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First residents of Europe were black
SoreShoulder
Member Posts: 3,148 ✭✭✭
There's going to be the occasional dark person of European ancestry but they might be made of the same stuff as you. A broad (for lack of a better term "African") nose, curly hair, and dark skin were European traits until less than 9,000 years ago.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd/
Everyone, including those who migrated out of Africa before the Sahara desert formed, were black. Neanderthals also had the gene for black skin.
The gene for whiteness in Europeans is thought to have mutated in just one individual somewhere in West Asia, then slowly spread throughout Eurasia, less than 10,000 years ago. It must have reached the Americas through arctic peoples who could cross the Bering strait.
They say the modern British population's DNA is still 10% from these dark skinned hunter gatherers. It may not be that different in the rest of Northern Europe.
The ancient hunter-gatherers might have been fairly competitive people. Whiteness would give invaders a considerable advantage because of more vitamin D. First of all, they wouldn't slow up as much in the winter. Second of all, they could better live by farming, and so would have a much larger army.
Despite all that, the white invaders didn't wipe the original dark people out but somehow wound up intermarried. There probably were far fewer hunter gatherers to begin with because hunting and gathering can't support nearly as many people per acre of land as farming. So, 10% implies a large proportion of them were not killed off.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd/
Everyone, including those who migrated out of Africa before the Sahara desert formed, were black. Neanderthals also had the gene for black skin.
The gene for whiteness in Europeans is thought to have mutated in just one individual somewhere in West Asia, then slowly spread throughout Eurasia, less than 10,000 years ago. It must have reached the Americas through arctic peoples who could cross the Bering strait.
They say the modern British population's DNA is still 10% from these dark skinned hunter gatherers. It may not be that different in the rest of Northern Europe.
The ancient hunter-gatherers might have been fairly competitive people. Whiteness would give invaders a considerable advantage because of more vitamin D. First of all, they wouldn't slow up as much in the winter. Second of all, they could better live by farming, and so would have a much larger army.
Despite all that, the white invaders didn't wipe the original dark people out but somehow wound up intermarried. There probably were far fewer hunter gatherers to begin with because hunting and gathering can't support nearly as many people per acre of land as farming. So, 10% implies a large proportion of them were not killed off.
Comments
And if the invaders got there while the single, mutated individual's new gene for white skin was still spreading through their society, the concept of a mixed family would not have carried a large stigma because the newcomers would have still had some lighter, some darker individuals in their midst, and the darker ones died off in ensuing centuries because when it got more crowded and there was less game to trade for, they were much more susceptible to disease for lack of D.
Well, no one who understood anything about it said we evolved from monkeys. Our ancestors were and we still are, classified as great apes.
Perhaps you can feed more people by farming, but it requires a much greater investment of time and energy than hunting/gathering, by about 20%.
So, just because only ten percent of the average modern British person's dna is from the black hunter gatherers, you can't just assume the farmers took over and decided to keep one for every nine they killed off. There were many fewer hunter gatherers than farmers to begin with.
You also can't assume the invaders were farming because of being smarter, because the hunter-gatherers couldn't live off grain because of their skin. They probably had some limited form of farming so that they could make beer, but they needed a steady supply of vitamin D.
The part about it all starting from one individual seems improbable, lack of melanin is a recessive trait in many animals and spontaneous examples happen often.
Maybe early man had some mechanism to deal with low vitamin D levels. What seems more likely is the recessive gene low melanin individuals had an evolutionary edge in northern climates. Low melanin slowly became a dominant trait and not a recessive the farther north you went, as the climate got colder.
The minimum viable population model says the minimum is between 4 and 5 thousand. That tends to disprove any sort of spontaneous positive evolutionary leaps. As one mathematician says the only way the math works is if you carry around a plethora of recessive genes. Widespread genetic leaps just don't add up. no matter how much time they have to propagate. In other words there are a million ways genetic change will diminish you or kill you and far fewer ways genetic change will make you better and propagate into a dominant trait.
Farmers tend to stay put or not wander long distances. Genetic diversity is a slower process.
Traders and semi-nomads can cover a lot of ground and spread their genes over a larger area.
I believe evolutionary scientists are now saying evolution is more often than not driven by mutations. There's only one desirable one for thousands of undesirable ones which die out of a species, but occasionally, a real good one takes hold and becomes a part of a species.
If there were traders from a lightly populated hunter-gatherer area going into a heavily populated farming area, they probably needed the protection of the local chief so they wouldn't get raided. They probably didn't bring fancy clothes and aftershave and cruise the city for the nightlife in their chariot.
Who knows how it was back then with the marriage traditions? They could have been liberal or restrictive. They might have thrown out or sacrificed or enslaved children of outsiders and pilloried the women who had them. Who knows?
Kind of right and kind of wrong, less than 4-5 thousand genetic sets is a spiral downwards, the genetic pool gets weaker. Though there are other factors, like how wide the genes are spread. Like any rule, it is more a guide than a rule. The hypothesis is that probabilities may be a better way to gauge the past than a few scattered genetic examples.
Early man may have wandered, but much of it was generational wandering. Life was just too hard to continuously start over again from scratch. Nomades and traders wandered, hunter-gatherers wandered somewhat, but most of their wandering was circular, following game and wild plant ripening. They hit the same fruitful areas year after year.
Using math, logic, and probabilities may be a way to achieve a clearer picture (a plausible hypothesis).
I've never bought into the random mutation and evolution theory. No matter how much time you have to mix and match, the math just doesn't add up.
Like I said a million ways for a random mutation to kill you, how many ways for it to be beneficial and then spread wide enough to be persistent and not degrade into oblivion? But if each individual carries around a set of recessive genes (tried and proved) like different blades on a Swiss Army knife, the chances of finding the right (or superior tool) for the job (climate, food source, etc.) at hand greatly improves.
Anyway, they can trace the European gene for white skin and blond hair to somewhere between the Middle East and India, originating roughly 10,000 years ago, although there are different genes present in Asia and America.
They said awhile back they can trace all non-African lineage back to four women somewhere around Lebanon, Though that theory seems to have died.
I wonder what the weather was like in that area at the time? I know a little farther north, east of the Urals was supposedly ground zero for most of the modern European stock. Where they settled was largely dependent on what the weather and the glaciers were doing at the time. Maybe they carried a light skin light hair recessive with them? I think the more they sort out DNA and gain an understanding of the recessive genes, the picture will become clearer.
It's not thought to be a very important gene in terms of how many different traits it effects. If you had genetically modified identical twins so that one had the gene for white skin and one had the gene for black skin, they would still be identical in almost every other way.
Every time I think of early European and African development the old story of the Ant and the Grasshopper comes to mind, Aesop's Fables. Europeans had to plan ahead, improvise and evolve or the winter would kill them.
You ought to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Covenant_(novel) The history of South Africa has been rewritten and massaged, Michener comes closer to the truth than most.
We have enough gun laws, what we need is IDIOT control.
Blood makes you related. Loyalty makes you family.
I thought getting old would take longer. :shock:
There would have been folks of all shades in between white and black at first, then, even before a black would have been regarded as an outsider, the black Europeans would have died off as it got crowded and game got scarce and they got sick easier for not having vitamin D.
Without having any data, I would guess that people who lived closer to the sea and people with richer diets might maybe have retained a little more ancestral darkness than people from inland.
Humans are thought to have left Africa around 40-50,000 years ago except for an earlier migration that set off toward the East across South Asia and may have ended up in Australia.
They are probably keeping more of their food production in the country now that other people don't own it. They might have chosen to devote less space to raising high end beef exports so everyone could have enough food.
Because copiers have 4 colors now not just black.
I'd like to read that study, I remain unconvinced, skeptical.
A side note; black radiates heat better than white, another reason white would be beneficial in a cold climate, the reflective properties of white, it reflects radiant heat, from the inside or in effect heat retention.
Another side note; there is more genetic diversity in a troop of Chimpanzees than there is on a continent of humans.
That's a burden.
Kind of my opinion also, the farther north you go the paler the people in general and the converse is true. I find it improbable some white (pale) guy walked into a predominantly black gene pool and the results are light brown in the Mediterranean and almost pink above the 50th paralell or so. It really isn't a black-white thing, there are all shades in-between.
Heck I raise Goldfish, low melanin goldfish pop up all the time. I still think low melanin is recessive in many animals and pops up all the time, part of Gods plan for our (and their) survival in the long term and/or something that was successful in the distant past and remains in the Swiss Army Knife gene pool. In some climates, it becomes dominant because it is a survival trait.
A single mutation as the vehicle for natural selection and positive results just doesn't add up in my mind. Too many ways for a mutation to go wrong, too few ways for it to succeed and then propagate wide enough to persist. I wish I had better math skills, my math skills are instinctive more than quantitative. But I was an auditor for the seventh-largest retailer in the world and was really good at spotting anomalies. One of those rain man type talents, I haven't lost a game of Freecell in decades.:)
I've read some books on the math of evolution and natural selection. Saying that evolution, natural selection, and random mutations are the sole reason we are here just doesn't add up, my intuition says "tilt". IMO one of those things that science doesn't know the answer too, so they are still following a flawed hypothesis because it can be shortened into a theory that many people can wrap their minds around.
The cause is probably that everyone has genes from two people and the further North you are, the better the light ones did.