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Ancient DNA Shows All Europeans Were Once Descended From Belgians

W

Woorloog

Banned
Huh. This makes the Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy gag about "Belgium" being the most offensive word even funnier.
 
T

Toxi

Banned
sphagnum said:
Yeah, basically. They wouldn't have even been light skinned. Although you're forgetting the Proto-Indo-Europeans/Yamna people ("Aryans") who showed up about 5000-6000 years ago.
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Kinda off-topic, but when and where would paler skin have evolved in human populations? I guess it's a continuum based on geography and time, since skin color has many genetic factors and isn't just a simple on-off thing.
 
S

sphagnum

Banned
Toxi said:
Kinda off-topic, but when and where would paler skin have evolved in human populations? I guess it's a continuum based on geography and time, since skin color has many genetic factors and isn't just a simple on-off thing.
Click to expand...

It does vary, but it seems to have been around in the north by about 6000 BC for people in Europe.

When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.

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.

Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.

...

The paper doesn’t specify why these genes might have been under such strong selection. But the likely explanation for the pigmentation genes is to maximize vitamin D synthesis, said paleoanthropologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, as she looked at the poster’s results at the meeting. People living in northern latitudes often don’t get enough UV to synthesize vitamin D in their skin so natural selection has favored two genetic solutions to that problem—evolving pale skin that absorbs UV more efficiently or favoring lactose tolerance to be able to digest the sugars and vitamin D naturally found in milk. “What we thought was a fairly simple picture of the emergence of depigmented skin in Europe is an exciting patchwork of selection as populations disperse into northern latitudes,” Jablonski says. “This data is fun because it shows how much recent evolution has taken place.”
Click to expand...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin
 
J

JonnyDBrit

Member
Toxi said:
Kinda off-topic, but when and where would paler skin have evolved in human populations? I guess it's a continuum based on geography and time, since skin color has many genetic factors and isn't just a simple on-off thing.
Click to expand...

Welcome to one of the great debates of European (and more broadly, Mediterranean) archaeology.

A traditional model has been the presumption of a gradual change in skin tone roughly correlating with small waves of migration outward from Africa. However, as our understanding of genetics has grown and become more precise, we've run into two problems with this model, which kinda come up with this study:
1) Ancient populations had the potential to travel a lot farther than we anticipated within a relatively short span of time
2) Migration wasn't purely outward from Africa.

So with the first point, out ancestors might have gotten out across Europe before their skins actually had the chance to change colour all that much. With the second, it might be they themselves didn't originally develop lighter skin tones at all, or at least not to the extent seen presently. First Nation peoples in Canada don't look white, likely because they get a sufficient amount of Vitamin D - the creation of which is one of the primary benefits of lighter skin - from fish. Europeans, rather obviously, do have a tradition for eating plenty of fish, and it's kind of a natural diet given how much coastline we have. So one idea proposed is that perhaps a more isolated and continentally derived group, like say, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, brought those light skin colours when they migrated to Europe. Or perhaps even as recently as Germanic migration from Scandinavia via viking raids and settlements.

And it might be that the genes developed further south, but emerged as a common mutation that just happened to really take off in Europe. Or it could be a variety of sources coming to create a common result, or-

Fake Edit:
Or just read what sphagnum posted above, yeah.
 
T

Toxi

Banned
sphagnum said:
It does vary, but it seems to have been around in the north by about 6000 BC for people in Europe.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin
Click to expand...
Thanks! Wow, that's really recent. It looks to me like that suggests, in Europe at least, the pressures for lighter skin color were only really high at higher latitudes. And the reason why the rest of European populations evolved light skin was due more to migration from the Near East.

JonnyDBrit said:
Welcome to one of the great debates of European (and more broadly, Mediterranean) archaeology.

A traditional model has been the presumption of a gradual change in skin tone roughly correlating with small waves of migration outward from Africa. However, as our understanding of genetics has grown and become more precise, we've run into two problems with this model, which kinda come up with this study:
1) Ancient populations had the potential to travel a lot farther than we anticipated within a relatively short span of time
2) Migration wasn't purely outward from Africa.

So with the first point, out ancestors might have gotten out across Europe before their skins actually had the chance to change colour all that much. With the second, it might be they themselves didn't originally develop lighter skin tones at all, or at least not to the extent seen presently. First Nation peoples in Canada don't look white, likely because they get a sufficient amount of Vitamin D - the creation of which is one of the primary benefits of lighter skin - from fish. Europeans, rather obviously, do have a tradition for eating plenty of fish, and it's kind of a natural diet given how much coastline we have. So one idea proposed is that perhaps a more isolated and continentally derived group, like say, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, brought those light skin colours when they migrated to Europe. Or perhaps even as recently as Germanic migration from Scandinavia via viking raids and settlements.

And it might be that the genes developed further south, but emerged as a common mutation that just happened to really take off in Europe. Or it could be a variety of sources coming to create a common result, or-

Fake Edit:
Or just read what sphagnum posted above, yeah.
Click to expand...
Thanks, this is all informative.

I didn't think of the fish factor, but that makes a lot of sense when so much of Europe is close to the coast.
 
highrider

highrider

Banned
Yeah, but you're always a discovery away from turning everything on its head. I don't think any ancient human evidence is conclusive, we are still at the beginning of our understanding of it. Every theory is full of holes and so much is unexplained.
 
jts

jts

...hate me...
fries.jpg


I'm proud of my ancestry.
 
S

sphagnum

Banned
This is one of those headlines that shows that the press doesn't know what to do with science, like all those newspapers recently splurting out "Ancient rock carving proves meteor hit Earth 12,000 years ago and killed the megafauna!" even though the paper about it is controversial and probably bunk.

Gobekli Tepe still cool though.
 
D

Dehnus

Member
Fliesen said:
That'd explain what made us so damn evil. - Of course, they share a border with the Dutch.
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Yeah, but the Dutch are so evil they aren't even human. Basically they infected the poor Flemish. Sooo much evil!!! I mean even the sea hates them and tries to constantly take the land back the Dutch stole from it! An elder species of Evil imps I tell you?
 
C

Cocaloch

Member
People need to be smarter about disseminating articles like this to the public. There are some really problematic connection between ethnicity and genetics that are both untrue and inherently not particularly useful that stuff like this perpetuates.
 
R

roytheone

Member
Dehnus said:
Yeah, but the Dutch are so evil they aren't even human. Basically they infected the poor Flemish. Sooo much evil!!! I mean even the sea hates them and tries to constantly take the land back the Dutch stole from it! An elder species of Evil imps I tell you?
Click to expand...

Fuck the sea! What did the sea ever do for us? Nothing i say, nothing! This land is now ours, let's see the sea try and take it back! I spit on the sea, spit!
 
B

Baron von Loathsome

Member
sphagnum said:
This is one of those headlines that shows that the press doesn't know what to do with science, like all those newspapers recently splurting out "Ancient rock carving proves meteor hit Earth 12,000 years ago and killed the megafauna!" even though the paper about it is controversial and probably bunk.
Click to expand...

20090830.gif
 
S

sphagnum

Banned
Cocaloch said:
People need to be smarter about disseminating articles like this to the public. There are some really problematic connection between ethnicity and genetics that are both untrue and inherently not particularly useful that stuff like this perpetuates.
Click to expand...

Are you referring to the title? I don't see anything wrong with the article itself, but the title is dumb.
 
J

JonnyDBrit

Member
sphagnum said:
Are you referring to the title? I don't see anything wrong with the article itself, but the title is dumb.
Click to expand...

The line bolded in the OP is heavily misleading. Not to mention:
Modern humans first entered Europe roughly 45,000 years before the modern age. This migration spelled the end of Neanderthals, which had previously inhabited the continent. All of the ancient Europeans examined in this study exhibited lineages that traced back to a population that lived 37,000 years ago in a region that would later be known as Belgium.
Click to expand...

Again, the population of the time time is represented by a specimen from Belgium, it doesn't mean the entirety of that population was from Belgium.

The Artisan said:
This. While the Middle East was the cradle of civilization, Africa was the birthplace of mankind.
Click to expand...

Already clarified my statement in that regard.
 
T

Toxi

Banned
PSqueak said:
Does it matter when it's universally accepted that all human life started in africa tho?
Click to expand...
In the thousands of generations since the birth of Homo sapiens, there was other interesting stuff that happened though. Even Africans are very different from the original modern humans with all those years of adapting to new habitats, diets, lifestyles, diseases, etc. Just look at all the different ethnic groups on the continent. And those are the people whose ancestors didn't fuck with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Part of what makes it so interesting for me is the amount of migration. We have populations diverging to far off locations and then mixing again. Nobody stayed in one location forever.
 
M

Metroxed

Member
"Descended from people living in present-day Belgium" and "descended from Belgians are two very different things.
 
G

Gozan

Member
So basically today's Belgians are the descendants of those who were too lazy to move to a better place?...
 
G

gutter_trash

Banned
sphagnum said:
Absolutely. It baffles me - Europeans are mutts but archaeogenetics sites are infested with white supremacists.
Click to expand...

pretty much, aynone who reads up on their own local history will find out that they were settled by various peoples and conquered by various factions

reason being why you would find a Greco-Roman looking Lebanese in Beirut as you will find an Eurasian looking Russian in Moscow.
 
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