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It’s enticing but usually pretty dumb to entitle anything The X Gene, like I just did, because genetics generally work more according to statistically complex interminglings of multiple causal factors.
But Razib Khan has a blog post about the skin color gene SLC24A5. Much of the world’s population, both African and East Asian, has the ancestral darker version, while Caucasians in Europe and the Middle East tend to almost all have the new lighter version. South Asians fall in-between.
It’s hardly the only gene contributing to what we recognize as racial differences between Caucasians and others, but it’s rather striking.
Here are percentages of the old dark version by group (note, some are based on small sample sizes so don’t get too worked up over small differences):
Samaritans, whether Good, Bad, or Ugly, live on a couple of hills in Israel.
The Basque live on the coast of Spain and France and speak a pre-Indo-European language isolate.
The Burusho or Hunza (zero percent in sample of 25 people) are a North Pakistani mountain tribe who speak a pre-Aryan language isolate.
First Indian prime minister Nehru was a Pandit Brahmin from Kashmir in the far north of the Subcontinent.
The Mbuti are a Pygmy people.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Uh oh.
Presumably this is the Neolithic farmer gene?
Greeks at zero percent? Take that black Achilles!
Fascinating. This suggests the existence of nearly pure subpopulation ancestors of the original “Aryan” steppe nomad conquerors.
Curious that the Samaritans of biblical significance feature prominently as Aryans.
And this is what they look like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofi_Tsedaka
As Samaritans are the descendants of the northern Hebraic kingdom of Israel and non-Ashkenazi Jews (Jews are from the southern Hebraic kingdom of Judah) that indeed is interesting. Much more than almost anyone may grasp.
When the Assyrians (who were Eastern Semites in language and culture) conquered the kingdom of Israel (its capital was Shomron/Samaria), they slaughtered many adult men and castrated many of the rest. Then they took virtually all the non-castrated Israelite males above age 10 or 12 and scattered them, and most of the 'valuable' Israelite women across the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians then sent a bunch of people they had conquered to live inside the old boundaries of the kingdom of Israel, and forced mixed marriages.
A decade after the conquering, virtually no children born in the Assyrian province were full blood Hebrew Israelite. Another 25 years later, and probably very few children born there were more than a quarter Hebrew/Israelite. Yet most retained the identity of being Yahwist religiously and culturally, right down to this day.
There are, I think, two particularly important things to ponder more from this. First, the Assyrians conquered a large number of tribes living in today's upper Middle East, and several of them are known to have been Indo-European moved south. In fact, much of the nobility of the Neo-Assyrian Empire may have been Indo-European in ancestry. So then the question becomes: were the non-Hebrews who were forcibly planted on the land of the kingdom of Israel and who mixed with the remnants of that Hebraic kingdom preponderantly Indo-European?
Is the extra whiteness of the Samaritans a key reason, even THE reason, that the Jews came to hate Samaritans the way that Jews and Mohammedans hate pork? The religion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (southern Hebraic kingdom of Judah) evolved rather quickly after the 70 year Babylonian Captivity (the Chaldean/Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered Judah roughly a century and half after the Assyrians conquered Israel, and the Chaldeans forced almost all of Judah's 'elites' to move to the heart of Babylonia) into something that can only be labeled 'racist.' The Jews came to see the pure blood of Abraham as the mark of salvation, and then as the mark of being the people who had the right to rule the world. Those assumed pure-blood Jews hated the Samaritans as half-breeds, and that hate went well beyond the Jewish hatred of any other group of Semites.
Is the Jewish hatred of Whitey something that was born of the Samaritans being whitened?
Small sample size, but interesting.
not so small, relative to the total population size
Idle question, canarying this one out:
Has there ever been a single example of a gene variant and distribution which everyone thought was obviously sexual selection which somehow turned out not to be sexual selection? Even in animals?
What about East Asians? They can be very light, almost as light as Europeans in some cases.
However, one expects there are going to be a lot of Eurasian+Eurasian matches in this coming breeding generation. And there is no guarantee that kids from these unions will have all--or even a reasonably full set--of the skin lightening genes of either whites or East Asians.
Neither skin lightening system is a single allele deal, so it isn't like 1/4 of kids would be "black". However, the Caucasian system has three or four real heavy hitters that each account for 15-25% or so of a typical light skinned European's "lightening". (Ex. SLC24A5 on chromosome 15 or SLC45A2--the "cream gene" in horses--on chromosome 5.) I assume the East Asian system also has a few genes that do the heavy lifting as well. So what i'd expect is a real wide range of skin tones in the Eurasian+Eurasian progeny.
What I don't know is if some of the heavy hitter East Asian genes are mostly on some of the same chromosomes as the Euro system? If not you're going to see some rare but really dramatic situations where mom+dad are pretty light skinned and junior comes out looking black. Let the comedy ensue!Replies: @Bernardo Pizzaro Cortez Del Castro
Wikipedia (for simplicity – the point is cited) states: “The earliest known sample of the threonine allele is 13,000 years old from Satsurblia Cave in Georgia. The allele was widespread from Anatolia to Iran at the beginning of the Neolithic, and was introduced to Europe with the arrival of the first farmers from this region about 8,000 years ago”
So – it’s well named “Caucasian” and that’s interesting since “Caucasian” was in use to describe the heritable feature long, long, long before anyone eye-glimmered SLC24A5.
Generally that and other curious details like its universal presence in Basque and other non-IE isolate cases make me wager it did not originate with Indo-Europeans but got swept up in the variety of IE migrations and eventually became diffused throughout IE populations. Even its presence among Greeks can be explained this way because Indo-European Greeks moved into the landmass that was already populated with many pre-IE peoples. The Greek language differs from other IE on account of all the loanwords picked up from these archaeo-Greeks. Given sufficient time the Greek language was perfectly diffuse (diffusion IE to archaeo) and so was SLC24A5 (diffusion archaeo to IE). Taken together they have the characteristics of a very thoroughly shaken-up mixture.
Another hint at this are physical descriptions of Hittites – the earliest IE occupiers of Anatolia – by their contemporaries which relate Asiatic characteristics. As stands there’s no knowing for sure but that’d be my wager – SLC24A5 was present in pre-Ice Age, pre-IE Caucuses, was present east to the Harappan civilization and west to Hispania and the proto-Basques in and throughout the pre-IE Neolithic, then was picked up by IE migrations and diffused thoroughly given several millennia.
Part of the reason some find it hard to wrap their minds around this is a poor understanding of autosomal DNA (on which SLC24A5 rides – chromosome 15, BTW). Even in places like the British isles where the prior non-IE populations were entirely wiped out, it was only men who were wiped out – the whole body of pre-IE autosomal DNA survived with the women who survived Celtic interlopers and would have become highly diffuse in subsequent generations. And that was the exception – in most areas Indo-European migrations did not entail wiping out indigenous peoples. If you are R-M420 or R-M343 your daddies and granddaddies’ Y chromosome going way back were “Indo-European”, but every last other gene you carry – needn’t be and looks like SLC24A5 is one, that isn’t.
Different genetic architecture. They get their pale skins via a different set of genes.
https://www.unz.com/gnxp/why-are-northeast-asians-white-skinned/
It’s interesting that South Asians, i.e. Indians, come in at a low 22.5%, and are thus overwhelmingly Aryan, and they were also considered “Caucasian” by the government until the 80s(ish).
How is it that human memory somehow understood that South Asians were similar to Europeans? They don’t look similar.
Using a strictly skull based categorization method, these anthropologists organized three racial groups. Caucasoids were characterized by a doliocephalic shape, with receded zygomas, large browridge and a narrow nasal aperture. Negroids were characterized by a mesocephalic head shape, with receded zygomas and wide nasal aperture. Mongoloids were characterized as a brachycephalic head shape, absent browridges, small nasal aperture, and projecting zygomas.
Amongst the 'everyone else' category, at a first approximation 'dark Caucasoids' were lumped in together with 'whites', (Europeans).
Surely, this was because the the typical American had very very little actual experience or contact with west Asiatics.Replies: @DFH
http://kuow.org/post/albinism-and-me-how-my-genetic-condition-makes-my-ethnicity-invisible
Albinism And Me: How My Genetic Condition Makes My Ethnicity Invisible
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kuow/files/styles/medium/public/201604/20160403_122120.jpg
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kuow/files/styles/x_large/public/201604/20160402_172155__2__0.jpg
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kuow/files/styles/medium/public/201303/Kamna%20and%20Sarah%20podcasting.JPG
the right one is the South Asian girl.Replies: @Steve Sailer
https://pix.sfly.com/tcAxwJ - next to a white Euro girl
https://pix.sfly.com/6sSb2E - look at the eyes
So if you had both sets of genes what would you be? Transparent?
They look similar (“Caucasoid”) except for skin (+hair, eye) color.
the % isn’t really the most interesting thing. it is that there are very very very few copies of the ancestral allele across so much of europe. this seems to be a recent feature of the last 5,000 years. the impact on skin color is dominant toward lightness (see the original 2005 paper). so it is very strange that if lightness is driving the selection that heterozygotes are so much less fit than homozygotes. lactase persistence allele is maxed out at ~90% because it is dominant it. this allele should have been similar, but it’s not.
ancient DNA specialists believe it came from the middle east. both the early european farmers and later indo-europeans carried it. but its frequency wasn’t as high, though it wasn’t high.
finally, some of you should read my post closely. you are making dumb comments because you don’t know anything.
I don't really believe sexual selection for light skin and eyes is extremely strong, because white guys will have sex with dark women no problem so long as they have the right parts and shape. But there is an instinctive aversion to sharing one's resources with a mate's children with another male, and having a surprise black baby with a white woman is a strong visual indication of infidelity, even if it's a false positive.
It's kind of an uncomfortable thought, but killing unwanted children is not at all out of the ordinary, even today as the Irish vote for abortion makes clear. It needn't be only for paternity issues; women routinely abort babies that have conditions of one sort or another. They'd probably abort a lot more if testing could determine the child's IQ, personality, physical attractiveness, etc. Even in the current year, it wouldn't surprise me if some women would abort children for being too dark if they could.
Given the remarkably thorough elimination of the ancestral version of this gene, I have to leave open the possibility that it was due to conscious selection, i.e. culling. I'll leave it up to scientists to determine whether this is possible or likely, but reason points in that direction.Replies: @BB753, @Thirdeye
Every day now, I feel abject terror looking at the hideous far-right swing of this country and those who wield that terror with impunity.
Meanwhile, every day and for long before, black americans have had to live in an actual terrorizing police state that I will never experience
The Basque live mostly in the Pyrenees mountains.
I don’t believe it’s of Aryan origin. That’s why it’s in the Middle East, which is of Neolithic farmer ancestry. Neolithic ancestry is common to Europe and the Middle East.
The Greek language has a non-Indo-European substrate.
Italy had Etruscan and some other non Indo-European languages until the Latins imposed Latin on the peninsula.
Meanwhile, every day and for long before, black americans have had to live in an actual terrorizing police state that I will never experienceReplies: @Mishra, @MBlanc46
Well thank you. Definitely brightened my day a bit.
The “Middle East” being Iranians, Palestinians, and Pashtuns? Indo-Aryan = Indo-“Iranian”. Palestinians to the west and Pashtuns near the Khyber Pass, in a historical sense the eastern end of the steppe’s reach, being other potential “Middle Eastern” variants.
Perhaps, speculating, the Israel situation is highly complicated by Palestinians being Aryans instead of other people more accustomed to the nature of the desert (I don’t see Arabs, including Maghrebi, on the list). Further speculating, perhaps Yassir Arafat was a poor choice of Palestinian leader given his heavy Egyptian (albeit part Palestinian) ancestry.
Physical anthropology (e.g. skull measurements) was the reason that Indians were considered Caucasoid and not negroid or Mongoloid. Anthropologists initially developed racial classification based on skull shape. The observable craniofacial skeletal differences ranged from breadth of nasal aperture, nasal root height, head shape e.g. mesocephalic, brachycephalic and doliocephalic, sagittal crest appearance, jaw thickness, browridge size, forehead slope, etc., but did not involve differences such as eye color, skin color, lip shape, and hair type.
Using a strictly skull based categorization method, these anthropologists organized three racial groups. Caucasoids were characterized by a doliocephalic shape, with receded zygomas, large browridge and a narrow nasal aperture. Negroids were characterized by a mesocephalic head shape, with receded zygomas and wide nasal aperture. Mongoloids were characterized as a brachycephalic head shape, absent browridges, small nasal aperture, and projecting zygomas.
A product of Harrow and Cambridge, he referred to himself as the last Englishman to rule India.
Skin color is determined in a complex polygenic way, so too much can be read into the effect – or not – of on single allele.
It’s not like lactose tolerance or sickle cell – traits which can be reduced down to a single mutation.
Until quite recently – before the Teddy Kennedy era of total immigration, American discourse was dominated by a simplistic dichotomy of black (subsaharan African) and non black (everyone else).
Amongst the ‘everyone else’ category, at a first approximation ‘dark Caucasoids’ were lumped in together with ‘whites’, (Europeans).
Surely, this was because the the typical American had very very little actual experience or contact with west Asiatics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_ThindReplies: @PiltdownMan
ancient DNA specialists believe it came from the middle east. both the early european farmers and later indo-europeans carried it. but its frequency wasn't as high, though it wasn't high.
finally, some of you should read my post closely. you are making dumb comments because you don't know anything.Replies: @Bill P, @GW, @notanon
Well, what would the cumulative genetic effect be if homozygous babies were routinely killed over dozens of generations? Say a heterozygous man has a homozygous kid with a heterozygous woman. He’d probably think he wasn’t the father, and that’s kind of a problem.
I don’t really believe sexual selection for light skin and eyes is extremely strong, because white guys will have sex with dark women no problem so long as they have the right parts and shape. But there is an instinctive aversion to sharing one’s resources with a mate’s children with another male, and having a surprise black baby with a white woman is a strong visual indication of infidelity, even if it’s a false positive.
It’s kind of an uncomfortable thought, but killing unwanted children is not at all out of the ordinary, even today as the Irish vote for abortion makes clear. It needn’t be only for paternity issues; women routinely abort babies that have conditions of one sort or another. They’d probably abort a lot more if testing could determine the child’s IQ, personality, physical attractiveness, etc. Even in the current year, it wouldn’t surprise me if some women would abort children for being too dark if they could.
Given the remarkably thorough elimination of the ancestral version of this gene, I have to leave open the possibility that it was due to conscious selection, i.e. culling. I’ll leave it up to scientists to determine whether this is possible or likely, but reason points in that direction.
The Samaritans are according to Biblical narrative a foreign population settled by the neobabylonian empire to replace the northern tribes of Israel.
Amongst the 'everyone else' category, at a first approximation 'dark Caucasoids' were lumped in together with 'whites', (Europeans).
Surely, this was because the the typical American had very very little actual experience or contact with west Asiatics.Replies: @DFH
The Supreme Court ruled that Indians were not white
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind
They can look very similar.
http://kuow.org/post/albinism-and-me-how-my-genetic-condition-makes-my-ethnicity-invisible
Albinism And Me: How My Genetic Condition Makes My Ethnicity Invisible
the right one is the South Asian girl.
The Samaritans are quite unmixed and have never left the holy land. When you look at them, you are looking at a very ancient stock.
And this is what they look like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofi_Tsedaka
The fifth paragraph of Razib Khan’s linked-to blog post is
“It turns out that this mutation, the derived variant, is almost disjoint is [??? in] frequency between Europeans and Africans. That is, about ~100% of Africans carry the ancestry G base at [???] while ~0% of Europeans carry the G base (as opposed to the A base). Interestingly, East Asians carry the G base at ~100% frequency as well. If you genotype an anonymous individual and their genotype is AG or GG on [???] at rs1426654 then it is highly likely that that individual is not a European.”
This paragraph includes three apparent mistypings, from only one of which the intended wording can be inferred. I stopped reading at this point. Are those familiar with this field able to infer the intended wordings at [???]?
Distribution of A/G base variant at rs1426654
100% Africans and East Asians have the G-base variant
0% Europeans have the G-base variant
Europans have the A-base variant.Replies: @Sean
No, not as Aryans, which marks language and attendant culture. But as being truly white in pigment.
As Samaritans are the descendants of the northern Hebraic kingdom of Israel and non-Ashkenazi Jews (Jews are from the southern Hebraic kingdom of Judah) that indeed is interesting. Much more than almost anyone may grasp.
When the Assyrians (who were Eastern Semites in language and culture) conquered the kingdom of Israel (its capital was Shomron/Samaria), they slaughtered many adult men and castrated many of the rest. Then they took virtually all the non-castrated Israelite males above age 10 or 12 and scattered them, and most of the ‘valuable’ Israelite women across the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians then sent a bunch of people they had conquered to live inside the old boundaries of the kingdom of Israel, and forced mixed marriages.
A decade after the conquering, virtually no children born in the Assyrian province were full blood Hebrew Israelite. Another 25 years later, and probably very few children born there were more than a quarter Hebrew/Israelite. Yet most retained the identity of being Yahwist religiously and culturally, right down to this day.
There are, I think, two particularly important things to ponder more from this. First, the Assyrians conquered a large number of tribes living in today’s upper Middle East, and several of them are known to have been Indo-European moved south. In fact, much of the nobility of the Neo-Assyrian Empire may have been Indo-European in ancestry. So then the question becomes: were the non-Hebrews who were forcibly planted on the land of the kingdom of Israel and who mixed with the remnants of that Hebraic kingdom preponderantly Indo-European?
Is the extra whiteness of the Samaritans a key reason, even THE reason, that the Jews came to hate Samaritans the way that Jews and Mohammedans hate pork? The religion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (southern Hebraic kingdom of Judah) evolved rather quickly after the 70 year Babylonian Captivity (the Chaldean/Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered Judah roughly a century and half after the Assyrians conquered Israel, and the Chaldeans forced almost all of Judah’s ‘elites’ to move to the heart of Babylonia) into something that can only be labeled ‘racist.’ The Jews came to see the pure blood of Abraham as the mark of salvation, and then as the mark of being the people who had the right to rule the world. Those assumed pure-blood Jews hated the Samaritans as half-breeds, and that hate went well beyond the Jewish hatred of any other group of Semites.
Is the Jewish hatred of Whitey something that was born of the Samaritans being whitened?
Palestinian Arabs are descended from people who invaded from the Southern part of the Arabian Peninsula beginning with the Islamic conquests in the 7th century and extending through the 1200s. Definitely not Aryans.
I don't really believe sexual selection for light skin and eyes is extremely strong, because white guys will have sex with dark women no problem so long as they have the right parts and shape. But there is an instinctive aversion to sharing one's resources with a mate's children with another male, and having a surprise black baby with a white woman is a strong visual indication of infidelity, even if it's a false positive.
It's kind of an uncomfortable thought, but killing unwanted children is not at all out of the ordinary, even today as the Irish vote for abortion makes clear. It needn't be only for paternity issues; women routinely abort babies that have conditions of one sort or another. They'd probably abort a lot more if testing could determine the child's IQ, personality, physical attractiveness, etc. Even in the current year, it wouldn't surprise me if some women would abort children for being too dark if they could.
Given the remarkably thorough elimination of the ancestral version of this gene, I have to leave open the possibility that it was due to conscious selection, i.e. culling. I'll leave it up to scientists to determine whether this is possible or likely, but reason points in that direction.Replies: @BB753, @Thirdeye
Rickets used to be the preferred theory to account for the culling of dark homozygous children, as you put it.
Why would the Samaritans “feature prominently as Aryans” ? There is nothing in the post to suggest that.
5 Steve Sailer > Small sample size
not so small, relative to the total population size
This doesn’t make sense at all. Why do Finns have darker genes than the rest of the Europeans esp. the Southern Europeans? And how could East Asians have darker genes than the much darker skin South Asians?
The sun is directly overhead in South Asia. That will tend to turn people black over generations.
This brings up a speculation/curiosity i’ve had. There are a lot of Eurasians growing up in the US now. Their coloring is generally unremarkable.
However, one expects there are going to be a lot of Eurasian+Eurasian matches in this coming breeding generation. And there is no guarantee that kids from these unions will have all–or even a reasonably full set–of the skin lightening genes of either whites or East Asians.
Neither skin lightening system is a single allele deal, so it isn’t like 1/4 of kids would be “black”. However, the Caucasian system has three or four real heavy hitters that each account for 15-25% or so of a typical light skinned European’s “lightening”. (Ex. SLC24A5 on chromosome 15 or SLC45A2–the “cream gene” in horses–on chromosome 5.) I assume the East Asian system also has a few genes that do the heavy lifting as well. So what i’d expect is a real wide range of skin tones in the Eurasian+Eurasian progeny.
What I don’t know is if some of the heavy hitter East Asian genes are mostly on some of the same chromosomes as the Euro system? If not you’re going to see some rare but really dramatic situations where mom+dad are pretty light skinned and junior comes out looking black. Let the comedy ensue!
My first and so far only thought about this list is: where are the Bogomils? Gotta watch the Bogomils. Well, you don’t GOTTA, but there are worse things you can do. From Bogomils, or their absence, you might learn something, or not. Bogomils, the next big thing. There are two kinds of computer programs: the ones that have Bogomil Event Listeners, and the ones that don’t. And how about Bogomils WITH computers? They might influence elections overseas. Someone’s going to think of this – or already has.
Regarding SLC24A5, I suppose I should be gratified that a science’s rate of discovery is so high it surpasses that science’s rate of giving intelligible names to the things about which it is making discoveries…but I’m not. Biochemists are miserable communicators. I thought this in graduate school and for years afterward, until I heard of RING proteins, whereupon I simply gave up. (RING proteins have nothing to do with rings, even if you believe zinc fingers look like fingers. They are proteins encoded by Really Interesting New Genes. Thanks a lot.) SLC24A5 may yet be proven to encode a cation transporter, and a skin-color-influencin’ one at that…but it won’t be renamed anything like that.
However, one expects there are going to be a lot of Eurasian+Eurasian matches in this coming breeding generation. And there is no guarantee that kids from these unions will have all--or even a reasonably full set--of the skin lightening genes of either whites or East Asians.
Neither skin lightening system is a single allele deal, so it isn't like 1/4 of kids would be "black". However, the Caucasian system has three or four real heavy hitters that each account for 15-25% or so of a typical light skinned European's "lightening". (Ex. SLC24A5 on chromosome 15 or SLC45A2--the "cream gene" in horses--on chromosome 5.) I assume the East Asian system also has a few genes that do the heavy lifting as well. So what i'd expect is a real wide range of skin tones in the Eurasian+Eurasian progeny.
What I don't know is if some of the heavy hitter East Asian genes are mostly on some of the same chromosomes as the Euro system? If not you're going to see some rare but really dramatic situations where mom+dad are pretty light skinned and junior comes out looking black. Let the comedy ensue!Replies: @Bernardo Pizzaro Cortez Del Castro
I have observed a similar situation within my family…many of my first cousins are mulattos , 3 of them married mullattos, they each had 3 -4 children….one of them came out looking 100% African…2 had Blue eyes and light skin, like derick Jeter , while the rest appear like mulattos.
Hair and facial features make it obvious that even the darkest S Asians are Caucasian
Photos of my son, 100% Tamil Brahmin
https://pix.sfly.com/tcAxwJ – next to a white Euro girl
https://pix.sfly.com/6sSb2E – look at the eyes
The big cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao are on the coast.
ancient DNA specialists believe it came from the middle east. both the early european farmers and later indo-europeans carried it. but its frequency wasn't as high, though it wasn't high.
finally, some of you should read my post closely. you are making dumb comments because you don't know anything.Replies: @Bill P, @GW, @notanon
GO away.
If you look closely, you discover that a lot of “Palestinians” still proudly display the features of their Crusader forebears. One suspects they are secretly proud of their warrior heritage.
Kind of ironic that descendants of European Crusaders now crusade for Islam.
Real Arabs will not hesitate to tell you that regular Palestinians are a mongrel group of Circassians, Turkmen, etc. with very little Arab ancestry.
My impression is that it would make sense either to lump South Asians into a giant Caucasian race or split them off as their own highly diverse group, but either would make more sense than what the government has been doing since 1982 and lumping South Asians in with East Asians.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Caucasian-languagesReplies: @Anonymous
Because there are individuals of European descent who look like they just came from Mumbai.
It was in hunter gathers in the north before “both the early european farmers and later indo-europeans”.
There are similar Mesolithic finds of people with the light skin hair and eye mutations in Russia. The earliest blonde hair allele (c. 18,000 BP) was found in the region “near to where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together”.
Sounds like there was a selection pressure for SLC24A5 as part of selection for the signature European suite of characteristic– a long way north of the Middle East.
Yes, but they had the other aspects of European appearance, SLC45A2 (the secondary light skin allele), and the light hair and eyes alleles too.
Yamnaya killed indigenous European males and applied a paper bag test to the ladies so that only the whitest skinned enjoyed reproductive success as official wives of a warrior who could support them, (as opposed to being raped and killed as the spoils of war). Probably a few of the Yamnaya women who entered Europe were pale enough to be competitive, and the high born Indo-Europeans caste expanded and got paler with every generation as the brownish lower orders of the Yamnaya mixed with the tawnier indigenous women died out along with the ancestral allele of SLC24A5 that made them unwhite by the new and ever-lightening standard .
“Jesus was an Aryan” was some 19th Century German highbrow theory.
R.I.P. Alan Bean, moonwalker. Now there are only four of them left on Earth.
An admirer of Monet, Bean took up painting after leaving NASA. He was a Caucasian.
More goonbrow.
Is there some reason why people use “Caucasian” instead of “Caucasoid?” After all, there are actual Caucasians in the world….
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Caucasian-languages
It's similar to color terms like "black", which strictly speaking refers to skin color but by extension, because skin color tends to correlate with genetic ancestry, is used to denote genetic ancestry and descent. In terms of skin color and morphology, someone like Vijay Singh would be "black" and "Caucasoid". In terms of genetic ancestry, he would be Caucasian.Replies: @syonredux
http://kuow.org/post/albinism-and-me-how-my-genetic-condition-makes-my-ethnicity-invisible
Albinism And Me: How My Genetic Condition Makes My Ethnicity Invisible
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kuow/files/styles/medium/public/201604/20160403_122120.jpg
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kuow/files/styles/x_large/public/201604/20160402_172155__2__0.jpg
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kuow/files/styles/medium/public/201303/Kamna%20and%20Sarah%20podcasting.JPG
the right one is the South Asian girl.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Golfer Vijay Singh from Indians on Fiji is very dark-skinned, much darker than Tiger Woods, but has quite Caucasian-looking facial features. If he were an albino, he’d look pretty much like a regular white guy. He’s an extreme case, but worth noting.
Singh is also interesting for demonstrating how race in America is not really skin color. In his 40s in the 2000s, Singh became the most successful old golfer of all time, even knocking Tiger Woods off his pedestal as #1 in the world in 2004-05. But the American media showed virtually zero interest at the time in the story of this nearly black-skinned man overcoming skin color prejudice yada yada, because while Singh may be close to black in skin color, he doesn’t seem to have any black African ancestry, and that’s what Americans mean by “color.”
By the way, Tiger might be more than the 1/4th black I always assumed. Reading up on his parents, his father’s ancestry is a little vaguer than I had heard before. Earl Woods was clearly part black and part white, and had family stories about a Chinese and an American Indian ancestor, but whether they really existed and what fraction of his ancestry they were is vague. So Tiger might be as much as 3/8ths black.
Tiger’s tiger mother Kultida’s ancestry appears more nailed down: half Thai, quarter Chinese, quarter Dutch. Her father was an architect. She was kind of a poor little rich girl. Her parents got divorced and they sent her to boarding school and then just left her there, paying the bills but, didn’t visit her for years.
Zero interest because Singh himself was reticent on the matter...
http://www.golf.com/tour-and-news/vijay-singh-has-always-been-reluctant-discuss-his-early-years-pro-and-good-reason
"I don't like to talk about my private life," he says. "The media" -- and here the exasperation shows on his face, the same look the prime minister displays when talking about Singh -- "the media knows everything about a player."
...and was deemed sexist in this kerfuffle from several years ago, which did not endear himself with the media.
http://www.espn.com/page2/s/whitlock/030514.html
So it would appear the media was either aware of or considered that Singh is a Melanesian, or a proto-Australoid, or a Pacific Islander, and thus is not African or "black" (considering Fijians genetically are much further from African Americans). His story essentially would not "sell".
Of course, people have not NOTICED that Tiger's role in the infamous racial draft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z3wUD3AZg4
Well, those who are higher on the ANI/ASI spectrum with a higher percentage of Aryan vs. Dravidian can look pretty close to Europeans
Finns have only been in Finland since the 12th C. They’re a brown skinned people.
The sun is directly overhead in South Asia. That will tend to turn people black over generations.
ancient DNA specialists believe it came from the middle east. both the early european farmers and later indo-europeans carried it. but its frequency wasn't as high, though it wasn't high.
finally, some of you should read my post closely. you are making dumb comments because you don't know anything.Replies: @Bill P, @GW, @notanon
does EDAR show the same pattern (higher %age than it should be?)
The Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well is the first major instance of Christ expanding God’s salvation to gentiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_ThindReplies: @PiltdownMan
A picture of the Sikh, Bhagat Singh Thind, who was ruled to be not white (overturning an earlier decision). Making allowances for the turban and flowing beard, he looks pretty Cacuasoid to me, as many Sikhs do.
My north Indian acquaintances have European features and are about the same shade as a Neapolitan family I know. My late half Indian friend was fair skinned although he tanned well. I just assumed he was some variety of eastern European until he showed me pictures of his mom.
The lumping is entirely political but the whole damn thing is so why should it make sense in any why other than political?
“But the American media showed virtually zero interest at the time in the story of this nearly black-skinned man overcoming skin color prejudice yada yada, because while Singh may be close to black in skin color, he doesn’t seem to have any black African ancestry, and that’s what Americans mean by “color.””
Zero interest because Singh himself was reticent on the matter…
http://www.golf.com/tour-and-news/vijay-singh-has-always-been-reluctant-discuss-his-early-years-pro-and-good-reason
“I don’t like to talk about my private life,” he says. “The media” — and here the exasperation shows on his face, the same look the prime minister displays when talking about Singh — “the media knows everything about a player.”
…and was deemed sexist in this kerfuffle from several years ago, which did not endear himself with the media.
http://www.espn.com/page2/s/whitlock/030514.html
So it would appear the media was either aware of or considered that Singh is a Melanesian, or a proto-Australoid, or a Pacific Islander, and thus is not African or “black” (considering Fijians genetically are much further from African Americans). His story essentially would not “sell”.
Of course, people have not NOTICED that Tiger’s role in the infamous racial draft.
Khan said the most interesting thing was
Imagine you are a Bronze Age Tupperware salesman
Pick one
http://www.skincaretalk.com/images/6/6d/6d44ef96_vbattach1205.jpeg
https://www.bollywoodshaadis.com/img/article-l-201782216313223492000.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/53/d7/6d/53d76d24ae9b56bb9a9e7c29ff5cac2c.jpg
Such a mystery why the ancestral allele of SLC24A5 died out!
What explains the difference in skin color or shade or type among different Europeans and Caucasians? Is it some other gene or genes in addition to the skin color gene SLC24A5?
Southern Europeans, Mediterraneans, Middle Easterners tend to be olive skinned, while northern Europeans have lighter skin. And among northern Europeans, there’s the fair type of skin that burns and doesn’t tan at all, like among the Irish, and then the ruddier type that tans quite well into a deep orange or bronze tone, especially among Germanics and Scandinavians.
Perhaps the skin color gene SLC24A5 produces the baseline olive skin tone and then an additional gene or genes produces the different lighter tones.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Caucasian-languagesReplies: @Anonymous
I believe that “Caucasoid” is a term from physical anthropology to describe a particular morphology – skull shape and so on. Strictly speaking, it’s a morphological term, rather than a term connoting genetic descent. Morphology tends to correlate with genetic descent, but it’s not necessarily the case. For example, Bantus and Papuans might both be “Negroid” morphologically, but genetically, Papuans are less genetically related to Bantus than Germans and Chinese are.
It’s similar to color terms like “black”, which strictly speaking refers to skin color but by extension, because skin color tends to correlate with genetic ancestry, is used to denote genetic ancestry and descent. In terms of skin color and morphology, someone like Vijay Singh would be “black” and “Caucasoid”. In terms of genetic ancestry, he would be Caucasian.
The Crusaders left little to no genetic trace in Palestine, and had trouble just staying alive due to malaria and other diseases. Moreover, the Palestinian Christians during the Crusader Kingdoms tended to favor the Muslim rulers over the Frankish ones.
Pale Asian skin is less transparent than pale Caucasian skin. It also has a lower density of sweat glands.
I don't really believe sexual selection for light skin and eyes is extremely strong, because white guys will have sex with dark women no problem so long as they have the right parts and shape. But there is an instinctive aversion to sharing one's resources with a mate's children with another male, and having a surprise black baby with a white woman is a strong visual indication of infidelity, even if it's a false positive.
It's kind of an uncomfortable thought, but killing unwanted children is not at all out of the ordinary, even today as the Irish vote for abortion makes clear. It needn't be only for paternity issues; women routinely abort babies that have conditions of one sort or another. They'd probably abort a lot more if testing could determine the child's IQ, personality, physical attractiveness, etc. Even in the current year, it wouldn't surprise me if some women would abort children for being too dark if they could.
Given the remarkably thorough elimination of the ancestral version of this gene, I have to leave open the possibility that it was due to conscious selection, i.e. culling. I'll leave it up to scientists to determine whether this is possible or likely, but reason points in that direction.Replies: @BB753, @Thirdeye
Child-culling is an instinctive practice that is moderated only by lower reproductive rates, with their attendant greater parental investment in the individual child. With limited resources for child-rearing a small difference in bonding, which could be driven by appearances among heterogeneous-looking children, could make a life-and-death difference.
Southern Europeans, Mediterraneans, Middle Easterners tend to be olive skinned, while northern Europeans have lighter skin. And among northern Europeans, there's the fair type of skin that burns and doesn't tan at all, like among the Irish, and then the ruddier type that tans quite well into a deep orange or bronze tone, especially among Germanics and Scandinavians.
Perhaps the skin color gene SLC24A5 produces the baseline olive skin tone and then an additional gene or genes produces the different lighter tones.Replies: @Sean
The variant of SLC24A5 that Europeans have got now is the main reason they have white skin. The older variant is ancestral SLC24A5 was once not all that rare in Europe. Ancestral SLC24A5 is the main reason sub Saharan Africans have dark brown skin, so European were once quite a bit darker. Ancestral SLC24A5 disappeared from Europe about 5000 years ago. which is very close to when the Indo European / Bell Beaker people arrived. The only reasonable explanation is that invasion resulted in the death of the darkest European people: the bearers of ancestral SLC24A5.
What explains then the variation among Europeans and Caucasians in skin tone or type? For example, do the Irish have different genes that interact with SLC24A5 such that their skin is very fair and burns easily and does not tan?
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mace-lab/genetic-ancestry/guff_documents/Genocide_in_Ireland.pdf
Hmm, kind of odd that the Kalash show 29%. They are quite fair and many have blonde hair and light eyes. I thought they were supposed to be about the purest of the Aryan/North Indian peoples. Yet they have a higher prevalence of the ancestral variant than South Asians?
I believe diet plays a role in this. There is a biochemical issue. People who eat a lot of meat don’t need to absorb sunlight so can have dark skins in northern latitudes (e.g. Eskimos). Grain-eating farmers OTOH need the light and so must have light skin.
“European (Finnish)” probably includes the Sami people, who look like many Arctic peoples from around the Arctic Circle.
It's similar to color terms like "black", which strictly speaking refers to skin color but by extension, because skin color tends to correlate with genetic ancestry, is used to denote genetic ancestry and descent. In terms of skin color and morphology, someone like Vijay Singh would be "black" and "Caucasoid". In terms of genetic ancestry, he would be Caucasian.Replies: @syonredux
As I noted upthread, the existence of actual Caucasians (i.e., people from the Caucasus/speakers of Caucasian languages) makes the use of “Caucasian” as a racial term rather confusing (I’ve read articles where it took me a while to figure out which meaning was in play). Using “Caucasoid” avoids confusion. Alternatively, we could scrap both terms and use something else: Euripoid, West Eurasian, etc.
"It turns out that this mutation, the derived variant, is almost disjoint is [??? in] frequency between Europeans and Africans. That is, about ~100% of Africans carry the ancestry G base at [???] while ~0% of Europeans carry the G base (as opposed to the A base). Interestingly, East Asians carry the G base at ~100% frequency as well. If you genotype an anonymous individual and their genotype is AG or GG on [???] at rs1426654 then it is highly likely that that individual is not a European."
This paragraph includes three apparent mistypings, from only one of which the intended wording can be inferred. I stopped reading at this point. Are those familiar with this field able to infer the intended wordings at [???]?Replies: @helena
It turns out that this mutation, the derived variant, is almost disjoint [is] in frequency between Europeans and Africans. That is, about ~100% of Africans carry the ancestry G base [at] while ~0% of Europeans carry the G base (as opposed to the A base). Interestingly, East Asians carry the G base at ~100% frequency as well. If you genotype an anonymous individual and their genotype is AG or GG [on] at rs1426654 then it is highly likely that that individual is not a European.
Distribution of A/G base variant at rs1426654
100% Africans and East Asians have the G-base variant
0% Europeans have the G-base variant
Europans have the A-base variant.
The red hair gene makes your skin paler and burn prone, obviously. There are places in Ireland where living people with large round heads are found, ditto Scotland. The Yamnaya/ Bell Beakers conquest led to intense selection for lighter skin. Hence the spread of the red hair gene .
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mace-lab/genetic-ancestry/guff_documents/Genocide_in_Ireland.pdf
The European craniofacial form and skin colour is the result of sexual selection of women. The original period of sexual selection of women was in North and East Eurasia during the Ice Age. I think in north Europe during the Bronze Age there was another period of sexual selection.
Distribution of A/G base variant at rs1426654
100% Africans and East Asians have the G-base variant
0% Europeans have the G-base variant
Europans have the A-base variant.Replies: @Sean
Khan said (of the dark skin version of SLC24A5):
Natural selection right?
Lets look at a real example of natural selection to see if it works so completely that a derived variant of a gene takes over complely and the original version is completely replaced over time in a new and very different environment .
A clear case of natural selection in northern Europe:-
Right back to the skin lightening , ie back to SLC24A5. Pretty obvious that natural selection did not wait until 5000 years ago to start working, but even if it did it would not have eliminated virtually 100% of ancestral SLC24A5.
It was sexual selection, which required high mortality of men necessary for reproductive fitness ( care and provisioning or wife and child) . In the Ice Age the men were in short supply because they froze on long hunting trips . In the Bronze Age they were killed by Bell Beaker invaders’ copper axes like this one found in County Mayo :-
Meanwhile, every day and for long before, black americans have had to live in an actual terrorizing police state that I will never experienceReplies: @Mishra, @MBlanc46
Jeez, TD, I experience a terrorizing police state every day. And I’m a white guy.
Whatever the genes are, East Asians skin ranges from whitest white thru off white to shades of gold and light tan.
They don’t want a tan
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2332785/Dangerous-double-jaw-surgery-rise-South-Korea-women-encouraged-face-risks-bone-cutting-procedure-beauty.html
East Asians have ancestral EDAR which makes for chin protrusion, and their skin is not all that white even if never exposed to the sun (photos are deceptive, because East Asian womenmodels are made to look far paler that they actually are. East Asian women apparently want to look like north European women, and I think I know why.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11616
East Asian skin appears to be in the northern Middle East, Southern Europe zone in terms of color:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unlabeled_Renatto_Luschan_Skin_color_map.svgReplies: @Sean
East Asians have the derived EDAR allele, not the ancestral, and the derived allele reduces chin protrusion:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11616
East Asian skin appears to be in the northern Middle East, Southern Europe zone in terms of color:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11616
East Asian skin appears to be in the northern Middle East, Southern Europe zone in terms of color:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unlabeled_Renatto_Luschan_Skin_color_map.svgReplies: @Sean
OK, not chin, but in South Korea where people can afford it there is a very risky surgery becoming remarkably common, and it’s done to reduce the bony part of the mandible in order to get a less robust looking jaw.I happen to doubt that the version of EDAR that East Asians have is unconnected with that demand . There is a much bigger market for skin lightening products in China, Japan ect than in any part of Europe. As Darwin noted long ago, the standard of beauty for women is really not very different across the world, and that more or less European norms for women are being sought after by East Asians is attested to by the skin lightening and surgery they are resorting to.
The Motala people had derived EDAR and so going by South Korea, the Motala females today would not be very happy with their jawlines, or their swarthy complexion because, only some of them had derived SLC24A5 and I suppose one must wonder if sexual selection in the Ice Age ever produced a fully white population (ie one fixed for derived SLC24A5 and the lesser whiteness alleles). Moreover, I suspect that derived EDAR would have been eliminated by a thousands of years of truly intense sexual selection on women. However derived blonde hair, light eyes and white skin alleles and north European face shape sans derived Edar were all about in various places in the north and east of Eurasia and no one has been able to say what pressure these derived alleles were for originally selected under, if not sexual selection.
R1b and its derivatives are more common in Ireland than in Finland or anywhere else in north Europe, and the Irish have the paler skin. The ancestral version of SLC24A5 disappeared when the Bell Beakers arrived in Europe, and apparently killed off most of the population especially in the north. Ireland had more Bell Beaker replacement of the original population and whiter skin so derived SLC24A5 seems to be hold over from the Ice Age that came in handy for surviving genocide-in-the-Axe-Age.
The Irish also have a sizable number of people with the "black Irish" phenotype i.e. black hair. I think the paler Irish skin in women is less popular among men than the skin that tans that German and Scandinavian women have.Replies: @Sean
The jaw surgery article you linked to has a before picture of a woman whose chin and jaw resembles that of H.P. Lovecraft. I don’t know if that is more of an East Asian or Caucasian phenotype. The stronger jawline is usually more associated with Caucasians, which is partly why Caucasian men are typically regarded as having a more masculine appearance than East Asian men. The fact that that particular surgery is prevalent there wouldn’t necessarily mean that that trait is atypical. Sometimes, it can be the opposite, for example Caucasian women naturally have larger breasts, and breast augmentation is more common Caucasian women than East Asians, and black women naturally have larger buttocks and tend to get butt injections to make them even larger.
The Irish also have a sizable number of people with the “black Irish” phenotype i.e. black hair. I think the paler Irish skin in women is less popular among men than the skin that tans that German and Scandinavian women have.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTSGEYQCGfQtFwMknMykFnbtuOTHgiv_ryY8a8OBStbO-
I think the very light skin of the Irish is connected to the Bell Beaker conquest of Ireland and the advantage that a very white skin gave women of a particular time and place. However, Razib Khan says of derived (white skin) SLC24A5 "there are very very very few copies of the ancestral allele across so much of europe. this seems to be a recent feature of the last 5,000 years", and so conditions in Germany and Scandinavia were apparently not very different. I think the red hair gene (most common in Ireland and Scotland) makes all the difference.Still, the popularity of tanning is not total, even among wonen who make a living as hardcore adult performers
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Stoya_2014.jpg
Photo Attribution : © Glenn Francis, www.PacificProDigital.com
The Irish also have a sizable number of people with the "black Irish" phenotype i.e. black hair. I think the paler Irish skin in women is less popular among men than the skin that tans that German and Scandinavian women have.Replies: @Sean
Well obviously the Asian girl wanted to look more feminine/attractive, but a very long narrow face is not at all masculine in men, quite the opposite. An HPL appearance in men is likely due to low prenatal testosterone.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTSGEYQCGfQtFwMknMykFnbtuOTHgiv_ryY8a8OBStbO-
I think the very light skin of the Irish is connected to the Bell Beaker conquest of Ireland and the advantage that a very white skin gave women of a particular time and place. However, Razib Khan says of derived (white skin) SLC24A5 “there are very very very few copies of the ancestral allele across so much of europe. this seems to be a recent feature of the last 5,000 years“, and so conditions in Germany and Scandinavia were apparently not very different. I think the red hair gene (most common in Ireland and Scotland) makes all the difference.
Still, the popularity of tanning is not total, even among wonen who make a living as hardcore adult performers
Photo Attribution : © Glenn Francis, http://www.PacificProDigital.com