They didn’t wait till the supposed Ice Free Corridor opened up. New evidence proves that the IFC wasn’t viable until after 13,000-12,500 years, and ancient Native American remains in Oregon at 14,600 bc, and a village site at the tip of South America at the same time frame, puts Native Americans inside the Americas before the IFC opened up, and proves that the Americas were peopled by another way. Probably by boat thru the Pacific Coastline. There are older sites littered through out the Americas, so Native Americans could have been in Americas as early as 40,000 years ago, just by linguistics alone puts them in Americas 40,000 years ago.

This is a fantastic website and I can not recommend you guys enough. Full of useful resource and great layout very easy on the eyes. 338A Casino Agen Ibcbet

What byzantine and orthodox art are you referring to?

'The frequencies for these genes basically match modern Levantine populations, Syrians and Palestinians.

The genes in question are
– the European variant at SLC45A2, what gives much of the skin pigment difference between Europeans and non-European Middle Easterners,
– a couple of genes one of which affects eye pigment mainly and the other which has very low impact on skin pigment (and have a more questionable selective relationship to skin pigment).

So from this data, probably more dark as Salma Hayek (if she lived in relatively cloudy Ukraine her whole life) than dark as Razib Khan (or any Bengalis)."

What the hell? Why does everyone believe these light skin mutations are exclusivity European? If those three 'European' mutations Peter is so inlove with are the main causes to European light skin, we should expect Iraqis to be at least as dark as Iberians.

Comparsion

Iraqi Google images
https://www.google.com/search?q=iraqi+people&espv=210&es_sm=122&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=YAguU9XOEqiQyAGxs4GwAQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1024&bih=667

Guide to Spanish phenotype
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCgQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theapricity.com%2Fforum%2Fshowthread.php%3F106927-Guide-to-Spanish-phenotypes-(by-regions)&ei=kwguU5z5AoThyQGks4CwDQ&usg=AFQjCNG1X2QJwXNqh5kai5DXemYQ83lnqg&sig2=OyLg5J_3O4ip3n4ToYo5DQ&bvm=bv.62922401,d.aWc

"The authors say nothing about SLC24A5, which is the third gene involved in the whitening of European skin. So it would be difficult to say how dark the Kurgans were."

According to you Peter west asians should be as white as Europeans. Why are you so stubborn? These mutations are not European we have PROVE at least the ones in genes SLC24A5 and TYR came to Europe with farming from the near east.

Are west asians white skinned? NO. So obviously there are unknown light skin mutations in Europe. Do you have eyes or are able to reason Peter?

First of all Peter, most of Europe left pre history around 2,000 or less years ago. The oldest ancient writings i know of describing the physical features of north-west Europeans(i.e. Celts and Germans) describe them as stero typical tall, light haired, light eyed, and snow white skinned. All writtings i know of comparing skin color of Europeans to west asians or north Africans always say the European group(whether Romans, Iberians, Iyrllians) is lighter. By the time Europe left pre history the genetic makeup was almost no differnt in every region as today, you already had most of the major modern ethnic groups.

Your interpretation of MA-1 boy is incorrect. He was not mixed central asian-European, that's what i thought at first when i only knew about his admixture results. Actualley he is most related to Mesolithic Europeans, he was like their ancient eastern brother. He was also a pure west Eurasian, not intermediate between modern Eurasians. His population contributed ancestry to many modern populations(America, Siberia, south asia, west asia, and Europe) unlike their western brothers who only contributed ancestry to Europeans and possibly a tiny winy bit to some people in Asia and north-west Africa.

I agree with you that these bronze age proto-Indo Europeans and Eneolithic people are most likely not the main ancestors of modern east Europeans. The alleles in SNP's rs12913832, rs16891982, and rs1042602 are too differnt.

Bronze and Iron age Indo Iranians in Siberia had almost complete opposite results in rs12913832 and rs16891982 to their supposed Yamna ancestors and Catacomb relatives. They had results that would be expected of modern Europeans, so in my opinion if there was some type of crazy pigmentation change in eastern Europe in the last 5,000 years it was complete by at least 4,000 years ago.

I am still very skeptical that skin color can be accurately predicted. Those three mutations YOU STILL CALL EUROPEAN, are as popular in near easterns as they are in Europeans(except the one in rs16891982 which is ~50% in near easterns and ~100% in Europeans) so i do not think they make an unbelievable effect on skin color. I know all the experts say they do and i trust them, but i think there are other mutations that if Europeans did not have they would be as dark as near easterns.

I am tending towards saying La Brana-1 and loschbour had dark skin but i am still not sure. If for example a genome from Mesolithic Russia finds that they had light hair and eyes but none of the mutations associated with European light skin, that will be prove there are unknown light skin mutations.

It is strange that these ancient Pontiac steppe people where down in all of them, even below near eastern and early European farmer averages. I think Mesolithic ancestry could be the reason. I have heard that the forest Neolithic and early Indo Europeans had very Mesolithic like skull shapes. This is defended by over 50% Mesolithic mtDNA U5-U4-U2e in bronze-iron age Indo Iranians(light) and similar percentages in Catcacomb and Yamna cultures(dark). Maybe some hunter gatherer groups in east europe were more brown eyed than in west Europe, and maybe La Brana-1 and Loschbour are blue eyed flukes(not normal for their people).

The last thing i will say Peter is that these ancient Pontaic steppe people were modern European. They had the same mixed hunter WHG/WHG and farmer EEF ancestry modern Europeans do. No where outside of Europe do you find an mtDNA gene pool like theirs.

A different course of inquiry could be this:
oestrogenisation made women more caring for the children in Europe and allowed/forced an increased paternal investment on offspring.

Do oestrogenisation make women more caring for children and cuckolding less frequent?
Because, if she cuckolds her male provider, she should do it with another male provider and, in ancient time, the previous children would be in a dangerous situation (or at least very disadvantaged).

Maybe it is a chance, but fairy tales talk about the fairy princess menaced by their darker haired/skinned sisters.

"Vitamin D levels are…"

The reason I wonder is Cro-magnon (and Neanderthals) are described as particularly robust which I assume implies particularly sturdy bones?

The authors say nothing about SLC24A5, which is the third gene involved in the whitening of European skin. So it would be difficult to say how dark the Kurgans were.

Sure, my point is that the frequencies of the genes we do know about are more like Lebanon than Bengal.

The West Eurasian variant of SLC24A5 (high frequencies in Middle East plus Europe and quite high frequencies outside Europe) is already known as present in Oetzi, so its odds of being present within this Kurgan population at high frequency is fairly good.

SLC24A5 could have a non-West Eurasian frequency in this population though, we will have to wait and see.

"The gorilla-like Luxembourg man shows traits of robustness"

Like Cro-magnon skeletons, very solid bones, no sign of rickets.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/XrayRicketsLegssmall.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickets

"Vitamin D insufficiency was found in 40% of non-Western immigrants in the Netherlands, and in more than 80% of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants."

Brown skinned people with blue eyes are not so common even in mixed race people. You would look twice if you saw such a person. I don't think there have been so many old bones looked at for the blue eyes and brown skin combination to be popping up twice; but it has. So at this point it seems to me the selection for white skin did not go along with selection for blue eyes for thousands of years. I'm confident the selection for blonde hair and blue eyes is sexual.

Years ago Peter mentioned the possibility white skin prevented spousal abuse in monogamous living, and also inhibited sexual arousal to a certain extent. One can't help noticing that tanned skin is the look for young women, but wasn't in a previous era. So we have the evidence before us of how blue eyes could have been selected for, while white skin selected against in women.

Anon,

Probably as dark as Razib Khan, although the only way to know for sure would be to revive this ancient DNA (as in Jurassic Park).

The frequencies for these genes basically match modern Levantine populations, Syrians and Palestinians.

The genes in question are
– the European variant at SLC45A2, what gives much of the skin pigment difference between Europeans and non-European Middle Easterners,
– a couple of genes one of which affects eye pigment mainly and the other which has very low impact on skin pigment (and have a more questionable selective relationship to skin pigment).

So from this data, probably more dark as Salma Hayek (if she lived in relatively cloudy Ukraine her whole life) than dark as Razib Khan (or any Bengalis).

Characteristics of hair skin and eyes, which came from sexual selection of women and are related to oestrogenisation, may have been differentially selected once the steppe tunda period ended. The Spain and Luxembourg studies both finding a blue eyes and dark skin combination is very hard to explain otherwise

The hair skin and eyes traits spread outside the steppe tunda area, but white skin was maybe selected against for a time because there was more male-male competition and white skin went along with oestrogenisation. The gorilla-like Luxembourg man shows traits of robustness
I think maybe white skin going with oestrogenisation somehow is the explanation.

The Kurgan mtDNA is closer to Central European mtDNA, both modern and Bronze Age, then Central Asian mtDNA, both modern and Bronze Age. See here…

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p217/dpwes/Wilde_Brandt_mtDNA2.png~original

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p217/dpwes/Wilde_Brandt_mtDNA_PCA2.png~original

So there's very little doubt that these Kurgan groups contributed to the modern European mtDNA gene pool, along with groups from the Atlantic fringe, like the Bell Beakers, and the remnants of early Neolithic farmers across Europe.

Out of these three, the Kurgans had to be the Indo-European speakers, while the others contributed non-Indo-European substrata, like farmer loan words, to modern European languages.

The only question here is whether the Kurgan groups tested by Wilde et al. were homogenous, and became lighter over time due to positive selection and mixing with the other Europeans, or whether they were a mix of more northerly and lighter Proto-Indo-Europeans and brunet farmers from the east Balkans and southern steppe.

The fact that the Middle Bronze Age Andronovo Kurgan groups of South Siberia were already very fair and had higher frequencies of blond hair and blue/green eyes than most modern Europeans, supports the latter scenario. So in other words, the Proto-Indo-Europeans might have come from some ancient Hyperborea north of the steppe, and were much lighter than the people they dominated to the south, who then joined them in the expansion deeper into Europe.

Needles to say, the Proto-Indo-European expansion was very likely a male driven phenomenon. So the fact that the Andronovo and related groups carried extreme frequencies of R1a, coupled with the fact that ANE proxy Mal'ta boy also belonged to R, and ANE seems to have entered most of Europe after the Neolithic, basically means that what we're looking at here is a Y-DNA R/ANE/Indo-European invasion of Europe during the Copper Age, which first started with a drive into Ukraine and the east Balkans, where a lot of brunet farmer females lived. Kind of like this…

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Kurgan_map.png

@ anonymous: thanks for the FST info – much appreciated.

The FSTs are based on the mtdna panels. Comparing FSTs from different sets of genes is not useful.

well written & well thought out – i apologize if i'm misreading this, but 2009 research & your 2014 link list .0084 as the Fst/distance between Greeks & Swedes (NB: for comparison, they list .0057 between Greeks & Palestinians) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index
I'm new to this & assume that the Fst stat varies between who & what SNPs are sampled, but that it's a good "ballpark" distance indicator! is there any adjustment when comparing samples across time? & can a more Bayesian approach be used (setting the null at what we expect, etc.)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8570542.stm

rickets

What we really need now are complete genomes from across time and space of the Kurgan cultural horizon, and especially from the early sites near the middle Volga, like Khvalynsk.

Good for you, Peter!

Just one comment – you noted that "The authors are placing the burden of proof on the wrong null hypothesis when they state that their simulations 'failed to reject population continuity.' The null hypothesis should be population discontinuity."

Really, it's only because we are so habitually frequentist in our statistical reasoning that we assume there needs to be a null hypothesis to begin with. The fact that people can argue about which hypothesis should be null, and therefore what the results are, belies the claim that frequentism is "objective." The fairest way to examine the situation would be with Bayesian methodology, but using an uninformative prior. Then it would be easy to see how well each side fit the data rather than trying to give primacy to either side.

These Kurgans do not show a close relationship to early European farmers in terms of mtDNA. They're most similar to early Bronze Age Central Europeans (Unetice Culture), but also not that far from modern Central Europeans.

http://polishgenes.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/pca-of-ancient-european-mtdna.html

In any case, I don't think this population had a single origin. I bet many of the females had local east Balkan and southern steppe origins, but the others, as well as the males, came from somewhere further north or east, and were more similar to the Andronovo Kurgans who were almost fixed for R1a.

"Only later, within the time frame of 20,000 to 10,000 years ago, did some of them become white."

Europeans have a V shaped dental arch, and a narrow face. The first known case of impacted wisdom teeth was 13,000 to 11,000 BCE in southwestern France. So obviously two separate selection pressures on something other than appearance resulted in alterations in appearance as a side effect. The convergence of the side effects on changes in appearance proves it.

Exactly! Light pigmentation was already present long before in LBK Central Europe and blue eyes in Mesolithic Western Europe, so comparing Wilde et al. (2014)'s 'Skeletal material from 150 Eneolithic and Bronze Age individuals from the west and north Pontic region', and Bouakaze et al.(2009)'s '25 archeological human remains from southern central Siberia dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages' that 'most probably had typical European pigment features, i.e., blue or green eye color, light hair color and skin type, and were likely of European individual ancestry', we may conclude that their purported Indo-European continuity isn't at all that obvious! Instead, the selective sweep identified in the Pontic area must have been induced by immigrants from areas where those mutations were already present at saturation level, ie. in the west, what of course again severely compromises the Kurganist house of cards of a Pontic Indo European expansion.

These findings may be of some value in resolving the question of Indo-European language origin. There has long been a competing school of thought that traces the earliest branches of IE (sometimes called "Indo-Hittite") back to the Neolithic agricultural population of Anatolia. The population sampled in this study may well have derived from these Asia Minor agriculturalists, who were still in the process of acquiring the fairer phenotype that later came to be associated with the Indo-Europeans who adopted pastoral nomadism and spread across much of Central Asia during the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The combination of sparse populations and successive violent conquests that defined the history of the steppe region would have created more opportunities than usual for the rapid radiation of genes affecting physically obvious traits like pigmentation. The fair traits apparently so common among the Tocharians in Xinjiang and their kinsmen in the Altai region probably arose as quickly as they were swamped by the later Turkic-Mongolian-Tungus migrations.

Just for clarification, exactly how dark does this study suggest these early Kurgan people were? Are we talking about something as exotic as the Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers that caused such a stir earlier this year? Or simply olive-tan like the modern Near Easterners?

Dr. Frost, central asians aren't some ancient wellspring from which all eurasian populations sprang, so it is erroneous to assume they had ancestral variants of skin color, eye color etc.

In fact central asians are some of the most highly admixed groups on planet earth, comparable only to latin america. The tatars themselves were mixes of european, south asian, and east asian populations. It was before in the beginning of the 000's that many researchers like Spencer Wells were looking at DNA from living central asians and concluding that europeans, east asians, south asians and other eurasians are descended from them, having gone separate ways. In fact, now we now that exactly the opposite happened.

More pertinent to the issue at hand in your post: During the eneolithic and bronze age (5000 – 4000 BC) central asia was populated very sparsely. The group that was being studied in this paper could not have been central asian because central asians didn't even exist yet. It is only later that migrations brought wheat farmers from the middle-east, pastoralists speaking indo-european from europe (of which the Tatlamakan desert dwellers were the earliest attested descendants), and finally and most gruesomely turkic-mongol warriors from east asia, who bequethed their languages to the people of turkey and central asia.

We are talking about a period before these migrations happened. When eurasian populations, still unadmixed, were living far away from each other.

''pet cats have also a large variety of eyes color: green blue yellow…
what's the explanation?''

My explanation for this is too simplistic . It would be natural variation . What I 'm trying to understand is how is the mechanism of mutations . We know that most mutations are random , but there is no Lamarckian mechanisms to create potential environmental adaptations then other processes may occur.
We know that evolution is based on trials, errors and successes . Combinations that are over time diminish the quantity, where the non-adapted types are eliminated by natural selection . But how mutations occur ?
I think the mutations are as errors of the initial design . Think of an architectural project that over time , during construction will undergoing a transformation of its initial design . Mutations are errors , such as autism , schizophrenia , flat feet , very tall people. The human being is a mutation , a bug in the initial design for primates , which in turn are also bugs of its predecessors . God is apathy , inertia….
But in a super reality (extreme rational thinking) there not ''errors'' or ''successes''.

Genetiker has no clue what he's talking about.

Anatolian, Indo-Iranian and Greek are far more important for reconstruction of PIE than Baltic, precisely because they were attested relatively close to the breakup of PIE, which originated on the steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Yes, Baltic remained more conservative in some respects than the other branches because of its location. So?

Paleolithic continuity theories are rubbish, both linguistically and genetically as we conclusively know now.

"Ethiopian manuscript paintings (source: A. Davey). Ethiopians have a self-image that is lighter-skinned than their actual selves"

Do you use Byzantine and Orthodox art to show that the people in Eastern Europe can "have a self-image that is darker-skinned than their actual selves" as well?

"It also appears that the changes to hair, eye, and skin color did not happen simultaneously. First came the diversification of eye color and then the diversification of hair color. Parallel to these changes, and extending over a longer time, was the whitening of skin color"

That may because the highest intensity of sexual selection is required for white skin. Or, white skin may have have spread originally, because it induced care and provisioning.

pet cats have also a large variety of eyes color: green blue yellow…
what's the explanation?

@PFrost

"It's not clear to me why you feel it's important that the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Western Europe were light-skinned."

It's not if they were. They must have been at one point. It's *when* the change occurred.

"they must have become light-skinned through a very different suite of genetic changes. They thus tell us nothing about the evolution of white skin among the ancestors of present-day Europeans."

or if it was Neanderthal admixture then maybe it tells us a lot.

.

@anon

"This is why the extremely rare northern europeans without the near eastern SLC24A5 allele are not any darker than those having it. The fact that these people have never been seen is of no consequence. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lacking."

If correct they will have been seen just not noticed as such.

.

"Light eyes and light skin and light hair go together. Modern people with light eyes also have the lightest skin and lightest hair. This fact is clearly undeniable evidence that the first people with light eyes also had light skin. Haven't you seen the statistics on this? They even go back to the 18 and 1900s, and come from places like Germany."

Hair, skin and eye colors do *tend* to follow patterns most of the time which as they are the result of varying levels of depigmentation is not too surprising as there may be *additive* effects.

Secondly there is an odd distribution: more blond and blue to the northeast, more red and green to the northwest. There is no explanation for this distribution from the current model

.

"Heck, northeast asians have light skin too, and they don't even have the light eyes and hair yet."

Quite. They don't have light hair and eyes. So why do Europeans?

.

"When the farmers moved in, they brought their own middle eastern light skin genes, but they just coincidentally drifted to 100% frequency. They have virtually no effect on skin coloration in people already carrying the mesolithic european skin lightening genes."

Iodine – among other things.

.

Even if La Brana was brown it still asks as many questions as answers.

Actually, we can also correlate the many different instinctive behaviors (brain hardwiring) of dogs of different breed, with the many different coat colors (melanocytes patterns derived from neural crest) and shape of dogs breeds (also mostly neural crest for the face).
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but at least it's consistent with the hypothesis that when brain functions coding for behaviors are modified, visible developmental features coming from neural crest derivatives, in particular melanocyte migration, are also modified.
So that perhaps it means that it is difficult to touch one without touching the other.

I have the example of my two dogs, one has a retriever behavior, the other a herding behavior. The farm dog actually bites the other dog to the leg like he was regrouping a sheep. The retriever is black and the farm boy is white, but I doubt that the humans who bred the dogs for their specific behaviors cared much for the coat color. To me, it came as a side effect of the behavior selection.

Neoteny means that other characters, beside those immediately visible, may display youthful characteristics.
It would be interesting to discuss the following points for white skin/neotenic versus dark/non-neotenic, in a postglacial cool climate situation.

1) vitamin D availability from a white skin mother to her developing fetus.
2)How long can they each breast feed. One of my uncle (blond blue eyed) was breast fed until he was ten.
3)Age of first menarche, menopause, Andropause and general longevity of the types.
4)If the cerebral development of the neotenic fetus/infant is prolonged, that means profound differences in cognitive features vs non-neotenic.
5)Also, the retina is basically a outgrowth of the brain while the melanocytes and part of the facial bone structure are produced from neural crest, i.e., you touch them, you touch the development of the brain and vice versa.

Do not stop to think whether European rivers of Central Europe were major vectors of population dispersion across the continent as well as by mutations?
Luxembourg appears to be close to the Rhine as far as I know.
Another hypothesis could be the spread of genes by atlantica and Baltic coast , which together result in , almost pinkish , very clear Celtic fair skin that is present from the north of Portugal ( in more moderate levels ) to Estonia . These Celtic sea genes can be , at least , the phenotype '' '' northern European origin of light skin . If the distribution of light-skinned Celtic took the west – European coasts ( France, the Netherlands , northern Spain ) , why not through England itself ? England was connected to the mainland at that time . This type of skin , typically European , might have initially originated in northern Spain and spread throughout Western Europe and the Baltic coast .
Or , selection of mutations that result in clear skin , occur in parallel in different regions of the continent or elsewhere . I have the impression that the Slavs are more able to bake your skin to the sun than the British .
Evolutionary psychology and psychogenetic seem from many very elaborate hypotheses to explain what seems to me not to be too complex to understand . People started to select the clear skin among other attractions, specifically because they were beautiful (they are cute ) . Sexual attraction . Especially it. Relates to neoteny I do not know as well , but even the most manly man , falls in love when you see a puppy or a baby .
We are externalizing a series of complex assumptions that are based on logical selection patterns . However , we forget that human beings are quintessentially illogical.
Of course , our brain understands that the most beautiful people tend to be more healthy, intelligent ( not enough already be pretty) and good in bed. What is not necessarily true. We are animals and animals are anthropomorphically illogical beings .
In the past , the human being was extremely shortsighted , like other animals , the selection process is to give immediate survival because there was no medicine, modern life etc. .

Alright, I just looked back over everything barakobama has been saying. So, now I am pretty convinced. You can't really argue with that kind of proof.

There are some unknown causes to Europeans having light skin and La Brana-1 and Loschbour had them. Most northern europeans today also have them. This is why the extremely rare northern europeans without the near eastern SLC24A5 allele are not any darker than those having it. The fact that these people have never been seen is of no consequence. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lacking.

Light eyes and light skin and light hair go together. Modern people with light eyes also have the lightest skin and lightest hair. This fact is clearly undeniable evidence that the first people with light eyes also had light skin. Haven't you seen the statistics on this? They even go back to the 18 and 1900s, and come from places like Germany.

Heck, northeast asians have light skin too, and they don't even have the light eyes and hair yet. So clearly the skin comes first, then the hair and eyes. So if early european hunter gatherers had light eyes, then it is clear that they also had the difficult to detect alleles for light skin.

When the farmers moved in, they brought their own middle eastern light skin genes, but they just coincidentally drifted to 100% frequency. They have virtually no effect on skin coloration in people already carrying the mesolithic european skin lightening genes.

The fact that these genes haven't been discovered yet is just more proof that they exist. How else can you explain the fact that La Brana-1 and Loschbour might have probably had them?

Wake up people! Do you not even read the previous posts?! Facts are facts and proof is proof! We don't have a time machine, so how could anyone really know?! Please argue with me!

"Peter what I have been saying is there are some UNKNOWN causes to Europeans have light skin and La Brana-1 and Loschbour had them."

I meant may have had them.

Peter what I have been saying is there are some UNKNOWN causes to Europeans have light skin and La Brana-1 and Loschbour had them. I have given you prove more than a gazillion times that these mutations are near eastern not European. You and others center these mutations around Europeans and ignore their equal presence in near easterns(SLC45A2-).

To me La Brana-1 and Loschbour's skin color is unknown. Because I don't believe every mutation that causes light skin in Europe has been discovered. I see it as more likely they had dark skin, but I have no idea what shade it would be. I would guess it was a deep shade of brown like in south Asians and native Americans. There are so many possibilities though and that is why I think it is unknown what skin color they had and don't like to make assumptions which could be incorrect. I really dis agree with this thread which says a little less brown, I think you assume the science of skin color is totally figured out. I am sure the few Europeans without the near eastern mutation in gene SLC24A5 are not any darker skinned than other people in their population.

I have listed the reasons many times why dark skin in Mesolithic (west)Europeans is not constant with many statics in modern people.

I think the way to come closest to figuring out the pigmentation history of Europe and how La brana-1, Loschbour, and Stuttgart are connected is to take all the info you can from those old anthropologist from the 1800's and early 1900's. Also serious modern studies on pigmentation and the genes would be even better. I have noticed that dark skin is not very uncommon in north-west Europeans and many can tan very well. I can name quite a few who were born literally with brown skin(most though have dark brown eyes). I wonder if they are missing some of the near eastern light skin mutations which could have become dominate through natural selection. Maybe there are many random brown skinned people in north Europe because of the higher amount of Mesolithic ancestry. But what is strange is that there are probably more brown skinned people in south Europe.

We must be talking about a different KITLG mutations because the maps I saw showed they are 100% in Papuans. You should not assume that ever gene connected with skin color has been discovered.

Davidski,

It would not be surprising to see influences from Uralic languages in parts of the Baltic region given the high frequencies of N there. That doesn't change the well-known fact that Baltic languages are closer to the original Aryan languages than Slavic languages. The Wikipedia article on Lithuanian states that

"The Lithuanian language is often said to be the most conservative living Indo-European language, retaining many features of Proto-Indo-European now lost in other Indo-European languages."

This page says that

"Lithuanian… is the most archaic among all the Indo-European languages spoken today, and as a result it is very useful, indeed, indispensable in the study of Indo-European linguistics."

And this page says that

"Lithuanian has been an especially important language for scholars seeking to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European tongue because Lithuanian appears to be strikingly conservative in its grammar and its acquisition of vocabulary. The language has changed remarkably little in perhaps 7,000 years. (Some scholars point out–only half in joke–that a Lithuanian peasant can often understand simple phrases in Sanskrit.) For whatever mysterious reason, this language preserves some very old features which have disappeared from practically all the other languages of the Indo-European language family."

The fact that there's no link between R1b and the Kurgan cultures tells us nothing about what language R1b men spoke, or whether the Kurgan hypothesis is correct.

You say that there's no evidence that Western European hunter-gatherers spoke Aryan languages. What you don't seem to get is that there's no direct evidence for what language any prehistoric people spoke, anywhere on earth, and there never will be any. The languages spoken by prehistoric peoples can only be determined by inference, and inference tells us that R1b men spoke centum Aryan languages just as certainly as it tells us that R1a men spoke satem Aryan languages.

It's not the high level of the Nordic component in the globe13 analysis that indicates that La Braña 1 was predominantly Aryan, it's the high level of Indianid component in the globe4 analysis, and the high level of the Aryan Nordic component in the MDLP World-22 analysis. The high level of the Indianid component tells us that La Braña 1 had DNA in common with Amerindians, and we know that the Caucasoid admixture in Amerindians is from Y Q proto-Aryan males. The Aryan Nordic component which is modal for La Braña 1 was also modal for Mal'ta 1 and Afontova Gora 2, both of which had Aryan or proto-Aryan Y chromosomes. The map for the Aryan Nordic component shows that it goes down into India, so we know that it was carried by Aryans. And note that the Aryan Nordic component peaks in Latvians and Lithuanians, which is consistent with the unique status of the Baltic languages as being the most conservative.

You again mention the Russian genomes. You failed to comprehend that those genomes cannot disprove the presence of Aryan languages elsewhere in Europe at the same, or at earlier times.

If we are just throwing out ideas, then how about pale skin and hair were selected because it allowed people to very quickly check themselves and each other for ectoparasites?

In the warmer regions, people can just leisurely check themselves any time of the day, or anytime they feel something. In northern regions, people wear lots of clothing where bugs can hide, and they have to wear those clothes all day for much of the year. Only briefly could they be removed in the coldest winter months.

The ability to see fleas and ticks quickly and in very low light (such as inside around a fire) might be extremely advantageous.

This ability would be especially useful when people began keeping domesticated animals (and opportunistic rodents) in and near their homes. The farmers and herders moving into the coldest regions would benefit most from light skin and hair for this reason. If multiple waves of deadly rat/flea/tick transmitted pathogens swept through an area, then selection would be rapid.

The hunter gatherers wouldn't have benefitted from light features as much, because they didn't store grain or live with domestic animals besides dogs. The fact that domestic animals also have strange pigmentation might be via a similar mechanism.

When the need to hide is removed, evolution favors alternative coloration. Large changes in pigmentation on a single animal (such as black and white spots on cows or goats) or variable coloration within sibling groups prevents the parasites from adapting, while allowing them to be easily seen by birds, or people.

You know, on my way to work I came to idea being an addendum to the "sexual selection" theory of white skin and blue eyes appearance.

In warmer areas 12 year old child can essentially live partially on its own. 14 year old child can go and gather food.

On the other hand, in colder areas 14 year-old boy has dim chances of succeeding in hunting.

Therefore, it would seem to be advantageous for young boys to appear "young", so they a) evoke maternal/paternal feelings form olders b) do not seem like a threat to older men c) therefore, have larger chances to survive a prolonged period of dependency on others for providing food.

Does that make sense? I mean in context that paler skin and hair is often associated with children.

You didn't watch the video I linked to, did you?

The Baltic region has non-Indo-European substrate influences (potentially linked to the high frequency of N1c there), and the only part of the world where they are lacking is the forest steppe of what is now Russia (where R1a peaks at over 70%).

Moreover, at the moment there's nothing tying R1b to the Kurgan cultures. It might have initially been a marker of related ANE-derived groups like the Bell Beakers, Tyrrhenian language speakers, Hurrians and/or Kura-Araxes people, before being Indo-Europeanized in Central Europe during the Bronze Age. We'll see.

And there's certainly no evidence that the hunter-gatherers of Western Europe spoke anything close to Indo-European. You just pulled that out of the proverbial, because for some odd reason you think that anyone with a high level of the "North European" component must be an Indo-European.

Unfortunately, I've got a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more champagne humor like this from you over the coming months, but not for much longer than that, because those ancient genomes from Russia are on the way.

Davidski,

I never said anything about Loschbour.

You forgot to mention that the Kurgan people had blue eyes. La Braña 1 also had blue eyes, and the Y Q proto-Aryan ancestors of Amerindians carried the blue eyes allele of rs12913832 too.

You assume that blond hair and fair skin were universal traits among Aryans, and that they were universal going all the way back to 8,000 years ago. You have no grounds for such an assumption. The Mal'ta genome shows that proto-Aryans originally had none of these traits.

Your insistence that only R1a men spoke Aryan languages is a load of Slavocentric nonsense. It's as clear as can be that R1b men spoke centum languages and that R1a men spoke satem languages.

It was only the Mediterranean agriculturalists that didn't speak Aryan languages. The Aryan Nordic hunter-gatherers that were there first and whom they partially displaced did speak them. What the linguists have seen as substrates is in fact just the influence of the languages of the Mediterranean immigrants on those of the Nordic natives. The languages of the northeast show the least influence from the Mediterranean languages because the northeast was the last place to receive Mediterranean immigration, and it received the least of it. The Baltic languages, and not the Slavic languages, remain the closest to the original Aryan languages, because the Baltic areas received even less Mediterranean immigration than the Slavic areas, and received it later.

The genomes of Copper Age Russians might prove that they were R1, but they will of course not prove that Copper Age Western Europeans weren't also R1.

The Y haplotype of La Braña 1 has no bearing on his autosomal DNA, and the degree to which that DNA is shared with modern Europeans.

Anonymous Nordic man is from the tropics, what? This is a joke right? Nordic stands for Denmark, Sweden, Norway. The language formed I think the iron age it is not a distinct race.

genetiker,

Thanks for the comedy relief, but if La Brana and Loschbour were so called Aryans, then why didn't they have the same markers for blond hair, fair skin and R1a as the Kurgan people from South Siberia?

Secondly, obviously there were no Indo-Europeans in Europe during the Neolithic, because Neolithic people didn't speak Indo-European languages, but they did leave traces of their non-Indo-European languages everywhere except the southern Russian steppe and forest steppe. See here at 28:45…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFZhWfL0ocY&list=PLAXoDomeFLX90fTHi0W8lYBtEoZHSBH2i&index=13

So the steppe theory is doing better than ever, and should be confirmed with the first Copper Age genome from Russia. La Brana was just a close Mesolithic cousin of the so called Aryans, who left very few direct descendants in Europe, unlike the so called Aryans.

The original home of Nordic man is in the Tropics:

http://i.imgur.com/PGzhdgF.jpg

" 'Beleza et al 2013 (skin color genetics in Cape Verde) leaves substantial unexplained variance. And East Asian skin color is unexplained.

It's not necessary for any difference to have "disappeared", but the alleles we know about may explain less than we think.'

Exactly for this reason I think Loschbour and La Brana-1 should be classified with unknown skin color. "

Beleza et al 2013 is an excellent paper analyzing the genetics of pigmentation in an admixed African/European population.

However, this study has several weaknesses, which arise for various reasons. Because of these weaknesses, the authors are very careful about the language they use, and about their conclusions.

Firstly, this is an association study using SNPs. This means that the genome was only sampled every 1000 basepairs on average. If the SNPs tested are not actually 100% correlated with the causitive allele, than the signal is weakened.

Secondly, this is a study using real people, with non-random ancestry proportions relative to each SNP. If this was a study on mice, then they would have selectively bred each suspected allele into the same reference strain for the analysis of pigmentation. With people, there is no way to do this. So all pigmentation alleles are initially linked to large blocks of other ancestry related SNPs. With large numbers, the relevant SNPs can be narrowed down (due to recombination events in different individuals) but the linked ancestry may take thousands of years to be broken up in each individual case. This accounts for most of the association of ancestry with pigmentation. The authors clearly note that at least half of the signal from 'generic ancestry' can be attributed to linkage to only the four genes with the most major impact. And as I mentioned, they were VERY careful in their wording. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that 90% of the ancestry component is from this.

Thirdly, pigmentation is strongly effected by the environment. As an example, I still have a noticeable light band around my wrist from a watch I haven't worn in 15 years. When I was a beach lifeguard as a teenager, I worked with an identical twin. She was quite dark, while her sister who worked at a bank was much paler. Tanning effects are impossible to control for in association studies, and that weakens the significance of results.

I could continue with this, but I don't have the time right now. I think it would be much more reasonable for any skeptics of the genetics of pigmentation to sit down and read some scientific reviews. And if you do not understand the shortcomings of any particular analysis, look it up or ask someone.

Sure, science is never 100%. And if evidence exists to the contrary, then I'm right with you. But choosing to ignore evidence because it just 'seems wrong' to you is a sign of delusion.

I never said anything about F.

I consider what others say and look at it myself and sometimes agree. How do you explain such a basal form of Y DNA F in Europe? People used to say that about Y DNA C-V20 and now we know it is pre-Neolithic.

Stop regurgitating Maciamo's crap and learn to think for yourself.

"Aryans were the Y R1 and mt U inhabitants of Upper Paleolithic Europe.

They spoke languages ancestral to the Aryan (Indo-European) languages that we know today.

And they had their own distinctive set of religious beliefs."

That's just a hypothesis. Your generalizing mtDNA U and RO has been found in Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Y DNA I, C-V20, and F-96 were likely the main haplogroups of Mesolithic Europeans. R1a I think likely existed in far eastern Europe and central Asia(with a related MA-1 like people).

Aryans were the Y R1 and mt U inhabitants of Upper Paleolithic Europe.

They spoke languages ancestral to the Aryan (Indo-European) languages that we know today.

And they had their own distinctive set of religious beliefs.

Sorry, I mispelled Aryan.

My analyses of the La Braña 1 genome indicate that La Braña 1 was autosomally predominantly Aryan

How do you define "Ayran?"

I don't use PC terminology or David Reich's ridiculous neologisms.

No apologies.

Mammoth steppe is a synonym for steppe-tundra. During the LGM, from 25 to 15 ka, the north was steppe-tundra and the south was forest steppe.

See this page.

It says that

"Ice sheets covered northern Europe and Scandinavia. Most of the rest of northern Europe resembled semi-desert, with a mixture of tundra and grassland elements (steppe-tundra). In southern Europe, vegetation resembled a semi-desert steppe, with scattered pockets of trees in moist areas."

For other time periods, see this page. On the maps there you'll see "dry steppe" instead of "forest steppe".

Which KITLG mutation was La Brana-1 missing? How did you gene get his raw data?

Genetiker your admixtures are interesting but why do you give labels like Aryan? What is Aryan no one really knows. The Amerdian in La Brana-1 may really be ANE ancestry and his Meditreaen farmer ancestry.

@genetiker

"And you can't cordon off the northeast from the rest of Europe. For most of the Upper Paleolithic, the whole of Europe was steppe, not just the northeast."

Wasn't it that most of Europe was part of the mammoth steppe with a southern forest zone?

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/6525/7dt9.png

(although the forest zone doesn't include Luxembourg the two ecozones might have had different selection pressures on phenotype i guess.)

"The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Spain and Luxembourg thus seem to have belonged to a population that was peripheral to the evolution of white skin and multi-hued hair and eyes."

Interesting thought.

.

@anon

very interesting.

I think some of Razib Khan's posts mentioned KITLG mostly effecting hair color but I may have misremembered it.

hair color site:scienceblogs.com/gnxp

You're confused Peter. The KITLG SNP for which Veddoids and their Caucasoid and Mongoloid descendants have the derived allele is rs642742. That SNP is missing in the La Braña 1 genome. It was another KITLG SNP, rs12821256, that was found to have the ancestral allele.

And you can't cordon off the northeast from the rest of Europe. For most of the Upper Paleolithic, the whole of Europe was steppe, not just the northeast.

My analyses of the La Braña 1 genome indicate that La Braña 1 was autosomally predominantly Aryan, and that the Kurgan hypothesis is therefore false.

Peter – The most surprising—though least commented on—finding is that this Mesolithic hunter-gatherer had the ancestral allele for KITLG.
"barakobama" – I have heard that the light skin mutation in gene KITLG is most popular in literally black or dark brown skinned Papuans.
Yes the derived allele is also at fixture for Oceanians and almost certainly in Australian Aborigines.

See – http://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult.php?img=2685456_pgen.1000500.g004&req=4 for a figure showing the derived KITLG allele at 100%, fixture, in Papuans (as in Europeans)while slightly lower frequencies in East Asians.

A lot seems to have been made of Europeans and East Asians sharing the derived alleles… but if southern South Asians and Papuans who are essentially as dark as West Africans also share the derived allele, how much can it explain?

Papuans and Australian Aboriginal people (and other isolated "black" peoples like the Andamanese) seem like a really good check for a lot of pigmentation genetics. They participate in most of the allele sweeps that set all Eurasians apart from Africans and most of the allele sweeps that set East Asians apart from Africans (and Europeans to a lesser extent), yet have as dark skin as Africans.

I red an interesting article on pigmentation genetics this week -http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113066376/rock-pigeon-pigmentation-human-medical-research-020714/

"A team of American researchers has discovered mutations in three genes that determine feather color in domestic rock pigeons, according to a new study in Current Biology. The same genes direct the pigmentation of human skin – meaning the findings may have implications for medical research. …

The study team learned that coding and regulatory distinctions in the interactions among the genes Tyrp1, Sox10 and Slc45a2 affect multiple color phenotypes, or appearances, in pigeons. In one instance, scientists learned that a “reddish� mutation in Tyrp1 arose just once and was spread all through the species by selective mating. Different forms of Tyrp1 make pigeons blue-gray, red or brown.

Variations of Sox10 make pigeons red, regardless of what form Tyrp1 takes, the researchers found. Also, Slc45a2 makes the pigeons’ colors either very strong or look washed out."

The paper can be seen here http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)00021-9#ResultsandDiscussion

In the population of pigeons, the Tyrp1 variants look to be of similar effect in lightening as the SLC45a2 variants, but biased towards reducing black rather than red pigment.

Sox10 is an interesting gene, because it isn't selected for general human pigment variation and mutations seem to result ina condition called Waardenburg Syndrome that is responsible for most blue eyed, dark skinned people that presently exist on earth.

Note – although it is hard to judge, when the very striking dark skin, light blue eyes phenotype does occur, it seems it isn't actually because of "European blue eyes" alleles combining with dark skin alleles (as we might naively suggest), just a mutation in Sox10, leading to Waardenburg Syndrome.

http://tinyurl.com/pvrszfs for some people with Waardenburg Syndrome, showing how it can result in the dark skin, light eyes combination (many show characteristic some characteristic facial dysmorphology as well, perhaps because this gene has a wide role in more processes than most of the pigment genes we know to vary in humans).

The pic is down.

There is no such thing as white(light) skin genes. There are genes associated with light skin in Europeans. The three main ones are JUST AS POPULAR IN NEAR EASTERNS AS IN EUROPEANS except for the one in gene SLC45A2 which is still around 50% in near easterns.

There are other factors to creating light skin in Europe. How do you explain skin color difference between northern and southern Europeans and how do you explain skin color differences between southern Europeans and near easterns if they all have these genes?

I have heard that the light skin mutation in gene KITLG is most popular in literally black or dark brown skinned Papuans. People confuse west Eurasian with European and east Eurasian with east Asian. European is not a race it gets so annoying when people assume it is. Europeans and east Asians having common ancestors 30,000 years ago, what? Isn't MA-1 and multiple mtDNA U samples from Europe that are over 30,000 years old, and 40,000 year old mtDNA B sample in China good enough evidence to prove their common ancestors lived much longer ago?

Another bad assumption you make Peter is that these mutations can perfectly predict skin color. We don't know who was darker skinned La Brana-1 or Loschbour. You should say I think one was darker than the other.

All we know is that both la Brana-1 and Loschbour probably had black hair and light eyes. The skin color is unknown. A good guess would be dark but there is also a good chance no one has discovered the real cause for European light skin.

When someone finds a light haired Mesolithic Russian missing the so called European light skin genes, I will say I told you so.

Peter – The most surprising—though least commented on—finding is that this Mesolithic hunter-gatherer had the ancestral allele for KITLG.

Note that the derived allele is also at fixture for Oceanians and almost certainly in Australian Aborigines.

See – http://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult.php?img=2685456_pgen.1000500.g004&req=4 for a figure showing the derived KITLG allele at 100%, fixture, in Papuans (as in Europeans)while slightly lower frequencies in East Asians.

A lot seems to have been made of Europeans and East Asians sharing the derived alleles… but if southern South Asians and Papuans who are essentially as dark as West Africans also share the derived allele, how much can it explain?

Papuans and Australian Aboriginal people (and other isolated "black" peoples like the Andamanese) seem like a really good check for a lot of pigmentation genetics. They participate in most of the allele sweeps that set all Eurasians apart from Africans and most of the allele sweeps that set East Asians apart from Africans (and Europeans to a lesser extent), yet have as dark skin as Africans.

I found this an interesting article on pigmentation genetics -http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113066376/rock-pigeon-pigmentation-human-medical-research-020714/

"A team of American researchers has discovered mutations in three genes that determine feather color in domestic rock pigeons, according to a new study in Current Biology. The same genes direct the pigmentation of human skin – meaning the findings may have implications for medical research. …

The study team learned that coding and regulatory distinctions in the interactions among the genes Tyrp1, Sox10 and Slc45a2 affect multiple color phenotypes, or appearances, in pigeons. In one instance, scientists learned that a “reddish� mutation in Tyrp1 arose just once and was spread all through the species by selective mating. Different forms of Tyrp1 make pigeons blue-gray, red or brown.

Variations of Sox10 make pigeons red, regardless of what form Tyrp1 takes, the researchers found. Also, Slc45a2 makes the pigeons’ colors either very strong or look washed out."

The paper can be seen here http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)00021-9#ResultsandDiscussion

In the population of pigeons, the Tyrp1 look to be of similar effect in lightening as the SLC45a2 variants, but biased towards reducing black rather than red pigment.

Sox10 is an interesting gene, because it isn't selected for general human pigment variation and mutations seem to result ina condition called Waardenburg Syndrome that is responsible for most blue eyed, dark skinned people that presently exist on earth.

Note – although it is hard to judge, when the very striking dark skin, light blue eyes phenotype does occur, it seems it isn't actually because of "European blue eyes" alleles combining with dark skin alleles (as we might naively suggest), just a mutation in Sox10, leading to Waardenburg Syndrome.

http://tinyurl.com/pvrszfs for some people with Waardenburg Syndrome, showing how it can result in the dark skin, light eyes combination (many show characteristic some characteristic facial dysmorphology as well, perhaps because this gene has a wide role in more processes than most of the pigment genes we know to vary in humans).

Modern correlations are just that, correlations in modern people. In 5000 years it will probably be difficult for most people to believe that eye color was ever strongly correlated with skin or hair color. Things change.

Can you please tell me the study you keep mentioning about European/African populations and pigmentation. I am willing to belive they were dark skinned but for many reasons I see it as impossible for Mesolithic Europeans to be dark skinned and have a high amount of blue eyes.

I am getting very pissed that no one seems to listen. The only one of those three (near eastern!!!)mutations most associated with European light skin are more popular in Europe than the near east. Why are near easterns so brown skinned if these mutations cause pale skin in Europeans? Obviously there are other reasons why Europeans have such light skin(especially the most Mesolithic descended ones). Those mutations definitely don't explain the even lighter skin in northern Europe.

Today in Europe hair color is directly associated with eye color. If you have light blonde hair there is an under 5% chance you will have brown eyes. Who had light eyes the farmers or hunters? Modern day Sardinians are the most Neolithic descended people in Europe and happen to also be the darkest haired and eyed Europeans.

Why is the distribution of Mesolithic ancestry so similar to the distribution of light hair-skin-eyes? Why is light skin's distribution so connected with the distribution of light hair-eyes? How do you explain these things? You cant.

Tell me how a people 8,000 years ago who had olive skin, over 90% brown eyes-dark hair mixing with a dark skinned, dark haired, blue eyes people can have descendants just a few thousand years later with snow white skin, majority blonde hair, and vast majority light eyes? Do you see how crazy that sounds?

I am sick of giving you stubborn people the same old argument. You are inlove with those three mutations. You ignore all the evidence in modern people of why dark skin in Mesolithic Europe makes no sense.

I would bet you my life that genomes from Mesolithic east Europe will have plenty of people with light hair and if a redhead is found it will be prove they had light skin.

@barakobama

Studies on EYE color in European /African admixed populations have shown NO correlation with either overall genetic ancestry or skin color (when the known alleles causing the color changes are excluded from the analysis).

The entire basis of your argument stems from the fact there are not existant populations with light eyes and dark skin (besides those with recent admixture). Therefore, you suggest that these West Eurasian hunter gatherers must have had light skin. This is despite the fact that they do not have the alleles with the strongest signals for light skin, as revealed in numerous studies.

Clearly, there is evidence that many additional loci have small additive effects on this trait, and these additional alleles are present in the genomes of modern light-skinned Europeans. However, there is absolutely no evidence that these missing loci originated in the Mesolithic European hunter gatherers, or are even present in the ancient genomes under discussion.

In fact, that those alleles with the largest individual effects are not found in these ancient people, yet are nearly fixed in the modern populations with the most ancestry from them, supports the notion that there was actually little selection for light skin color in the populations leading to these people. If they were already 70% as lightened as current northern Europeans, it is hard to imagine the cause of such an intense selective sweep. If these additional loci can not even be slightly detected (individually) in studies using ~1000 African/European admixed individuals with nearly a million SNPs, then selection on the phenotype must be very difficult.

Suppose 10 additional loci could collectively provide 70% of the variance, yet their changes are imperceptible individually and not highly linked. Selection for them must be through a different mechanism than observable skin color.

Another option is just a lack of selection for dark skin. This could allow hundreds of different mutations to slowly accumulate in the population; any 10 of these more rare variants in combination giving lighter skin. But in that case, by simple statistics, we would certainly find many admixed individuals today with all of the African variants of 'known pigmentation alleles' but with light skin. These people do not show up in the studies.

You should be able to compare this situation with other highly heritable traits such as height. Several association studies using SNPs failed to find highly significant associations with height. Later studies with higher resolution showed that ~45% of variability could be associated with SNPs. With whole genome sequencing, the significance will surely increase as the actual alleles causing the differences are discovered.

The major difference here is that you do not have large numbers of 'pure' super tall populations mixing with unrelated 'pure' super short populations. The alleles are likely very ancient, and the linkage between even nearby SNPs has been broken down. So, unless you hit upon the actual SNP causing the phenotypic change, you see no significance in GWAS.

Also, perhaps there are examples I am unaware of, but I have yet to see a single African/European admixed individual with all the known African pigmentation alleles, but with highly freckled skin. That might be interesting.

So. I think there is no reasonable reason to believe that the early European hunter gatherers had light skin. This is similar to some kind of argument saying that the world appeared yesterday, but filled with all sorts of fake signs of the past in our brains and physical surroundings. There is no way to prove that isn't the case, but that isn't science.

Perhaps you should start a church of skin pigmentation and say that skin color is based upon your faith in the church. Maybe that's true.

Female selection is not the answer for everything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am getting sick of hearing about it. Women are more brown eyed and green eyed than men and from what I read hair color percentages are pretty even. People assume light hair and eyes are feminine traits probably because of our culture. I doubt the same stero types will be shown in all ancient writers. From what I have read from ancient Romans and Greeks where eye and hair color is mentioned they never associated any with males or females it was just different hair and eye color. A Lithuanian told me in his country the style is for women to dye their hair black and tan their skin. That's kind of the opposite from America but what it shows is paleness is not always associated with women.

Are pale women like 1,000 times more attractive? Why would over 1,000's of years European men keep overwhelmingly pick fairest women? It seems unlikely to me that selection of pale women is the answer.

Peter you keep mentioning baby like faces in Europeans what do you mean? I have never noticed that. Its okay to think of other possibilities besides female selection. You also have to consider who certain Europeans descend from. Whatever pigmentation changes occurred in pre Neolithic Europe should have little effect on southern Europeans. You should definitely not except Greeks or Sardinians to have these baby faces.

The thousand years or more of primogeniture and monogamy in Europe presumably also led to sexual selection of females with the first born having the pick of the brides. I remember reading about how European skulls have gotten more neotenous over the course of the medieval period. When the Pope compared the Angles to Angels perhaps that was just in comparison to others who where still relatively ugly at the time so Angles would not look the special to us today. Selection for female traits would create a more domesticated population primed for modernity.

Well, that's the problem with Frost's theory, isn't it?

Three points that contradict each other:

1) earliest farmers migrating to europe from near-east had european version of SLC24A5.

2)These farmers were later partly replaced by people more similar to mesolithic europeans hunter-gatherers, who according to the Lazaridis paper, had the ancestral version of the SLC24A5 gene. Both Loschbour, and La Brana. Separated by about 1,000 years and from different parts of europe, north Spain and Netherlands.

3) There is no evidence that modern near-easterners are descended from back-migrants from Europe.

So either separate light-skin mutations happened in the tundra steppe and the near-east, or the mutations is significantly older than 19,000 years.

@barak
"Laz 2013 proved most Europeans have mainly near eastern ancestry."

He didn't show that at all.

WHG + c. 90% of ANE + c. 50% of EEF is "European."

Personally i wouldn't call it European yet but Hyperborean (or some other suitable word for the crescent of land from Europe to Siberia that made up the mammoth steppe.)

Europeans are more like what's left of the Hyperboreans.

"I disagree with the evidence that most of the European gene pool comes from Middle Eastern farmers. In my opinion, this evidence is flawed because it rests on the assumption that the haplogroups in question are selectively neutral. They aren't, particularly in the case of haplogroup U. We also have good archaeological evidence for cultural and biological continuity in many régions of Europe, particularly those where the transition to farming took place in proto-historic times.
"

Peter, the fact is that the vast majority of European mtDNA no matter where in Europe is of near eastern origin. Sami and other ethnic groups may be acceptations because of founder effects(mtDNA V is probably not native to Europe). There were many subclades of mtDNA haplogroups which were found to be exclusively European so people assumed they had been there since like the Upper Palaeolithic because of age estimates. Now we know though that all of those haplgroups came to Europe from the near east with farming. H1 and H3 seem super European but they are not.

We now that mtDNA U5 and U2 have been in Europe for over 30,000 years and also U4 has probably been in Europe since the Upper Palaeolithic. Combined these haplogroups reach at average 15% or so in Europe.

Laz 2013 proved most Europeans have mainly near eastern ancestry. The only places you may find mainly Mesolithic ancestry are in north-eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Who knows hunter gatherer ancestry may be higher that WHG-EEF-ANE thing estimates. Plus there is some WHG in EEF.

Peter, those three mutations are not the only things whiting European skin plus they are near eastern not European. That's why I don't trust the age estimates. Stuttgart is good evidence those age estimates still may be young. I bet genomes from the near east dating back even 15,000 years ago will have rs1426654 A/A(in gene SLC24A5) and maybe the others.

So we know light eyes were probably pretty popular in Mesolithic (west)Europe but why are they still popular today in hybrid European-near eastern-ANE people. Swedish-Norwegian-Finnish have over 85% light eyes and ~72% blue eyed yet Swedish-Norwegian score ~42% WHG, ~40% EEF, and ~16% ANE. Finnish score ~47% WHG, ~33-34% EEF, and ~18-19% ANE. Both have a very high amount of Stuttgart related ancestry but then why are they dominated by hunter gatherer light eyes? Irish are even a better example they have around the same eye color as Scandinavians but have much more EEF than WHG.

Why is rs1426554 A/A dominate in Europe today if so many have high amounts of Mesolithic ancestry? Why is rs16891982 G/G or C/G(in gene SLC45A2) so dominate in Europe today and less popular than the near east which is where it probably originated and spread from. Is selection the reason for all of this. Did it happen separately across Europe?

Almost every week now I've regretted the tone I took with Chris Crawford back when he was a regular here. It used to be you could read comments by impressive people who, even if they disagreed with the post were not dogmatists who thought they knew it all. Come back Chris.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI2cNs6m4cQ

wow, without the fur you can really see the muscle on them

conan the chimp

@barak
"Skin color in chimps is probably almost completely unrelated to skin color in humans. There could be a number of reasons why many have pale pinkish skin under their fur."

There's no need for pigmentation under fur. White skin isn't a pigment it's a lack of pigment.

.

"According to SNPedia rs12203592 T/T(in IRF4 gene) is very rare in CEU(Utah white Americans)"

If the SLC genes were an improvement over the early depigmentation method (if it existed) then you might expect the frequencies of IRF4 and MC1R to have gone down.

" If Neanderthal admixture contributed to de-pigmentation in modern Eurasians, the process must have begun at least as early as the entry of Cro-Magnons into Europe, and possibly as early as the first modern forays into the Mideast and Central Asia."

I was wondering if the admixture might be that early but different aspects of it were differently selected for or against over time.

For example, straight hair and depigmentation alleles from early on but the depigmentation alleles mostly selected against *until* they reached further north.

I doubt the Neanderthal thing I think they were talking about east Asians.

I have read Peter many times associating all forms of paleness in Europeans with women. He has made the point many times those features became popular because of sexual selection towards women.

Every statistic I have seen comparing hair and eye color between men and women isn't constant.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2007/07/how-swarthy-are-the-sami/

http://www.haar-und-psychologie.de/haarfarben/hair-colors-eye-colors-germany.html

There was another study on Icelanders and Ducth. Every single one(even the one form the 1930's) showed that women have a higher percentage of brown eyes, men have a higher percentage of blue eyes, and women a higher percentage of green eyes. It seems men may also have a higher percentage of blonde hair than women. I think many Americans assume more women have natural blonde hair because so many dye their hair blonde. Hair color statistics should be taken at a young age because hair color gets older with age, it may effect one gender more than the other.

There's a new study in "Nature" by Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey suggesting that "Neandertals were a source of adaptive variation for loci involved in skin phenotypes" in Eurasian populations.

Not sure what genes they're referring to. But such an admixture event would obviously antedate the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers by tens of thousands of years. If Neanderthal admixture contributed to de-pigmentation in modern Eurasians, the process must have begun at least as early as the entry of Cro-Magnons into Europe, and possibly as early as the first modern forays into the Mideast and Central Asia.

Skin color in chimps is probably almost completely unrelated to skin color in humans. There could be a number of reasons why many have pale pinkish skin under their fur.

I know that Loschbour had rs12203592 T/T(in IRF4 gene) and I have heard La Brana-1 did to. I also know the mutation is associated with sensitivity to the sun, freckles, and brown hair. I have no idea how it works and if it really makes a big effect on pigmentation. Since Loschbour and La Brana-1 were missing both SLC(TYR is at highest 50% in Europe and near east) means mutations in IFR4 doesn't effect the same way.

In the 8-plex eye color predictor if some one has rs12913832 G/G(in gene OCA2/HERC2) and rs12203592 T/T(in IRF4 gene) they have blue eyes. If someone has those two plus rs16891982 they are green eyed. Loschbour fits as blue and green eyed.

According to SNPedia rs12203592 T/T(in IRF4 gene) is very rare in CEU(Utah white Americans) combined with C/T it is maybe around 30%. I think their CEU are samples from white Utah Americans so probably mainly north-west European. Both T/T and C/T existed in Tuscans Italians, Mexicans, and African Americans from south-west USA. Mexicans(get it from Spain) and African Americans(get it from Britain) probably get it originally from Europe.

You do have to admire Frost, he keeps pushing his theories even though the recent evidence makes them a lot more unlikely than other theories.

Welp, we'll see with more data.

@barak
"The real cause(or all the causes) to creating European light skin(especially in the most Mesolithic descended region which is northern European) has(or have) not been discovered."

I think they likely have been discovered but they won't be noticeable except in rare individuals.

If MC1R or IRF4 have a depigmentation effect but everyone who's been studied *also* had the other skin lightening alleles then how would you know they had that depigmentation effect?

(Actually you probably would because people like that almost certainly have disproportionate skin problems in places like Australia.)

That those genes have a depigmentation effect would only be obvious in individuals who have them but not the SLC ones i.e. they'll be just as white without them – or more likely **whiter** like the almost translucent Scots you see if you've ever spent time in a Scottish regiment.

.

(obviously whatever the cause of the initial lightening it doesn't effect whether or not it spread by sexual selection after)

Peter I don't understand why you think mutations in SLC24A5, SLC45A2, and TYR=snow white north European. We know it doesn't because Iraqis have the same amount of these mutations except for the one in SLC45A2 which is around 50% in the near east and 100% in most of Europe. The one in TYR doesn't even reach 50% in Europeans and is just as popular in near easterns. These mutations are near eastern not European and ancient DNA has proven that.

Did you even read the evidence that I gave? You keep pushing this 11,000-19,000ybp stuff. You base on age estimates(who knows how accurate) on three mutations that may only cause a little paling of European and near eastern skin.

How would Razib know what skin color La Brana-1 and Loschbour had? Does he have a time machine? No so he doesn't know what their skin color was. People have to much faith in these three mutations.

I think you are making an assumption west Africans went from Khosian bronze to what they are now. Papuans who are east Eurasian have just as dark skin as almost all sub Saharan Africans. If anything I think the ancestors of all humans over 100,000 years ago had the skin color of west Africans or darker.

Can you please read my previous post. It seems you don't consider who lived where at what time. For example Neolithic farmers of Sweden were most related to Sardinians and Basque not the main ancestors of modern Swedes. So just because farmers in northern Europe today are very pale and Mesolithic like doesn't mean they were in the Neolithic. There has been a lot of population change in Europe since the Neolithic.

"Beleza et al 2013 (skin color genetics in Cape Verde) leaves substantial unexplained variance. And East Asian skin color is unexplained.

It's not necessary for any difference to have "disappeared", but the alleles we know about may explain less than we think."

Exactly for this reason I think Loschbour and La Brana-1 should be classified with unknown skin color.

Peter this is a continuation of my last post about why all the causes of European light skin have not been discovered. Here are some more reasons why I think La Brana-1 and Luschbour's skin color is unknown and why it is inaccurate to call them brown skinned.

Maju agrees
http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2014/01/la-brana-1-carried-very-rare-y-dna.html?showComment=1391020766375

Like I said in my last post we now know through ancient DNA all three of those mutations are near eastern not European. We also know that blue eyes and black hair(probably also brown) existed in Mesolithic (west)Europe and were popular.

Here are some things that are hard to explain if you believe Mesolithic Europeans were brown skinned and blue eyed(WHAT!!). It gets very annoying when people ignore these facts. Trust me pigmentation genes from more Mesolithic European especially eastern and blonde hair will pop up. Which would be great evidence they did not have dark skin.

>Today light hair-eyes-skin have very similar distributions in Europe. The lighter haired and eyed people are also the lighter skinned people.

>In Europe today generally the lighter the hair the lighter the eyes. If you have blonde hair there is close to 90% chance you will also have light eyes. If you have black hair you most likely(over 60%) will have brown eyes.

>Today Mesolithic European ancestry almost perfectly correlates with light eyes. It also is very similar to the distribution of light hair(maybe not counting Insular Celts who have ~40% light hair including 10-15% red but also have close to 80% light eyes) and light skin.

>The most Neolithic or just near eastern descended Europeans have vast majority dark hair, dark eyes, and also have darker skin than more Mesolithic descended Europeans. Sardinians who are nearly perfect matches to early European farmers have the lowest amount of light hair and eyes in Europe.

Peter could you explain how blonde hair descends from near eastern farmers(many think so) if nearly 90% of modern blondes have light eyes? We know the farmers were brown eyed and the hunter gatherers were blue eyed(of course not 100%). How do you explain redheads also have overwhelmingly light eyes and how that could be descended from near eastern farmers? So if you agree both blonde(aka light) hair and red hair existed in Mesolithic Europe how could they also have had a deep shade of brown skin?

Trust me I know redheads are the palest(non albino) people on the planet. When I compare my skin to other white people theirs looks brown. Our skin is literally white and can barely tan.

It is not just random that Mesolithic ancestry correlates with light skin-hair-eyes. If blonde hair, red hair, and light skin originated in Neolithic Europeans why aren't southern Europeans(especially Sardinians) full of it?

I guess you could say that for some reason the Neolithic ancestors of north Europeans got light skin from the farmers and brought to a new extreme(through unknown mutations) kept the light eyes of the hunter gatherers and developed light hair which became very popular and for some reason connected with the light eyes of the dark skinned hunter gatherers.

We know Neolithic Swedish are not the ancestors of modern ones(at least not even close to majority). They had little difference with modern Sardinians, Stuttgart, and Otzi. It makes sense all Neolithic north-west Europeans were like that. Maybe a mass migration of very pale people from eastern Europe(Indo Europeans and Uralics) spread their features during the metal ages. Maybe north-east Neolithic Europeans developed extreme paleness during the Neolithic. While south Europeans have other forms of Neolithic ancestry and have the pale(not as pale) skin and almost no light hair and eyes.

Peter could you please give me a logical explanation for why pale skin and light hair developed during the Neolithic?

"So you're saying that these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers became fair-skinned in a way completely different from that of other Europeans. And this other way has completely disappeared since then.

Sounds like Occam's chainsaw massacre."

What I am saying is whatever really causes true European light skin(not what you see in the near east) has not been discovered and may have existed in La Brana-1 and Loschbour. The real cause(or all the causes) to creating European light skin(especially in the most Mesolithic descended region which is northern European) has(or have) not been discovered.

There are three mutations most associated with European light skin and you mention them oftenly. The problem is all of them are just as popular in very brown skinned near easterns as they are in snow white Baltics, except for rs16891982 G/G or G/C(in gene SLC45A2)which is 100% in CEU(I think Utah white Americans) and the vast majority is G/G while a small minority is G/C. I have a distribution map of it and in a few populations in southern Europe are around 50-60% but in almost all Europeans it is close to 100%. According to SNPedia if a European has G/C or C/C they are 7x more likely to have black hair. I don't know how these genes work but are they connected skin and hair pigmentation?

Still rs16891982 G/G or G/C(in gene SLC45A2) is around 50% in near easterns. The mutation in gene TYR is not even 50% in most European populations and is just as popular in near easterns. I doubt it makes a big effect on skin color.

Maybe rs16891982 G/G or G/C(in gene SLC45A2) makes a big effect on skin color but that's all I can think of. Why are northern(most Mesolithic) Europeans lighter than southern(more near eastern) Europeans and why are near easterns much darker than both if they all have basically the same percentages of these "white skin" genes? Obviously there is some unknown reason.

No offense Peter, but you can forget all those age estimates for the three main white skin mutations because their not European and they don't cause white skin. We now have prove in ancient DNA that it was near eastern farmers who brought those mutations to Europe. They cause skin to be paler but how much paler black to dark brown? You cant explain the light skin in Europe with those mutations.

''Gottlieb,

Yes, mutations happen randomly all the time, but some kind of selection is needed to make them more and more prevalent. Otherwise, they will remain rare oddities, as is the case with albinism (although the rate of albinism is unusually high in some societies, apparently because of some kind of social selection).''

Yes i know but i'm not talk about the process, like you said, mutations are aleatory. What i try to explain, my opinion, is, the order of events seems misunderstood by many people, is not metamorphosis based on adaptation but only, selection, darwinian way of life.
Therefore, don't there ''people migrated by area X to area Y and mutations happen'', but people with mutations or mutants (people with aparent mutations like albinos and not father of albino kid with one of the two pairs of genes) migrated to…
Adaptation is like instinct, desire to live, when my skin is very sensible to sun of this land, i will search the land where i not die with skin diseases.

If Western European hunter-gatherers evolved an alternate form of skin depigmentation, I would expect to find some traces of it today. It's not as if they were an isolated population in the middle of the ocean. They were a subpopulation within Europe.

My point here isn't related to East Asians.

It's that if a lot of the skin color difference between Europeans and Africans is unexplained, and we have ancient populations who are more "European" than any recent population, they could have some "fairness" alleles at higher frequency than modern populations (even if this doesn't make them fairer overall).

"…Nor would it impede the spread of new mutant alleles. This was a highly mobile and large panmictic population, so new alleles would have spread rapidly"
'Rapidly' but not everywhere, since this 7000 years old European guy still didn't have a white skin and 5000 bc is pretty late.

"Did Otzi have brown skin?" Wikipedia says he was similar to southern Europeans.

"Finally, it's easy to go from a few hundred thousand to ten million in 5,000 years. Only 10,000 French immigrants came to New France, and now their descendants number at least 10 million in Canada and the United States"
Not so fast. The French immigrants were farmers with families of 8 kids. Typically not the kind of environment where you theory applies.
Actually you have not mentioned that point: what happen when farming came to the Europeans? did the sexual selection for white skin relaxed completely, or did it continue as strong as before?
7000 years ago, What would forbid the Europeans with dark skin to have 8 kids as well?

"If Western European hunter-gatherers evolved an alternate form of skin depigmentation, I would expect to find some traces of it today."

Yes, and if it existed – and it is only an if – and there were any surviving traces they would only likely be found the furthest away from the farmer's start point in Southeast Europe i.e. somewhere in the northwest corner – like Ireland, Scotland, Norway etc or remote clusters of their diaspora in Anzac or the US.

.

"he main problem is that many of the mtDNA haplotypes in question are not selectively neutral. This is particularly the case with haplogroup U, which is linked to body heat production."

Another possibility for the increase of mtDNA H after the collapse of LBK might be to do with the spread of SLC24A5 via the remaining LBK females i.e. neither the HGs or IE had it before they over-ran the LBK.