Some commenters didn’t read the comments, just spew out their ideology, making this thread hard to follow which direction we’re going.

I’d like the title of “White People are a homoplasy” which is indeed what is happening in our life time.

French consider themselves as “French”, they’re not British.
German consider themselves as “German”, not Netherlands.
The same as Chinese think of themselves as “Chinese”, not Koreans or Japanese and vice versa.
Indian consider themselves as “Indian”, not “Pakistani”.

Now look at the very idea that “White” racial category represents from the then World Power “England”, do they look “White” to me in American racial context these days?

“White” racial context has been slowly changing in the US media nowadays. You have to be Blonde, squared jaw bones, to be considered as “White”, otherwise, you’d be labeled as “Mixed”. They are slowly changing the perception of “White” or if you will it’s after all “White Homoplasy”.

The best comment in this thread.

This is a really good article. You should write a book. Ignore those people who don’t get it. They’ve locked their worldview and don’t know how to adapt to newer ideas.

This is especially important as 2 generations from now, we will be dealing with completely new admixtures within our country. This helps advance these future conversations.

Good on ya.

It’s true. In Europe, we do not use this word “caucasians.” But we use white. And everybody makes there meaning with this word “white”.

But I do not understand your meaning in comments. People feel they are country, language first.

Maybe this is an America thing. In Europe, we are European. And others are not European. But of course, we feel like American that look like us and from Europe closer to us.

Actually, you are cherry-picking, Razib. You want books, I’ll list you a bunch. You are well-read, so I won’t bother unless you ask.

NE Asians were higher on the ladder – but they were never White (Caucasians). Maybe you are referring to the Honorary Aryan category of the National Socialists. And your last posts are fantastic but selling this idea that White only in reference to actual pigmentation. That’s new semantics.

In the West, White is Caucasian. Full stop. Blumenbach and all. It’s your blog, you can be rude all you want (at least you have the brains to back most of your points), but you are cherry-picking.

Yes. White refers to Caucasians. Maybe NE Asians think they of themselves as white-skinned (big maybe). But all US govt docs, all earlier racial classifications consider “White” to mean Caucasian.

Of course, early definitions included Middle East, India, etc. Nowadays, these groups still fall under “White” in Govt docs, but in social circles – not so much, regardless of whether it is “scientific” or not.

At no point did “White” in the West refer to NE Asians. NE Asians are Mongoloids. Skull shapes and all.

There’s nothing wrong with your assumption. The potential problem that tend to arise when dealing with “White” terminology is whether the terminology represents “social construct” or intrinsic meaning of “White complexion”.

For e.g., lots of mixed race Brazilians consider themselves as “White”. Their assumption is fine within the social constructs of Brazilian demographics. But the problem arise when they themselves ticked “White” in whatever application in the US. Taking a census from that phenomenon can deviate one’s analysis and observation on racial issue. The same applies to Caribbean people with fair skin.

Taking a quick look at Puerto Rico racial composition shows that 200 years ago in 1800, there’s an equal composition of “White” and “Non-White” population. In 2010, their census shows that “White” population went up to “76%”. Unless there’s a constant migration of Europeans to the tiny island (sidetrack, for what? job prospects?), the increase in “White” population percentage does not make sense at all. The only plausible explanation of such increase is social constructs of “White” in Puerto Rico. There’s no “Latino” in their consensus.

Whatever percentage concerned with “White” terminology has to be dealt with demographics and social constructs. Mixed heritage of Colombian identifies himself as “White” and increase the % of white population. But throw NE Asians into the same population and see if the White % goes up. The answer is “No”. The distinction is too obvious. NE Asians do not identify themselves as “White” in the first place. The racial context of “White” terminology is considered as European origin whereas NE Asians consider “White” as having fair skin, nothing more, nothing less. The context is fundamentally different.

The way I see is, some Latino identifies themselves as “White” if they have sufficient facial structure, and melanin index to pass as “White” whereas in Asia, some SE Asians with fair skin do not identify themselves as “White” or “NE Asians” by no means. It’s just having fair skin.

If “White” racial context, as it’s arguably misused in Latin America, is used in Asia, the entire population of Thailand will identify themselves as “Chinese”. But they don’t.

Yes, what I’m saying is the terminology “White” becomes social construct, depending on the period and the social circumstances one is referring to. As “Sunbeam” is saying East Asians are darker skinned, which implies that the commentator has never been to East Asia, I’m pointing out the terminology “White” is not as what he thinks it is. It is not always “skin complexion”.

When it comes to comparing Northern Europeans and Northern East Asians, the terminology “White” is not skin color that one likes to draw from the context.

–> “Do they predate whites? Arise totally independently? While they are darker skinned than whites in general, they still are melanin challenged compared to Indians and Africans.”

Some of the East Asians population, especially from northeastern side (Northern Chinese and Koreans) are even whiter than so-called “White” people in terms of skin complexion. The only difference that separates Europeans and East Asians eventually becomes facial structure.

The term “White” appears no longer applicable to skin complexion these days. A guy from the UK, bronze-colored skin, is automatically regarded as “White” guy whereas a guy from Korea with pale skin is “Asian” guy.

“but a substantial number can clearly pass as white without difficulty because for all practical purposes they are white physically.”

In other words, they are passing for what they really are.

Whiteness may be recent and some whites may be a little bit less than they think they are, but it’s as real a category as Brahmin is.

This is an interesting book about the subject. I learned a lot from it.

http://www.danieljsharfstein.com/

[…] “White people are a homoplasy.” Data-rich, thought-provoking look at human populations, by Razib Khan. Read of the week. […]

I would say that the Science photo is well within the normal range of skin colour for a north European female child with sun exposure from playing outside. Girls don’t tan so easily once they get near puberty though.

“What about the sweep around EDAR, which results in many of the characteristics so distinctive about East Asians. It’s a major development gene, but perhaps it too is a reaction to a disease?”
The Motola hunter gatherers had 4/7 derived for the Asian EDAR mutations, which seems to be implicated as a defence against parasitic worms . A Scientific American article on article on Caleb Finch’s works says says that ‘AS human ancestors ate more meat, they evolved defenses against its attendant pathogens. These defenses contribute to longevity but foster disease later in life.’‘. Anyway EDAR seems to have effects on appearance, and sweat glands so maybe no Motala people really looked or smelled exactly like modern Europeans added to which skin colour would be very variable. That might have marked them out in large scale conflict with people who did not have Asian type EDAR and were darker (or lighter) skinned than the Motala people.

Re. “But what about the idea of a disease which selects strongly for the derived variant of SLC24A5?”
The Motala people had that SLC24A5 variant (and EDAR) despite any disease resistance they died out, which may be because they were killed off by enemy hordes. The Motala population are only known from an unfortunate group that ended up with their heads mounted on stakes. If it was an invading people who put paid to the Motala Swedes, the time frame suggest Doggerlanders.

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

If an individual has the phenotype of a ‘white person’ (whitish skin is a pre-requisite) then that person is basically white at the level of 1st observation. Then you look at Rashida Jones or Troiana! Belisario and then you realize that in proportion of biethnic or triethnic pairings, the dominnat genetic traits will show themselves.

I think it is safe to say that the origins of what we call white people’, began in the Levant and as they crossed into Europe proper, they developed (through drift) and further proliferation as we see today.

OK Razib I got it wrong. I was relying on http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin

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

I assumed that the writer for Scientific American had got in touch with the author and said they were composing an article, whereupon the top banana explained things rather more intelligibly than in the paper. They don’t seem to have said how many of the Motala seven they did test came up as being white skinned individuals

My reading of what you say is there were seven they got DNA from and not all seven had the full suit of alleles for white skin. But surely they know enough to say how many of the seven individuals tested had the full suite and had been what we would call white (and probably blue eyed blondes). Why did they not do that? Why all the mystery.

Speculative questions: Is it perhaps because it was not one or two white individuals but more than the “65 percent for slc24a5 and slc45a2 derived” suggests (ie your calculation of 20%). I wonder if that estimate assumes that the presence of slc24a5 and slc45a2 derived alleles in an individual was independent , and those with one were no more likely to have had the other as well . The figure of 65 % for both is not odd?

Doogee,

I guess one must actually travel in the region to truly know how people vary in terms of physical appearance. Based on what I saw there, those percentages are accurate/reflective. Although, at the end of the day, we are dealing with subjective impressions.

For whatever it’s worth, Carleton Stevens Coon claimed the existence of a “very persistent Nordic strain” among “Pathans”. Sir Auriel Stein claimed the same thing, but he was more specific, restricting the “Nordic strain” to Afridi Pashtuns (not sure why).

Also, I haven’t read “Man Who Would be King”, but there is a vast amount of colonial British literature filled with supposedly “factual” information on Pashtuns. These people spilled a lot of ink on the topic of “unruly Pathans”, which makes sense if one takes into consideration British political policy in the “borderlands”. Regardless, their “racial descriptions” of “Pathans” are consistently very different from anything like “black Mohammedans”, rather the exact opposite. Again, there is a lot of stuff to examine, but I’ll only quote a few things.

Mountstuart Elphinstone visited Afghanistan when “Afghanistan” also included FATA and KPK in Pakistan. He refers to modern Afghanistan + FATA + KPK as the “Kingdom of Kabul”. He uses the term “Afghan” only to refer to Pashtuns. Other ethic groups in that nation are referred to by their actual ethnic designation (Uzbek, Tajik, etc). Here is what he notes about Pashtuns:

“But an English traveller (sic)… would be pleased with the cold climate, elevated by the wild and novel scenery, and delighted by meeting many of the productions of his native land. He would first be struck… with the appearance of the people… He would admire their strong and active forms, their fair complexions and European features, their industry and enterprise, the hospitality, sobriety, and contempt of pleasure which appear in all their habits…”

Describing the Yusufzai Pashtuns of Pakistan:

“They are generally stout men, but their form and complexion admits of much variety. In those whose appearance is most characteristic of their tribe, one is struck with their fair complexions, grey eyes, and red beards, by the military affection of their carriage, and by their haughty and insolent demeanour (sic).”

Describing the Pakistani Pashtun tribes of the southern Karlani belt:

“They are tall, fair men…”

“… being large bony men, often fair, and always wearing long hair and beards…”

“… tall and muscular, of fair complexions and high features… their appearance may be conceived to be wild and terrible.”

Then there is Sir George Campbell:

“In truth, the Pathans are of all people in this world the most democratic, the least subject to authority, the most independent. Physically they are one of the finest races created by God (my response: lol) …”

Finally (as not to get annoying with the quotes), there is the “People of India” series:

“Many of the Pathans in general, are as fair and ruddy as Europeans, with light brown hair and beards, and blue, grey, or hazel eyes; and they are a strikingly handsome, athletic race, capable of immense endurance of fatigue…”

“They are, for the most part, fine, powerful men, with a strong Jewish physiognomy… In complexion, the Momunds are frequently fair, and all are handsome…”

“The Jadoons are a fair complexioned tribe, many of them having brown hair and beards, and ruddy color, with grey or hazel eyes …”

And ad infinitum. There is far more of this stuff (again, they spelled a lot of ink concerning “Pathans”), but this is enough to demonstrate the point.

The present social constructs are so messed up that I am shocked so many people fall for the US derived definition that is often wound up in US racial and social priviledge having nothing to do with culture or nationality.

In my recent travels as a private contractor, many of the Pushtun and Northern Punjab I came across, are clearly fair skinned but they are not Caucasian or European. The Caucasian peoples were thrown out of their homeland by Russian imperialists, further aided by Stalin (Georgian and Caucasian, as he was born in the area) but over time the area became inhabited by various Soviet and other groups (Ukranian and others). The Tsarnaev brothers (Boston) were part of the group that were exiled outside of their homeland and rightly or wrongly, initiated a jihad against imperialists, albeit in their adopted homeland! I also came across many red headed Nuristanis, and if they dressed in normal Western clothes, they would be considered Welsh or Irish! But culture is not and never was about colour unless it is USA or some parts of Europe.

Pulling the white card only works in USA or Europe. Elsewhere, one may lose his head because of intrusion into a group that one is not a part of, or shared values, or disrespect towards said group is dangerous to one’s health.

Culture is about the collective habits and mores of shared group ‘ideology’ so people like Kalash, Yazidi, etc being isolated for millenia, get a chance to maintain group identity (less outsiders and their influences, etc) so they can survive. Being isloated creates its own environment (MtDNA or Y) as the Europeans of today invariably are the products of successive migration and mixing while Kalash and others did not go through that extent of heterogenous affiliation but they do show perhaps part of an expansion where they got stuck in their present environemt and this is where they have remained.

Mr. Khan:

When you say “white”, what exactly do you mean ?
Do you mean European peoples ?
Or Caucasian/Caucasoid ?

Stop calling white people homos.

You try calling me a homoplasy to my face!

http://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/tomb-sunken-skulls-sweden-sheds-light-prehistoric-inhabitants-002361

11 skulls , “65 percent for slc24a5 and slc45a2 derived. vs. 100 percent and 95 percent in modern europeans. “

OK, there were some who were not white, but “Some motala individuals probably were light as modern north europeans”. As far as I can see, and according to what I have read, seven of them were pale, very probably what we would call white.

You may have a point about slc24a5 , I don’t know enough about genetics.

“I believe white people emerged biologically only in the past 5,000 years, on the edge of history and prehistory”

Seven individuals from the Motala archaeological site of southern Sweden dated 2700 years older than your date for the biological emergence of palefaces had fully white skin SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, plus blue eyes HERC2/OCA2 (which makes skin a little lighter)

Motala had people as white as can be 8000 years ago, while dark skinned Luxembourg man at same time had blue eyes. If I recall correctly, a few years ago you were pointing to the effect of blue eyes alleles HERC2/OCA2 in lightening skin as showing that blued eyes were a side effect of selection for alleles that lightening skin.

It seems there were dark skinned and eyed farmers in Europe
http://dienekes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/prehistoric-farmers-from-northern.html

Late Glacial Maximum Europe has Magdalenian woman, the first recorded impacted wisdom tooth (a possible index of reduced-feminine jaws). Moreover, delicate features are linked to light eye colour in European men.

The current patriarch of the Syrian Jacobite church is ginger.

White or brown makes little difference to me.
Humans, or more precisely homo sapiens sapiens are a very closely knit species sub-divided into races that can easily breed with one another. Studying the genetic migration and make up is a worthy institution, but some like paying more attention to the evolution of the species itself(where’s that damn missing link!?).
The Toba catastrophe is very interesting and I wonder how many different kinds of humanoids were running around before the episode?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck

,

I have seen many Afghan refugees in UK & Germany who are even less “Indian” genetically then Pak pashtuns, 10% of passing them as Europeans is exaggeration. And 40-50% passing in southern is again not true at all, middle eastern like Levant, Turks etc better passes in South Europe then Afghans.

Kalash and Kafirs indeed on average are more fairer/white,

“I know that you won’t cheat me because you’re white people — sons of Alexander — and not like common, black Mohammedans.”

We have to remember black Mohammedans here are not Indians east of indus but Afghans like pashtuns looking at where they are located, far away from any indic. For them pashtuns were “Indians” like.

the major problem with your thesis is if it is a marker

Has it not been a marker for the last thousand years or so?

“If you read Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People you will learn that the white race is a social construction of relatively recent vintage.”.

Some Americans believe White is a social construct because of the history of race and Whiteness in the U.S. Most Ellis Island Jews, Irish, Slavs, and Italians were the racial Other when they first landed in an America dominated by British Mayflower descendents. They only lost their Other status and became White later on. And than there is the whole one drop rule passing phenomenon where some people in the U.S can be born Black but later be listed as White on their death certificate if they were Caucasian looking enough and wanted to pass as a White person. Hispanics are all classified as White when they commit crimes, but are all classified as Nonwhite for affirmative action purposes. Indians in the U.S were at one time legally White but now they are no longer legally White and are racially lumped in with Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc into a broad category called Asian.

The history of Whiteness in the U.S has had a lot of shades of gray, it wasn’t always so clear cut dry black and white. So I can see why some American historians believe Whiteness is a social construct that either can be broadened or narrowed depending on who you ask. Puerto Rico for example is listed as being a 75 percent White island despite the fact that the vast majority of Puerto Ricans are Mixed Race. People can look at that say that is an example of why Whiteness is a social construct. All North Africans are lumped into the White category in the U.S census even though traces of Sub Saharan admixture are found in groups like Egyptians, Yemenis and Moroccans for example.

in the Levant you can also find people with light skin and hair, I’v seen ginger Syrians before. Do you think that these sorts of features developed independently in the Levant or are they the results of past European blood?.

If you read Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People you will learn that the white race is a social construction of relatively recent vintage

Cool, so me and my kids can get in line for affirmative action now, right?

But seriously, maybe lighter pigmentation isn’t the result of a disease, but rather what it is usually associated with: less solar radiation.

So maybe there was a giant eruption or an impact event like the proposed the Burckle crater that drastically reduced sunlight for some time.

In fact in South Asia it’s not optimal, though with clothing and avoiding direct sun during the midday, people can deal with it.

Isn’t that somewhat backwards? IIRC from my university days, the best strategy to stay cool in a hot and not too humid climate is to wear a thin layer of clothes that keeps the sun of your skin while allowing perspiration to wick through and evaporate. In very humid climates the perspiration doesn’t evaporate from the clothing fast enough, so wearing fewer clothes is the better strategy. So whether your skin is light or dark, in a lot of case you’ll want to use clothing to protect yourself from the sun as a simple matter of heat regulation.

Obviously a lot of South Asia is really fricken humid though… but I wouldn’t think it would be an issue for the Kalash at least, no?

I’d be curious though… how maladaptive to you find SLC24a5 for yourself? Do you have to protect yourself from sunburns? (I’m so pale that I find it somewhat mystifying that some people can tolerate the sun lol… so I have how much this varies with skin colour exactly).

Neanderthals are always presented as fair skinned (though I guess you’ve posited they could have been more diverse than that http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/03/neanderthals-came-in-all-colors/#.VcrmBPlVhBc ). Considering the 4,000 year time frame you give, that means fair-skinned neanderthals had to be convergent evolution right? From what we know, where their skin pigments anything like Europeans/Kalash with SLC24A5 or was it caused by a separate set of genes?

In Scarsdale, Beverly Hills, and Miami Beach, they’re a rhinoplasty.

Another Vijay: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3886603/ (This one also compares different Indian sub-populations to each other.)

Reading through this one out of curiosity, interesting differences that seem to line up with what observations would suggest:

“For instance, Caucasoids resemble Indians in their moderately wide biasterionic breadth and narrow faces, but differ in their lower transverse craniofacial index and narrower bimaxillary breadth and nasal aperture.”

Europeans have narrower palate and nose (pretty expected climatic correlation) and a higher “transverse craniofacial index” (e.g. face is narrower at cheekbones relative to the width of the braincase).

The midfacial protrusion is an interesting one as the South Asians are really different from everyone else on the frontal flatness index (how far forward the nasion, the furthest forward nasal bone, is relative to the maximum facial breadth). And even more so the orbital flatness (depth of the orbit measured by the dacryon subtense divided by the breadth of the orbit). That’s explicit in their table 8 where the comparisons find no populations similar to them on these variables. While the flatness of the nasal bones in isolation comparable for Europeans as measured by simotic index and nasodacryl index, (and high for world)and the flatness of the zygomaxilla is also comparable to Europeans.

So it seems like a really distinctive facial cranial trait of the Indians is on average a uniquely relatively deep orbit in front of which is a more similar and pretty “sharp” boned nasal complex to Europeans (just with a relatively broader aperture, so probably wider nasal wings / ala). The European sample by contrast has an an orbital depth / index that’s more comparable to other world populations and Egypt is intermediate with Europe and South Asia. Probably gives a pretty strong profile in relief that is distinct from the European one.

I wonder if this has any advantages in terms of vision problems, as some vision problems relate to having an orbit that fits imperfectly with the eyeball, compressing it. Although this is more shape than volume, so perhaps not. Might also suggest that the nasal bone shape is more of a unifying trait of the Indian-European etc. West Eurasian populations while the orbital depth is more of an internally variable thing.

These cranial shape papers are always really complicated to visualize so I may have got the above wrong).

One disease which is responsive to Vitamin D http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2855046/ and was resurgent in many parts of the world in the early Bronze Age was Tubercullosis (TB) (Southeast Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age ; Jordan http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/391058 ; Egypt http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12376865 ; Hungary possibly http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308812)

Re the Great White Plague hypothesis.

1. The other thing that happened as the same time that light skin emerged in these populations, perhaps due to selective fitness effects is that lactase persistance went from zero to near fixation in one of the most remarkable known instances of fitness based selection in modern humans of all time.

2. Both light skin and LP help people get Vitamin D in their systems.

3. Vitamin D has immunity related effects which rival its calcium processing effects that help bones to develop.

4. The 4.2 ky climate event also coincides. These was a period of intense aridity that effected a region spanning at least from the Indus River Valley to Mesopotamia and probably further, in the geographic region where the light skinned phenotype gained prominence. Intense aridity was accompanied by illness in the Middle East, at least, where we have written records, and there is a widely shared hypothesis that the Middle Eastern pork taboo that is now a part of Judaism and Islam originated during the 4.2 ky climate event.

5. If a 4.2 ky climate event induced disease were particularly responsive to Vitamin D in particular, and relatively insensitive to other kinds of immune function, then this could be a common cause for intense selection for light skin and LP.

6. Such a disease could also provide a real historical foundation for the events accounted in the legendary historical material of the Book of Exodus. If there were Semitic people in Egypt at the time, the pastoralist Jewish people may have had more LP and lighter skin (due to Semitic origins to the further North) than the Egyptians and hence been spared relative to Egyptians by your hypothetical plague, which they interpreted as divine intervention.

I wonder if selection to specific cultural and ecological conditions can explain similar physical appearances in in genetical distant populations.

Old anthropology texts include Melanasians as part of the negroid race, genetically this obviously false but I wonder if there actually a relevant taxonomic information there. Negroidlike physiological in both cases maybe an adaption to tropical environments with high polygyny and tuber based horticulture. Peter Frost as pointed out the similarity in sexual selection in both groups.

Similarly we see pygmy types pop up repeatedly in tropical forest with no special genetic similarity.

White physiology could be seen as morphotype that is one likely solution to specific set of ecological and economic factors found repeatedly in eurasia, Disease may be part of this but I think you can posit a more general set of factors.

I don’t know anything about the Kalash really so I don’t know if there is anything specific to their cultural or ecological environment which would make them more likely to end up like southern europeans then other south asians, in the same way their is analogous evolution in melanasians and west africans.

If we’re on the topic of skeletal phenotypes/shape variation, here are another two studies on comparative craniometrics (I think I’ve posted them earlier on gnxp IIRC), these two mainly focus on Indians (and other south Asians) wrt global variation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3886603/ (This one also compares different Indian sub-populations to each other.)

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jay_Stock/publication/227092233_Cranial_diversity_in_South_Asia_relative_to_modern_human_dispersals_and_global_patterns_of_human_variation/links/09e4150641bd1c8558000000.pdf (While this has a greater variety of other non-Indian south Asian samples, and also compares ancient S Asian crania to modern populations.)

Doesn’t exactly reveal anything new, just that Indians/S Asians are a gracile, small-bodied, small-featured population with sharper/protrusive mid-facial features in comparison to Europeans and Middle-Easterners (and ofc by that, the East Asian, Aboriginal Australian and African populations too). And that those from the Northwest of the subcontinent (Pakistanis in general and Punjabis) are more robust than the Southerners. Andamanese are the odd ones out.

Interestingly, the archaic cranial series cluster with modern-day Sri Lankan populations who were found to be rather distinct from the mainlanders (didn’t expect that).

This study compares Han populations from East, South, Central and Southwest regions of China. http://goo.gl/zrMbXr

Hans from the southwest seem differentiated from the rest. Narrower longer faces, longer noses, etc. Why such a difference between them and the Southern Han? Seems odd.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that while archeogenetics showed that West European Hunters were brown skinned and blue eyed, that Early European Farmers, while dark of hair and eye, tended to have light skin? I presumed they looked rather similar to contemporary southern Europeans – or perhaps Near Easterners who did not have later Sub-Saharan African admixture (e.g., Assyrians, Cypriots, Christian Lebanese).

If we were talking about the concept of “whiteness” in say an Australian context (where even Greeks are seen as nonwhite), I think it would be fair to say that white people didn’t exist 4,000 years ago. But no one within the U.S. context say denies the whiteness of someone like Ralph Nader or Tony Shalhoub.

Peter Frost believes that Europeans evolved their distinctive eye, hair and skin color about 10,000 to 25,000 years ago due to sexual selection. His arguments sound persuasive to me.

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-puzzle-of-european-hair-eye-and-skin-color-2/

I know that the La Brana hunter gatherer might have been darker skinned. But then he was from sunny Spain.

These TreeMix graphs are quite congruent with what David found, northwest South Asian populations and Yamnaya/Afanasievo consistently cluster together. I think this is why a migration edge between Yamnaya and northwest South Asians never takes place on these graphs, since these trees have them as already being quite similar. The PCA plots also show the closeness.

A side note, but I’d modify one aspect of SD’s question. It’s a very minor point, but I’d still like to note it. The Kalash and Pashtuns don’t seem to be 20%-25% ENA. Rather, they are probably around 10%-15% ENA. This is what qpAdm consistently shows, and whenever TreeMix has a migration edge from a purely ENA reference to these populations, that is the range we’ve seen (David’s trees had the Kalash at 12% ENA).

In terms of phenotype, if one visits the region, one finds that anywhere from 10%-20% of Pashtun males can pass in northern Europe. But, if one expands “white” to mean passing in any part of Europe, I’d say around 40% of Pashtun males can do so (although certain tribal groups among Pashtuns show much higher frequencies of such phenotypes than 40%, and some much lower than 40%). With other northern Pakistani ethnic groups, perhaps a range of 50%-60% (but again, that’s with an expansive definition of “white” which includes the Balkans, Greece, Italy, and the Iberian peninsula). I think what you write here, “… being part of the common network of demes, Southern Europeans and Northwest South Asians drew upon some of the same variation as part of their adaptive response to selection pressures…” is the best explanation I’ve ever seen for this.

“…it could be that the “white” phenotype emerged several times in variously related people…due to convergence, not common descent.”

bingo!

driven by the evolutionary arms race/escape from disease, & in only the last 4 or 5000 years.
excellent insights — there’s your book!

I completely agree–environmental pressures shape the race and cause certain genes to be expressed, resulting in different appearances.

Australia is the perfect example–4 subraces: 1) the gracile and typical aborigine; 2) the now extinct robust proto-caucasoid Murrayians of the temperate southeast; 3) the tasmanians; and 4) the negrito of the northern jungles.

All share the same genetic code, but they have different physical appearances.

For skeletal phenotype, its quite complex to characterise (with pigment mostly just one major dimension of variance right?). But we have physical anthropology and this often bins paleolithic Europeans, modern west Eurasians and farmers in the same cluster. Always hard to say how much this relates to measurement variable choice though. Dienekes pontikos blog is a decent place to look for this.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724841400178X is an interesting paper comparing facial shape between Uyghur, Tibet, han and Europeans inc nose . There is some distinction in uyghur-han shape dimensions vs european-han (and Uyghur closer to han) which will probably relate to european-indo Iranian difference.

Morphologically edges of the range of west Eurasians (e.g. far north, south) may not be more similar to outgroups so much as less archetypal (i.e. archetypal = simultaneously highly typical for group and differentiated from outgroup, neither alone makes archetypal).

I have Rs1426654 which is one of the 3 SNPS of SLC24a5 and the value I have for Rs1426654 is ‘AA’. AA is associated with lighter skin. I have ancestry from both North and South India.
According to the below paper:
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003912
this SNP Rs1426654 influences skin pigmentation in India.

And, regarding my prior comment, did southern Europeans get a higher dose of plague than northern Europeans, etc?

Interesting, but why should such a “white plague” tend to correspond with areas where sunlight is relatively weak?

Tidbits to add to your article for the readers: from my discussions with her, I can say that Nell does not hate white people; she is also married to one. It is true she doesn’t favor the construct, but it is mostly because the construct became associated with class. As people moved within wealth (Irish, Italians, etc.), they became part of the construct… and obviously, one can recognize the limitations of the construct from this perspective.

On the Kalash:

There are three sub-groups to the Indo-Iranian language family:

– Indo-Aryan languages
– Iranian languages
– Nuristani (and other related Kalash, Kafir, etc.) languages

In other words, the Nuristani/Kafir/Kalash languages are a very old group of the original Indo-Iranian (Aryan) languages. And from your genetic data above, the genetic descendents of these speakers.

I’m curious what you might have to say about the other prominent feature (in my mind) of white people — what I’d describe as a “pyramidal nose”, in contrast to the flatter, wider noses of africans and asians. I’ve met one or two Han Chinese with very prominent, pointed noses, but such a nose is very rare for them. I thought Indians (um, speaking in general… I don’t have any grasp of details here) were an interesting case of a population exhibiting dark skin in combination with white facial features.

For the spread of “white people”, I’d be interested in what statues from egypt and the middle east look like over time. I know there are statues of egyptian (native egyptian) pharaohs that look white. But I just checked wikipedia for Senusret III (19th century BC) and his statues exhibit what I’d think of as a nonwhite nose. (Here’s one:) So that’s some meager support for white people spreading within the last 4000 years.

Your criticism is based on two misconceptions:

1) That East Asians are uniformly darker-skinned, which a trip to any East Asia, particularily Japan or Northern China would disprove.

2) That brown or olive-skinned societies invariably find pale people alien, which a visit to most Asian or Middle Eastern countries would disprove.

I have a very basic question.
Kalash people have around 20-25% ASI. So how much of this contributes to them not looking like (not as white as) North Europeans though they have SLC24A5 ?

Also, the admixture percentage of Kalash and Pathan is same as per Harappadna. So, did you still expect Kalash to cluster differently and why?

You might not like this comment any better, but here goes — I have wondered for some time if the fitness advantage depigmentation confers, once it emerges, might be related to — well, to put it as delicately as possible, the fitness advantage it continues to confer on its possessors in the American Deep South, where I live. That is, depigmentation operates to stably distinguish and set a boundary between an in-group and an out-group, in circumstances where membership in the in-group carries with it serious social advantages, and the reverse is true of membership in the out-group.

I’ve noted that many human societies have done irreversible things to their children to mark them as members of the group – tattooing, circumcision, skull-flattening by use of a cradleboard, and so on. Others use equally hard to remove behavioral markers like accents, possession of skills that have to be acquired early, and so on. But depigmented skin and light eyes may work even better, because these markers are present at birth as well as irreversible. (Despite the popularity of “fairness creams” in the Indian subcontinent, it is much easier to darken light skin than to lighten dark skin.) So, the possession of depigmented skin and light eyes itself would not have conferred any particular fitness advantage on their possessors, but membership in the in-group would, and membership in the in-group would have been signalled by having fair skin and light eyes.

Someone who knows more about all this than I do ought to be able to come up with a way of making this into a testable hypothesis, if it seems worthwhile to do so.

I was going to be all smarty pants, so I idly googled up what cave paintings had to tell us. And lo and behold:

“Not surprisingly, given the fact that humans are almost never depicted in Stone Age paintings,”

I looked at a few human representations they have found. Very stylized, so you can’t find anything there.

It’s like those cavemen were playing with us.

Then I thought I might look at early writings. You know “Those people from up north look funny,” that kind of thing.

But:

“The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship suggests that Mesopotamia’s writing appeared first. That writing system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. At first, this writing was representational: a bull might be represented by a picture of a bull, and a pictograph of barley signified the word barley. Though writing began as pictures, this system was inconvenient for conveying anything other than simple nouns, and it became increasingly abstract as it evolved to encompass more abstract concepts, eventually taking form in the world’s earliest writing: cuneiform. An increasingly complex civilization encouraged the development of an increasingly sophisticated form of writing. Cuneiform came to function both phonetically (representing a sound) and semantically (representing a meaning such as an object or concept) rather than only representing objects directly as a picture.”

Okay maybe written language wasn’t advanced enough yet to record such notions. But lots of people had art.

If something like “white people” is only 4000 years old, well shouldn’t we see some signs in art somewhere that some mutants were running around? We know that trade routes could cover a surprising amount of ground even in stone age cultures. Horse riding appears to have arisen by 3500 BC or so. These people just weren’t that immobile. Heck in America you would find seashells distributed very far inland, a long time before Columbus.

Then too, if you put this event at 4000 years ago, what about Orientals (to mean the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Mongol, etc). Do they predate whites? Arise totally independently? While they are darker skinned than whites in general, they still are melanin challenged compared to Indians and Africans.

I dunno about your theory. It just seems to me you would find some kind of evidence somewhere, perhaps even written thought I’m not sure that is feasible. But painted on a vase or something? I don’t see how that wouldn’t have been recorded. I’m pretty sure that if everyone has a nice mocha shade of skin, some albino barbarian mutants would have been worth someone’s time to paint.

Most Europeans became lactase persistent since the Bronze Age, so why not the Kalash with their own allele?

What about the lactase persistence Razib mentions?

There’s nothing really special about the Kalash. They’re just an extreme isolate since the Bronze Age with a very small effective population size.

They’re like the Basques of the Hindu Kush. That’s why they’ve been confusing the bejesus out of many population geneticists.

Do you think it’s plausible that the “specialness” of the Kalash comes from a non-IE substrate?

Davidski, Commentator – that question applies to both of you too.

Thanks for the reply. What prospective discoveries in the field would increase that confidence or decrease it?

I’m surprised you have difficulty accepting Razib’s comment.

How is asking for his confidence level of what he terms a “plausible” explanation “have difficulty accepting”?

I happen to suspect that this idea is very much on the mark. I just wanted to know Mr. Khan’s level of confidence and, if he’s amenable, to know what factors increase or decrease that confidence. And I happened to have expressed similar ideas elsewhere on Unz Review (without the benefit of Mr. Khan’s level of expertise on the matter since I am not a geneticist).

What’s with all this motive suspicion and faulty mind-reading? Not every question is some sort of a snarky challenge or internet penis size contest.

@ Twinkie

“This seems to be a recurring theme of yours. How much confidence do you place on this plausibility?” in response to ‘it is plausible that every major group of humans today (major = numerous) is the product of fusions of branches of the human race which were sharply diverged during the Pleistocene’.

I’m surprised you have difficulty accepting Razib’s comment. I would have thought by now most would have accepted the overwhelming evidence that it is so.

Could this help explain the dreaded middle eastern autosomal result? http://dna-explained.com/2012/07/24/the-dreaded-middle-east-autosomal-result/

Or this? http://dnaconsultants.com/_blog/DNA_Consultants_Blog/post/Anomalous_Mitochondrial_DNA_Lineages_in_the_Cherokee/

Thank you. That is VERY fascinating. Among the Pamiris, Yaghnobis, and the Tajiks from Dushanbe, what kind of genetic distances are we talking about? Can you provide some sense of scale regarding the respective affinities for South Asia and Northern Europe, for example?

Thanks for the links.

Witzel wrote about the Kalasha religion here :
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/KalashaReligion.pdf

A list of texts on kalasha language + religion in English is maintained here
http://kalashapeople.blogspot.com/p/books.html

A discussion of Kalsha language is provided by Elena Bashir in Ch. 22 of the following book;
The Indo-Aryan Languages
By George Cardona, Dhanesh Jain
It has some discussion of religion in pages 905-990

Nature in the Kalasha Perception of Life by Birgitte Sperber, a chapter in a book entitled “Asian perceptions of nature: a critical approach” by: Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland.

Natural Resources and Cosmology in Changing Kalasha Society, A Book By Mytte Fentz

Dan,

Unfortunately, besides the test at GedMatch, there really isn’t anything else.

CupOfSoup,

For what it’s worth, the HGDP Burusho are quite low on R1a1a, compared to their neighbors. Out of 20 HGDP Burusho samples, only 2 have R1a1a. By contrast, R2 attains a frequency of 40% (the R* is actually R2)!

Twinkie,

We now have samples for Pamiri language speakers, Yaghnobi speakers, and a cosmopolitan sampling of Tajiks from Dushanbe. The Pamiri speakers, who are stereotyped for looking strongly European, are much more genetically South Asian and much more genetically Northern European in comparison to both Yaghnobi speakers and Tajiks proper. This dual heightened affinity to both South Asia and Northern Europe are probably indicative of greater steppe ancestry, in comparison to Yaghnobi and Tajiks proper. The Yaghnobi are considerably less East Asian-admixed in comparison to Tajiks proper, although they have the same affinity to both Northern Europe and South Asia as Tajiks. In a way, the Dushanbe Tajiks seem to be basically Yaghnobi, but with some Turkic admixture. The Pamiri are somewhat distinct from both, although Pamiri East Asian levels are intermediate between Yaghnobi and Tajiks proper.

It’s not helpful to simply focus on R1a, you need to look at the subclades.

In this regard the Burusho don’t differ in any way from Indo-Iranians.

Keep in mind that even if temperatures in the mountain valleys stretching through this area are low by tropical standards, the total solar flux is not particularly low.

So, based on that map, the Chinese of Sichuan should have the most European-like appearance, eh?

I’ve been told more than once that Tajiks in the Pamirs are much more likely to have brown or even red hair than Tajiks in the lowlands. Has there ever been a genetic comparison of the Tajiks of the Pamirs and, say, the Fergana Valley?

I’m one of those Europeans who was struck by this phenomenon in the mountains of Pakistan and the adjoining countries: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and even a bit of China.

Despite Afghanistan’s isolation from modern trade and migration (save the refugees who fled to Pakistan), Westerners who have been involved in the Afghan civil war have long noted the striking and colorful ethno-racial cauldron of the area: Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, and their intermixtures, for that matter, that produce a whole gamut of ethnic appearances. The French, in particular, were quite taken with the Tajiks.

My, my, the heirs of an Alexandrian conquest, the heirs of a Genghisid conquet, this has it all.

it is plausible that every major group of humans today (major = numerous) is the product of fusions of branches of the human race which were sharply diverged during the Pleistocene.

This seems to be a recurring theme of yours. How much confidence do you place on this plausibility?

Most of the populations and clusters that they are speaking of here did not exist when the divergence has been adduced. The Hazara for example on a compound population which emerged in the last 1,000 years due to the admixture of Mongols upon a Persianate substrate.

What happens if you separate the constituent genetic inputs of today’s Hazara (to the extent that the ancestral inputs can be ascertained) and then re-assess the genetic distance to Kalash? What do you see then?

For example, phenotypically the Kalash are lactose tolerant, but they lack the common Eurasian variant in totality. That implies that there is another variant in the LCT region unique to the Kalash. This also implies that the Eurasian variant has spread relatively recently into Northwest South Asia, perhaps post-dating the arrival of the Indo-Aryans!

Razib – how do the Burusho fit in here? They’re very high in R1a1a but non Indoeuropean. The reason I ask is I’d think there’d be other non-Indoeuropean influences underlying the region to various degrees.

Does anyone know of any relatively recent papers or books on Kalash religion? Everything I’ve seen so far is at least 100 years old.

“the Kalash are lactose tolerant, but they lack the common Eurasian variant in totality. That implies that there is another variant in the LCT region unique to the Kalash.”

Reminds me of the second half of this post: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/phenotypes-vs-genetic-statistics/

Keep in mind that even if temperatures in the mountain valleys stretching through this area are low by tropical standards, the total solar flux is not particularly low. In the region it can vary dramatically depending upon area – probably due to dramatic differences in cloud cover (e.g., microclimates due to topography, similar to San Francisco). In most places, though, the level of solar irritation is significantly above any European levels except for Iberia and some other areas around the Mediterranean.

That said, the relatively poor/seasonal climate does mean that people undoubtedly wear more clothing than people in the lowlands. They probably avoid going out in the winter time as well. Presuming there actually has been selection for pale skin to prevent Vitamin D deficiency, this difference may be enough to ensure that the paler variants in the initially mixed Indo-European populations won out in the highlands.

Edit note – I can’t figure out why my href link results in all caps. Must be something internal to the commenting system. Apologies.

Phenotype wise, they look Middle Eastern to me, some of them very fair. Some are pretty dark- pigmented. Sort of like Kurds. If they average above 10% blue eyes, that’d be quite above ME values.

Razib, thanks for the summary. I’m one of those Europeans who was struck by this phenomenon in the mountains of Pakistan and the adjoining countries: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and even a bit of China. While it is true that only a minority of these mountain people appear European, it is a common enough thing that in these areas, a person of European descent notices that they are suddenly much less regarded as “the other” than they would be in Kerala or even in Tashkent.

I am especially appreciative of your combating the tree paradigm of genetics. It seems to me there is a lot politics masquerading a genetics. Over these thousands of years, the dynamics have to be of splitting groups AND combining them and having new groups formed. In this case, since you and the previous commenter have noted that the % of European-looking folks is high among other mountain people s in this region, I’d like to posit that appearance might have a strong component of natural selection based upon environment. In the Karakoram valleys, home to the Shins, Burushos, Wakhis, and Baltis, all of whom produce the occasional light haired/eyed/skinned person, they have glaciers that are largest outside of the polar regions. This isn’t the South Asia of mangoes and coconuts, this is the South Asia of trout, apricots, and morels. These people have adapted to what has to be called a Nordic-style environment and I think we should expect a few so-called “white” people to appear over the millennia even if Alexander’s troops didn’t settle there.

@comentator Is there a test on GEDMatch or any other service that lets you compare yourself to these ancient populations or individuals like Yamnaya people, or the La Brana sample?

I have on GEDMatch about 45% ENF and 45% WHG with about 5% East African and 5% ANE. Wondering if I could get results that give me any more fun info like this.