First modern Britons had 'dark to black' skin, Cheddar Man DNA analysis reveals

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"The team proposes that the variants arose in Africa as early as 1 million years ago and spread later to Europeans and Asians. “Many of the gene variants that cause light skin in Europe have origins in Africa,” Tishkoff says."


http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/new-gene-variants-reveal-evolution-human-skin-color


"The first surprise was that SLC24A5, which swept Europe, is also common in East Africa—found in as many as half the members of some Ethiopian groups. This variant arose 30,000 years ago and was probably brought to eastern Africa by people migrating from the Middle East, Tishkoff says. But though many East Africans have this gene, they don’t have white skin, probably because it is just one of several genes that shape their skin color.

The team also found variants of two neighboring genes, HERC2 and OCA2, which are associated with light skin, eyes, and hair in Europeans but arose in Africa; these variants are ancient and common in the light-skinned San people. The team proposes that the variants arose in Africa as early as 1 million years ago and spread later to Europeans and Asians. “Many of the gene variants that cause light skin in Europe have origins in Africa,” Tishkoff says.

The most dramatic discovery concerned a gene known as MFSD12. Two mutations that decrease expression of this gene were found in high frequencies in people with the darkest skin. These variants arose about a half-million years ago, suggesting that human ancestors before that time may have had moderately dark skin, rather than the deep black hue created today by these mutations.

These same two variants are found in Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and some Indians. These people may have inherited the variants from ancient migrants from Africa who followed a “southern route” out of East Africa, along the southern coast of India to Melanesia and Australia, Tishkoff says. That idea, however, counters three genetic studies that concluded last year that Australians, Melanesians, and Eurasians all descend from a single migration out of Africa. Alternatively, this great migration may have included people carrying variants for both light and dark skin, but the dark variants later were lost in Eurasians.

To understand how the MFSD12 mutations help make darker skin, the researchers reduced expression of the gene in cultured cells, mimicking the action of the variants in dark-skinned people. The cells produced more eumelanin, the pigment responsible for black and brown skin, hair, and eyes. The mutations may also change skin color by blocking yellow pigments: When the researchers knocked out MFSD12 in zebrafish and mice, red and yellow pigments were lost, and the mice’s light brown coats turned gray. “This new mechanism for producing intensely dark pigmentation is really the big story,” says Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College.

The study adds to established research undercutting old notions of race. You can’t use skin color to classify humans, any more than you can use other complex traits like height, Tishkoff says. “There is so much diversity in Africans that there is no such thing as an African race.”
 
Interesting, though our understanding of what genes do what exactly is a bit too spotty and incomplete to make declarations like this, better headline title would have been "could have had" not "had"
 
Interesting, though our understanding of what genes do what exactly is a bit too spotty and incomplete to make declarations like this, better headline title would have been "could have had" not "had"
Do you think my descendants will be white in a 10 k years time ? We will they have white privilege?
 
Do you think my descendants will be white in a 10 k years time ? We will they have white privilege?

Haha who knows man, 5 thousand years ago white skin meant slavery, the Akkadians had a phrase "white as a slave", as the white skinned people to the north of them were primitive tribes.
 
Haha who knows man, 5 thousand years ago white skin meant slavery, the Akkadians had a phrase "white as a slave", as the white skinned people to the north of them were primitive tribes.
:pachah1:

Ps. Dark skin does not mean Bantuid /Africans . This will be very hard for the Hoteps and the likes of @ inquisitive to fathom .
 

tumal

hyde
dark skin =/= race

also AA's seem to have a inferiority complex, they lack a culture so they try to latch onto and claim anything from africa hehe
 
:pachah1:

Ps. Dark skin does not mean Bantuid /Africans . This will be very hard for the Hoteps and the likes of @ inquisitive to fathom .

I just got my 23 and me back. My maternal line is U5a2a. My futo is the color of caano liis.


"Origin and Migrations of Haplogroup U5a2a
U5a2a is a relatively young branch of one of the oldest European haplogroups — U5. The members of U5a2a trace their maternal lines back to a woman who lived approximately 13,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. For several thousand years, humans had survived the last great cold peak in a small number of more hospitable refuges in the south and the east of the continent. Then, around 14,000 years ago, the ice sheets covering the interior of the continent began to recede and human populations started to re-expand north. As they spread out and thrived in the newly hospitable continent, new maternal lineages emerged, including U5a2a.


The Cheddar Man also belonged to U5a
U5a
cheddar_gorge.cc081297a904.jpg

The Cheddar Man is named for Cheddar Gorge, England.
First discovered in 1903 in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England, the Cheddar Man is Britain's oldest complete human skeleton. Researchers have dated his bones back to nearly 9,000 years ago, when the Ice Age had ended but farming technology had not yet made its way across the continent, and people in England still survived by hunting and gathering. Unfortunately for the Cheddar Man, a bone lesion above his right eye shows he likely had a bone infection, and other skeletal evidence suggests his days of hunting may have come to a violent end.

More recently, Bryan Sykes of Oxford University extracted mitochondrial DNA from one of the Cheddar Man's teeth, and found that his maternal haplogroup was U5."
 
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