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

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

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

Straight hair is not different from common looking beast hair (dogs e.g afghan dogs). No life to it just straight that is.

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

Lower light levels! I give up.

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

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

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

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

I expect the extent Yamnaya conquest varies according to the region

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which case the man usually just takes two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if farmers contributed SLC24A5 why did Motala, have SLC24A5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is natural selection in action, is it ?

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

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

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

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

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

Or the Loschbour population got killed off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“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.

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.

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’.

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?

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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 .

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.

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.

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.

“The remains show signs deliberately placed like they were part of a funerary or ancestor worship ritual”.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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).

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.

World’s most popular TV shows:

The most popular TV show in the world
…
It’s … CSI: Miami!
…
Baywatch used to be the No. 1 show in the world too, throughout the early to mid 90′s

CSI- Miami Theme Song INTRO
David Caruso
Emily Procter

Baywatch season 2 intro
Erika Eleniak
monte markham
Pamela Anderson

The movies regularly cast men with blond and/or red hair as villains.

Not always. James Earl Jones played a number of villains.
Star Wars
Conan the Barbarian
Cry, the Beloved Country

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.

(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.

It’s impossible to say without additional, and older, samples

Yes, I think it may turn out to be a useful clue in figuring out population movements.

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.

EUROPEANS already had blue eyes while still hunter-gatherers. This is what we’ve learned after retrieving ancient DNA from two Mesolithic individuals, one from Luxembourg, dated to 8,000 years ago, and another from Spain, dated to 7,000 years ago (Dienekes, 2013; Lazaridis et al.,2013). These are late hunter-gatherers, so there is always the possibility of gene flow from early European farmers. Nonetheless, the time of origin now seems earlier for the palette of European eye colors and probably for the palette of European hair colors. How much earlier? Probably within the same time frame when European skin turned white: somewhere between 11,000 and 19,000 years ago according to Beleza et al. (2013) or between 7,600 and 19,200 years according to Canfield et al. (2014). Although different genes are responsible for eye, hair, and skin color, there was probably a single selection pressure that seems to have acted primarily on early European women (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2008).

Interestingly, although the Luxembourg man was blue-eyed, he also had brown skin. He lacked the ‘European’ alleles at all three genes involved in the whitening of European skin. Such a genotype is extremely rare today in unadmixed Europeans (Khan, 2014). Equally odd is the fact that this brown-skinned European lived long after (Beleza et al., 2013) or probably after (Canfield et al., 2014) the time period when European skin turned white. How could that be? Well, these estimates apply only to the ancestors of living Europeans. This individual may not have been so lucky.

When the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago, it may be that only some European populations had acquired a fully ‘European’ phenotype, i.e., white skin, multi-hued eyes and hair, a more childlike face, and longer, straighter hair. This phenotype would have been most predominant on the former steppe-tundra of northern and eastern Europe. Moving outward from this region, one would have seen humans with more and more of the evolutionarily older traits, i.e., brown skin, uniformly brown eyes and black hair, a more robust face, and short, frizzy hair.

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.

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.

:
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.

the light-skinned mutation being most strongly influenced by the catalyst of the farming transition from the Middle East.

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, 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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Correction: ‘The former steppe-tundra area was not a rich hunting ground in the Mesolithic’

*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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

You’re missing the point I’m interested in.

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:

“SLC24A5 was shown to play a pivotal role in skin pigmentation lightening in Europeans 10. Interestingly, the haplotype profile of SLC24A5 in CEU revealed a high affinity to aFM ( D aFM, MHG = 2) and a substantial distance to aHG ( D aHG, MHG = 28), as suggests that skin lightening associated with SLC24A5 originated from Near East, and likely was introduced into ancient Europeans via farming transition. This was strongly supported by a recent study based on 83 ancient DNA specimens 53.”
–Zhou et al 2015.

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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.

“We also found evidence of selection at two loci that affect skin pigmentation. The derived alleles 63 of rs1426654 at SLC24A5 and rs16891982 at SLC45A2 are, respectively, fixed and almost fixed in present -64 day Europeans 23,24. As previously reported 7,11,12, both derived alleles are absent or very rare in western 65 hunter -gatherers. suggesting that mainland European hunter -gatherers may have had dark skin 66 pigmentation. SLC45A2 first appears in our data at low frequency in the Early Neolithic, and increases 67 steadily in frequency until the present… In contrast, the derived allele of 69 SLC24A5 increases rapidly in frequency to around 0.9 in the Early Neolithic, suggesting that most of the 70 increase in frequency of this allele is due to its high frequency in the early farmers who migrated from the southeast at this time, although there is still strong evidence of ongoing selection after the arrival 72 of farming ..”
–Mathieson et al 2015.

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.

…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.

“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.

But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin

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.

For example, earlier this year, the genome sequencing of a hunter-gatherer who lived in what is now Spain helped build the case that Europe was home to blue-eyed but dark-skinned people.

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.

“Ginger Jihadis: Why Redheads are Attracted to Radical Islam”

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.

Credible scholars suggest that these genes developed independently in European and Asian populations after they exited Africa. The mutation is relatively recent.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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/

We sampled national newspaper coverage of white converts to radical Islam published between 5 August 2013 and 4 August 2014, excluding cases where there was no evidence of extremism or radicalisation. For example, Lucy Vallender, the ginger-haired Territorial Army private who had a sex change and became Britain’s first transgender Muslim woman, was excluded from our results.

We discovered that 76 per cent of white British converts to radical Islam had red hair. In the Daily Mail archives, 69 per cent of white Brits lured into jihadism or the orbit of an extremist preacher were ginger. The number was similar for the Mirror and the Telegraph. The Guardian yielded a full 100 per cent redhead rate for the stories we sampled.

These are extraordinary numbers when you consider that in northern and western Europe, the average incidence of red hair in the general population is 5 per cent. In other words, Islamic extremists reported on by the media are fifteen times more likely than the general population to have red hair.

Unless you think there’s a Fleet Street conspiracy to single out and report on ginger jihadis – and that the Guardian is leading the charge – the data clearly demonstrate that white people who convert to radical Islam are overwhelmingly likely to be ginger.

Of course, leading Muslims in public life and senior police officers have known about this for years, though they’re understandably reluctant to discuss it in public – until now. Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Tell MAMA, an advocacy organisation that tracks islamophobia, says: “For whatever reason, there does seem to be a number of people with ginger hair that are present in extremist activities. In no way do I suggest that the gene for ginger hair is a factor, but bizarre it is.”

“I’m glad someone is finally tackling this thorny topic,” says the director of a leading Muslim think-tank, who preferred to remain anonymous. “I can remember having a conversation with a counter-terrorism police officer in 2008 about this and he claimed most of the converts he dealt with are ginger.”

Another prominent Muslim in public life who appears regularly in the media adds: “Though there are no reliable statistics on this, ginger people do tend to be over-represented in extremist circles.”

—

“Blood-nut,” “fire-truck,” “matchstick” and “tampon” are among the more printable insults levelled at ginger-headed children, according to comedian Tim Minchin. 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.

Beauty magazine insiders will tell you that naturally red-headed celebrities are airbrushed even more brutally than their peers to ensure an even skin tone. And a nightclub experiment reported in Psychological Studies in 2012 showed that red-headed men were much more likely to be rebuffed, and red-headed women less likely to be approached, all else being equal. (The researchers used wigs to exclude other variables.)

Why are people so mean? Some scientists think it’s genetic: they say we’re wired to be attracted to rich genetic mixes – hence, perhaps, the near-universal attractiveness of Italians and Spaniards. The relative genetic purity of ginger-haired people – too much of anything else and the recessive gene won’t assert itself – isn’t what we’re programmed to appreciate.

They also draw attention to the frequent coexistence of freckles with red hair. Freckles are mini-cancer factories; people with lots of these naturally-occurring circles of brown skin are far more likely to get skin cancer. In other words, it could be an evolved, adapted response to avoid mates with a lack of genetic mixing.

:
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?

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.

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.

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?

Yes, they are indeed photos of modern people, not photos from thousands of years ago. They’re not supposed to be perfect representations.

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.

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.

Wikepedia on Reindeer>

A study conducted by researchers from the University College London in 2011 revealed that reindeer can see light with wavelengths as short as 320 nm, considerably below the human threshold of 400 nm. It is thought that this ability helps them to survive in the Arctic, because many objects that blend into the landscape in normally visible light, such as urine and fur, produce sharp contrasts in ultraviolet.[37] [...] Normally travelling about 19–55 km (12–34 mi) a day while migrating, the caribou can run at speeds of 60–80 km/h (37–50 mph).[2] Young caribou can already outrun an Olympic sprinter when only a day old.[49] During the spring migration smaller herds will group together to form larger herds of 50,000 to 500,000 animals but during autumn migrations, the groups become smaller, and the reindeer begin to mate. During the winter, reindeer travel to forested areas to forage under the snow. By spring, groups leave their winter grounds to go to the calving grounds. A reindeer can swim easily and quickly, normally at 6.5 km/h (4.0 mph) but if necessary at 10 km/h (6.2 mph), and migrating herds will not hesitate to swim across a large lake or broad river.[2]

Can you imagine trying to hunt those things on foot in the Ice Age? Even carrying the carcass back would be difficult.

Are you sure the facial gracility that people tend to find attractive in women wasn’t introduced by the farmers?

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.

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.

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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.

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.”

Arguably, Whites are the most physically beautiful, with north Asians the runner-ups, and the rest just more or less ugly and stupid.

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.

: 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.

: 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.

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.