with the last land connections being to England, France and Germany, not Sweden. I doubt there was a sudden mass migration out of the area, and I doubt that if there were that it went across water to Scandinavia rather than across land to mainland Europe. Perhaps one day we will get some DNA from the region and we’ll know what really happened.
If you say, I cant argue because don’t have knowledge of DNA, but this kind of stuff is not clear cut even for experts (the grey wolf is a different species to domestic dogs but no one realised that until they tested ancient enough grey wolves) . As older DNA is tested Peter’s theory is looking better.
After a long period of sinking slowly, what was left of Doggerland’s population waved goodbye when it was devastated by the the Storegga Slide tsunami of 6225–6170 BCE. Some people think most inhabitants had left by then for higher ground in Scandinavia and North England. Judging by the finds of fortifications in north England there was a lot of fighting in that region and time frame. Probably the Doggerlanders.
As older DNA is tested Peter’s theory is looking better.
Well I have to disagree, aDNA shows there’s simply no genetic pathway for modern Europeans to have inherited the “whole package” of their phenotype from any single population, regardless of how similar it might be. Since the start of the Neolithic Europe has been a melting pot of various migrations from variously pigmented people – if selection for “white” skin in today’s Europeans happened in a single ancestor *before* this Neolithic admixture, Europe should resemble South America in terms of skin colour variation… “white” would only be one of many contributing phenotypes. Since we see instead that Europeans today look more Motala-like than Motala, selection for this phenotype must have taken place *after* the Neolithic. And indeed, that’s exactly what we see in the ancient DNA with light skin allele frequencies rising through to the Bronze Age.
Since the start of the Neolithic Europe has been a melting pot of various migrations from variously pigmented people – …Since we see instead that Europeans today look more Motala-like than Motala, selection for this phenotype must have taken place
I think you need to remember that the only reason we know about the Motala people is that they (including females) had their heads cut off and stuck on poles by the Doggerlanders.
I think you need to remember that the only reason we know about the Motala people is that they (including females) had their heads cut off and stuck on poles by the Doggerlanders.
I think you need to remember that you just made that up – there is no physical evidence that Doggerlanders overran Sweden and the Motala samples weren’t beheaded, the stakes were inserted months, if not years, after the individuals had died. The remains show signs deliberately placed like they were part of a funerary or ancestor worship ritual.
How on earth does any of this impact on the observable increase of skin depigmentation alleles in Europe from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age anyway?
I did not fabricate that anthropologists appear to think the known parallels are colonial conflicts, when invading people stuck the skulls of conquered native on pikes. Yes ancestor worship ritual is is an alternative interpretation anthropologists have given, which in my opinion is weakened by the skulls including some from children.
“How on earth does any of this impact on the observable increase of skin depigmentation alleles in Europe from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age anyway?” There has been an much larger observable decrease in European natives having their heads cut off and displayed on sticks, this being the only case we know about. I think such an unusual occurrence might be related to massive population movements that explain why these skull were not from the ancestors of modern Europeans. There was a massive population (Doggerlanders) on the move in this time frame.
You’re not really making any sense Sean. One fact we know for sure is that skin depigmentation alleles rose in frequency in European between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. There is no way this could have happened if the “full suite” of European phenotypes was inherited in toto from a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer group.
We only know the “full suite” of light /diverse hair and eyes plus white skin was around in part of north Europe in a population of hunter-gatherers (who left no descendants) because of one site where several of their skulls were mounted on stakes. To say we know this particular population were the population with the highest frequency of the light/diverse hair and eye plus white skin alleles is an excessively confident statement.
Unless the full suite came together only as the Motala people entered Sweden, the Motala people were particularly not high frequency for all the full suite light/diverse hair and eyes and skin plus white skin alleles. Quite possibly they has less prevalence of the full suite as they had been in contact with people of different origins.
Unless you are assuming the full suite came from simply going north as in the simple latitude theory proposed by Nina Jablonski, there is no reason to think people who colonised the south of Sweden did not have the full suite. In fact, Luxembourg man had only blue eyes which shows Jablonski’s theory about light /(diverse) hair and eyes being a side effect of whiter skin for increased UVb absorption and vitamin D synthesis is wrong.
And all the alleles of the current European suite have been found in the Mesolithic which shows the agriculture variant of the UVb absorption and vitamin D synthesis hypothesis is wrong too. There is no evidence the full suite was found anywhere before it was but in a north Europe hunter-gatherer group in the Mesolithic. The alleles can’t be for anything to do with vitamin D, and since Peter proposed his explanation for the full suite the alleles have been dated to the period he said. Now we know the full suite was together in individuals a lot longer ago than the doubters who cited Luxembourg man thought possible.
It’s only human to see blue-eyed white Motala and blue-eyed white Europeans and simply join the dots over 8,000 years, but we have a raft of samples in between these points both temporally and genetically that show such an interpretation is way too simple.
By proposing a hunter-gatherer selection for the “full suite”, Peter’s post assumes that it developed in a pre-Neolithic population and was passed down intact into modern Europeans, which is undoubtedly false. From the distribution of allele frequencies in samples from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age we know that modern Europeans received the necessary alleles for their current appearance from different populations at different times – if any Mesolithic population *did* have an identical phenotype to modern Europeans, they *did not* pass it on to modern Europeans directly. So arguing where and when the earliest example of this “full suite” originated is irrelevant to the discussion, it’s how and when modern Europeans obtained it that is the issue I have with Peter’s post – DNA shows they got it gradually since the Neolithic, not as a “full suite” in the Mesolithic.
“From the distribution of allele frequencies in samples from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age we know that modern Europeans received the necessary alleles for their current appearance from different populations at different times “–
But that would involve different selection pressures, because blue eyes without white skin cannot be selected for the same reason that white skin without light eyes is. I don’t think you have taken on board how surprised everyone (well almost ) was by Luxembourg man having dark skin and light eyes. Eye and hair colours were supposed to be a side effect of light skin for agriculture. then a Mesolithic dark skinned light eyed man is found. Then the full suite in a Mesolithic man. All this disproves any the vitamin D- farming/latitude hypothesis.
“So arguing where and when the earliest example of this “full suite” originated is irrelevant to the discussion, it’s how and when modern Europeans obtained it that is the issue I have with Peter’s post – DNA shows they got it gradually since the Neolithic, not as a “full suite” in the Mesolithic.” You are very confident seeing as the last couple of years have produced such surprising finds .
But that would involve different selection pressures
Exactly. That’s why I find Peter’s explanation too simplistic for the data we have on hand. We have varied phenotypes in the direct ancestors of Europeans *after* the selection is supposed to have happened – it just doesn’t fit.
Eye and hair colours were supposed to be a side effect of light skin for agriculture. then a Mesolithic dark skinned light eyed man is found. Then the full suite in a Mesolithic man. All this disproves any the vitamin D- farming/latitude hypothesis.
Well no, it just proves that
a) eye and hair colours are probably not a side effect of light skin, and
b) there was a selective sweep for light skin in some Mesolithic populations.
If you expand your dataset to include “then a bunch of varied allele frequencies where found in the Neolithic”, we can add
c) there was another selective sweep for light skin in Neolithic Europe.
It seems unlikely to me that selection for light skin in Motala/EHG and again in modern Europeans would have different causes, so I’d be looking for a pressure that is applicable to both of them (and despite their inadequacies, latitude/UV/vitamin D etc. are common factors). On the other had it is possible that there were different selective pressures at work, so Peter’s theory could be correct for Motala while the cause of the more recent sweep in modern Europeans was due to some unrelated factor.
You are very confident seeing as the last couple of years have produced such surprising finds
That’s because I’m essentially just repeating what was discovered in these finds, with very little extrapolation from my own imagination.
While light /diverse hair colour is obviously not due to exactly the same selective pressure as white skin, because skin colour is not diverse, I think the default assumption must be that the full suite evolved in a single environment. Your own argument is predicated on the full suite coming together in a mix of differently selected populations. While that seemed tenable when it was hypothesises to have happened once, in the post Yamnaya Neolithic, Motala means it would have happened twice. Two such events is far less likely than a single environment producing the full suite
“We have varied phenotypes in the direct ancestors of Europeans *after* the selection is supposed to have happened – it just doesn’t fit.”
We know these were diverse populations because Luxembourg man (very odd with his robust skull and his dark skin and blue eyes and a type that no longer exist anywhere), is very different to the Motala population of about the same time. These populations may have been surprisingly small and are easy to miss, as evidenced by the Motola populations being a recent revelation.
“Well no, it just proves that
a) eye and hair colours are probably not a side effect of light skin, and
b) there was a selective sweep for light skin in some Mesolithic populations”
A population and their mix of alleles can change by an internal process of a selective sweep. But a population can also get swept away by another population’s success. Population replacement in other words. One population can expanding on the periphery and then move to the centre and replace the previous occupants. The Doggerlanders may have done that in the north. We know the Yamnaya replaced farmers (especially the men in central) Europe.
“It seems unlikely to me that selection for light skin in Motala/EHG and again in modern Europeans would have different causes, so I’d be looking for a pressure that is applicable to both of them (and despite their inadequacies, latitude/UV/vitamin D etc. are common factors). On the other had it is possible that there were different selective pressures at work, so Peter’s theory could be correct for Motala while the cause of the more recent sweep in modern Europeans was due to some unrelated factor.”
Absolutely none of the white skin alleles (SLC24A5 and SLC45A2) have been found in hunter gatherers living in Mesolithic Europe, apart from the Motala skulls in the Scandinavian peninsula. It is significant that even among the Motala population there were about a quarter dark skinned people. So there was no vitamin D related (or other) selection pressure operating on people in any latitude of Europe in the Mesolithic or afterwards for white skin. The appearance of selection in the post Neolithic may be related to the Yamnaya and their descendants choosing women from conquered populations who had particularly white skin as wives.
Your own argument is predicated on the full suite coming together in a mix of differently selected populations.
There is no other explanation – the data shows that modern Europeans come from a mix of ancestral populations, and we know each of these populations had a distinct phenotype. The alternate possibilities – that Europeans only come from one ancestral population, or that all their ancestral populations had an identical phenotypes – are both in direct contradiction of the data and can be rejected.
These populations may have been surprisingly small and are easy to miss
There’s not a lot of time or space between the Loschbour and Stuttgart samples, nor between the HungaryGamba HG and EN samples. You are appealing to non-existent evidence when we have solid evidence ranging from Spain to Russia and from the Mesolithic to the present. If and when your imaginary evidence becomes real, come make your argument then.
The Doggerlanders may have done that in the north.
.. and may *not* have with equal (if not greater) probability! When it comes to imagination vs facts, I’ll follow the facts every time.
We know the Yamnaya replaced farmers (especially the men in central) Europe.
Incorrect. Estimations of Yamnaya input into modern Europeans ranges from 0% (Sardinians) to about 60% (Armenians) – “replaced” is the wrong verb.
Absolutely none of the white skin alleles (SLC24A5 and SLC45A2) have been found in hunter gatherers living in Mesolithic Europe
Incorrect, both alleles are also found in the Karelia and Samara samples from Western Russia, southeast of Motala, and overlapping with the later Yamnaya territory.
So there was no vitamin D related (or other) selection pressure operating on people in any latitude of Europe in Mesolithic or afterwards for white skin
There most certainly was some form selection pressure operating, otherwise Europe would look like South America in terms of skin colour. It may not have been vitamin D, but it was probably something universal to both Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, as the alleles seem to have been selected for very quickly once introduced into the various populations.
The appearance of selection in the post Neolithic may be related to the Yamnaya and their descendants choosing women from conquered populations who had particularly white skin as wives
Indeed, that is certainly one possibility.
Re first three points The recent discovery of the previously unsuspected Motala population is suggests the facts are likely incomplete as to the population movements.
The point about the Yamnaya is they killed the men and took the women. Doggerlanders had the motive (nowhere else to go) and means (because they would be in concentrations at the point of contact) . So at around the time the Motola people got beheaded the Doggerlanders would be arriving with the numbers to conquer, and their own women. There is no doubt that the Motala population disappeared completely and are not our ancestors, so something happened to them and it probably wasn’t the Yamnaya.
Skin colour around the world correlates with polygyny much more than UV, Tibetans would be as dark as Senegalese if it was UV.
The dark skinned light eyed Luxembourg man shows light diverse eye colours are not a side effect of anything to do with vitamin D. There is no other explanation left but sexual selection for eyes and hair with light/diverse colours now. It is contrary to common sense to argue that selection operated on appearance and not on something as important to appearance as skin. Motala had the full suite in the Mesolithic, but others at the same time had only parts of it, being missing SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. So there was no selection for the full suite oreven just parts of it like SLC24A5 and/or SLC45A2 during the Mesolithic. (because the Spanish and Luxembourg had light eyes but neither SLC24A5 or SLC45A2). the obvious explanation is the constituent alleles of the full suite date from before the Mesolithic, which is consistent with the multiple studies dating SLC24A5 o SLC45A2 to long before the ice age. Moreover, feminine features are linked with light eyes , and reduction of the jaws dates to the ice age too.
[Certainly one possibility}:"The appearance of selection in the post Neolithic may be related to the Yamnaya and their descendants choosing women from conquered populations who had particularly white skin as wives"
Right and why did they feel that way about white skin if not because that is what white skin is for?
Correction: ‘ The obvious explanation is the constituent alleles of the full suite date from before the Mesolithic, which is consistent with the multiple studies dating SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 to long before the Mesolithic. Moreover, feminine features are linked with light eyes , and reduction of the jaws dates to the ice age too’.
Doggerlanders had the motive (nowhere else to go)
… except England, France, Germany and Denmark – all still connected by land bridges till right near the end.
and means (because they would be in concentrations at the point of contact)
… except they had gradually deserted Doggerland over the previous 10,000 years, so if anybody was still living there at all, it was probably in very low numbers by Motala’s time.
There is no doubt that the Motala population disappeared completely and are not our ancestors, so something happened to them and it probably wasn’t the Yamnaya.
It probably wasn’t Doggerlander’s either. The Motala culture appears to have lasted until around 3000 BC, when Neolithic Funnel-Beakers arrived from Germany…. too late for Doggerlanders to have wiped them out.
The dark skinned light eyed Luxembourg man shows light diverse eye colours are not a side effect of anything to do with vitamin D.
No, it shows that eye and hair colour were under different selection pressures to skin colour – it doesn’t confirm or reject any particular pressure.
It is contrary to common sense to argue that selection operated on appearance and not on something as important to appearance as skin.
… and yet you just proved that it did (dark skinned light eyed Luxembourg man remember!), so perhaps your idea of what makes “common sense” might just be wrong?
So there was no selection for the full suite or even just parts of it like SLC24A5 and/or SLC45A2 during the Mesolithic
That’s simply not true. All Mesolithic and early Neolithic populations with SLC24A5 have it at very high (75-100%) frequencies, so it’s very clear that was strong selection for it before the Neolithic. That the Spanish/Luxembourg samples don’t have it indicates that they are a separate population group that hadn’t been exposed to it yet, not that it wasn’t under selection in the populations that did already have it. As we see from the Neolithic and Bronze Age samples, both alleles rose to high frequencies very rapidly once introduced into the wider European population. So lighter skin was being selected for from the Mesolithic through to the Bronze Age, presumably (but not necessarily) by the same selective pressure.
with the multiple studies dating SLC24A5 o SLC45A2 to long before the ice age
I think you mean “long before the end of the ice age” (and I see you’ve corrected it to “Mesolithic”), but this isn’t really true either.
The 11-19k time frame given in Beleza is a summary of the midpoints using an additive model (11k) and a dominant model (19k). We now know that the pigmentation effects of SLC24A5 are additive, so the 11k is the better estimate. Note that the standard error here is huge, with the 95% confidence level for the 11k being 1k to 58k…. this certainly allows for a post-ice age sweep.
The Canfield paper reports the MCRA (ie 1st person with the allele – not the selective sweep which must have happened later), to 12kya with a 95% confidence of 7-19k. They explicitly state that this is “consistent with an A111T origin before or after post-glacial population expansions” (emphasis mine).
So please remove from your thinking the idea that light skin *has* to be an ice age/Paleolithic adaptation, the data indicate it may well be a Holocene/Mesolithic phenomenon… and while you’re at it, remove the idea that is *has* to be a European phenomenon – we know it was introduced to modern Europeans from the outside from the start of the Neolithic, and using haplotype data Canfield puts the mostly likely origin of SLC24A5 “in the Middle East, broadly defined”.
why did they feel that way about white skin if not because that is what white skin is for
I don’t know (if that’s even what really happened!), but I’ll guess it’s different to what South Asians felt.
“That’s simply not true. All Mesolithic and early Neolithic populations with SLC24A5 have it at very high (75-100%) frequencies, so it’s very clear that was strong selection for it before the Neolithic.” But there are others of the same time that haven’t it at all. 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). Yet fully white Mesolithic hunter gatherers with all the alleles existed not so far away to the north in a population that had only been living there a few thousand years.
I think it is obvious that there were multiple populations in Europe with very different appearances. Luxembourg and Motala were both major surprises for the conventional wisdom that you are espousing. We know one appearance (Motala) took over.
Eleven thousand years ago which you are pegging SLC24A5 at is fine with me because that puts it in the Late Glacial Maximum along with the first known impacted WISDOM TOOTH in Magdalenian woman, with her reduced-feminine jaws (delicate features are linked to light eye colour by the way) and when Sweden was under half a kilometre of ice.
Moverover, Beleza says the selective sweeps for the European-specific alleles at SLC24A5, and SLC45A2 and TYRP1 started much later, within the last 11,000…”
Right at the beginning I linked to a review by the US National Academies showing that northern Europe is not a low UV area. It really will not do to say SLC24A5 was selected for a reason (UVb-) that does not exist, and another one that nobody knows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
“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. “
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.
“[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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
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”
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