"Dark" and "Swarthy" Europeans Are Still Light

We've seen how olive skin is misunderstood by people to mean "tan" or "non-white", now let's look at the same thing with words like "dark" and "swarthy" used to describe the complexions of Europeans. People treat them as evidence against "whiteness", but they're really just exaggerations of reality.

Benjamin Franklin applied them to a lot of groups that are far from dark, basically lumping all whites who weren't Anglo-Saxon into a "swarthy" group with non-whites, including some who are probably lighter than English people:

All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

Another well-known example of this kind of exaggeration is English ideas about the so-called "Black Irish". They're really just white people from the British Isles (not just Ireland) who have dark hair and eyes and a Mediterranean appearance — like Colin Farrell, Catherine Zeta Jones, Sean Connery, Mr. Bean, Russell Brand and many others — but old school Nordicists used to claim that part of the Celtic physiognomy was "black-tinted skin":


But even when applied to "darker" Southern Europeans, they're still an exaggeration, like in this passage from White on Arrival about how Italian gangsters were portrayed in the media:

Al Capone was constantly portrayed in books, magazine articles, pulps, and movies as having a "dark" or "swarthy" complexion. When he appeared in court in 1929 in Philadelphia on charges of having concealed a weapon, the Chicago Daily News noticed that his "face, which is rather dark, assumed a dull reddish hue." No one emphasized Italians' dark features more than popular writer and former newsman Walter Burns. In his book, The One-Way Ride, Johnny Torrio was "a slight, dapper, dark young man"; gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi had "dark faces"; the Genna brothers were "swarthy, black haired, black eyed, looked not unlike Arabs, and probably had in their ancestral strain a strong dash of Saracenic [North African] blood".

From these descriptions you'd probably picture really dark Saudi Arabians or maybe even mixed-race Berbers, but here's what those people actually looked like (the rare mugshot of Capone has been skillfully colorized to show his blue eyes):

Al Capone

Genna Brothers

Johnny Torrio

John Scalise and Albert Anselmi

So the lesson is to not take descriptions like that literally or as meaning something "non-white". Europeans (including Southern Europeans) actually have the lightest untanned skin in the world, so even when they're "dark" or "swarthy", they're still lighter than everyone else.

Related: Al Capone: From "Dark" to "Fair"

Ancient Egyptians and Nubians Were Caucasoid

Ancient DNA has confirmed that Ancient Egyptians were Middle Eastern and not Sub-Saharan African. This was already suggested by earlier genetic studies that found North Africans were the result of a back-migration from West Asia. But even before that, older craniofacial analyses of skeletal samples from all over Egypt (and Nubia) spanning all of ancient history also showed the same thing.

Here are five lines of anthropological evidence that group Ancient Egyptians and Nubians with North Africans, West/South Asians and Europeans (Caucasoids), and separate them from Sub-Saharan Africans (Negroids). Note that Horn Africans (Somalis) cluster with Caucasoids in some cases and Negroids in others, which indicates they're a racially mixed population that's not representative of either Sub-Saharan Africans or Egyptians and Nubians.

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1. Craniometric

Combined samples of Pre-Dynastic (Naqada) and Late Dynastic (Giza) Egyptians, and Bronze Age, Early Christian and Medieval Nubians, cluster with combined samples of Ancient and Modern North Africans, East Indians and Europeans.


Brace et al. "Clines and clusters versus 'Race:' a test in ancient Egypt and the case of a death on the Nile". Am J Phys Anthro, 1993.

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2. Cranial Non-metric

Pre-Dynastic Egyptians from Naqada (#59), 26th-30th Dynasty Egyptians from Gizeh (#60), 12th-13th Dynasty Nubians from Kerma (#61), and Early Christian or Christian Nubians (#62) cluster with South Asians (#44) and several European groups: Greeks (#48), Scandinavians (#51 and #52) and Germans (#53). [NOTE that Somalis are up with Sub-Saharan Africans (#63)]


Hanihara et al. "Characterization of biological diversity through analysis of discrete cranial traits". Am J Phys Anthro, 2003.

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3. Dental Metric

Pre-Dynastic and 12th-29th Dynasty Egyptians cluster with Afghans and North Indians on the edge of a larger cluster of Europeans and West Asians. [NOTE that here again, Somalis show Sub-Saharan affinities and don't cluster with Ancient Egyptians.]


Hanihara and Ishida. "Metric dental variation of major human populations". Am J Phys Anthro, 2005.

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4. Dental Non-metric

12th Dynasty (Lisht), Roman/Byzantine (El Hesa), and Byzantine (Kharga) Egyptians, and Pharonic, Meroitic, X-group and Christian Nubians, cluster with other North Africans and Europeans (Poundbury, England).


Joel D. Irish. "Diachronic and synchronic dental trait affinities of late and post-pleistocene peoples from North Africa". Homo, 1998b.

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5. Prognathism

Ancient Egyptians from Badari, Pre-Dynastic Egyptians from Naqada, and 26th-30th Dynasty Egyptians from Gizeh, as well as 12th-13th Dynasty Nubians from Kerma and Early Christian or Christian Nubians, all cluster with Europeans and West/South Asians on the negative end of the prognathism scale.


Tsunehiko Hanihara. "Frontal and Facial Flatness of Major Human Populations". Am J Phys Anthro, 2000.

What "Olive-Skinned" Really Means

Most people either think that "olive" skin tone is the same as "tan" or "dark", or that it refers to some kind of "nonwhite" or "mixed" ethnicity ranging from the Mediterranean region to Latin America. But it's actually one of several skin undertones that have nothing to do with what race or shade someone is.

When shopping for foundation, you've probably heard the terms "cool," "warm," or "neutral" to describe how a shade will look on skin. Those terms refer to your skin's undertone and are used to determine which foundation shade will match it the best.

Cool, warm, or neutral undertones are the colors that come through your skin from underneath the surface to affect its overall hue. It's not about how light or dark your skin is; people of all skin colors, from very fair to deep, can have cool, warm, or neutral undertones. Here's what each of these terms means:

Cool: Hints of bluish, pink, or a ruddy complexion.

Warm: Skin skews yellow, sallow, peachy, or golden.

Neutral: Has no obvious overtones of pink or sallow skin, but rather the skin's natural color is more evident.

[...]

Does your skin look somewhat ashen or gray? You might have the wild card of the bunch — olive skin — which is a combination of the natural neutral, slightly yellow undertone everyone has plus the greenish ashen hue that's unique to olive skin. Olive skin tone is very specific, but is not neutral, as some tend to call it.

Here's what the 4 different undertones would look like on light untanned skin:


And here are people of different races and shades with 3 of the undertones:

Genetic Continuity in Greece

Greek women through the ages: Minoan, Cycladic, Mycenaean, Classical, Modern  (SOURCE)

A recent study suggested based on modern samples that Greeks hadn't changed much since ancient times. Now that's been proven with ancient DNA from Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean Greeks. Their ancestry is mostly Anatolian Neolithic farmer with some Caucasus/Iran and less Russian/Siberian admixture (the last two related to the spread of Indo-European languages), they had dark hair and dark eyes, and there was no difference between the elites and common people. They're genetically closest to modern Southeastern Europeans, and not to Northern Europeans or Africans as different people have claimed.

The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus and Iran. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe or Armenia. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.

[...]

The elite Mycenaean individual from the ‘royal’ tomb at Peristeria in the western Peloponnese did not differ genetically from the other three Mycenaean individuals buried in common graves.

[...]

Other proposed migrations, such as settlement by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists, are not discernible in our data, as there is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Mycenaeans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilizations of these regions.

[...]

Phenotype prediction from genetic data has enabled the reconstruction of the appearance of ancient Europeans who left no visual record of their pigmentation. By contrast, the appearance of the Bronze Age people of the Aegean has been preserved in colourful frescos and pottery, depicting people with mostly dark hair and eyes. We used the HIrisPlex tool (Supplementary Information section 4) to infer that the appearance of our ancient samples matched the visual representations (Extended Data Table 2), suggesting that art of this period reproduced phenotypes naturalistically.

We estimated the fixation index, F_ST, of Bronze Age populations with present-day West Eurasians, finding that Mycenaeans were least differentiated from populations from Greece, Cyprus, Albania, and Italy (Fig. 2), part of a general pattern in which Bronze Age populations broadly resembled present-day inhabitants from the same region (Extended Data Fig. 7).

The modern Greek samples used in the study for comparison are not the best. Thessaloniki is in the north of the country, the Coriell database doesn't provide specific origins, and there are only two Cretans. I believe that if Mycenaeans were compared to their descendants in the Peloponnese, continuity would be nearly perfect instead of just very strong.


Lazaridis et al. "Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans". Nature, 2017.

Related: Ancient Roman DNA, Ancient-to-Modern Genetic Distances

Reconstruction of an Ancient Egyptian

A 3,500-year-old noble Egyptian called Nebiri has been brought back to life through modern forensics.

Scientists have reconstructed the face of the ancient mummy, and discovered he had a prominent nose, wide jaw, straight eyebrows and moderately thick lips.

[...]

Nebiri is thought to have been a member of the Egyptian elite who served as the Chief of the Stables, looking after royal horses, during the reign of Thutmoses III, a pharaoh from the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt.

His remains were discovered in the Valley of the Queens in Luxor in 1904, but as the tomb has been plundered, just his head and jars containing his organs remained.

Researchers from the University of Turin have now used a range of facial reconstruction techniques to produce an impressive facial approximation.

To reconstruct his face, the researchers used a mixture of computer modelling and anthropological research.

The team then used a computer programme to start to build up a picture of the Egyptian's face.

[...]

Speaking to Live Science, Raffaella Bianucci, who led the study, said: 'He was between 45 [and] 60 years old when he died.

Shivali Best. "The face of Nebiri revealed: Scientists reconstruct the head of the ancient Egyptian 'Chief of Stables', 3,500 years after he died of heart failure". MailOnline – Science & Tech, 11:01 BST, 20 June 2017.

Phenotypes of Hunters and Farmers

Europeans are descended from prehistoric hunter-gatherers and farmers. Here's what we know about the origins and physical appearance of these two populations from anthropology (Coon 1939, Pinhasi 2012) and genetics (Lipson 2012, Lazaridis 2014), along with representations of what they might have looked like:

Mesolithic Hunters had broad faces, dark skin, light eyes and were intermediate between Western and Eastern Eurasians. So to represent them I chose a Uralic Norwegian Lapp that I darkened and gave blue eyes.

Neolithic Farmers had narrow faces, light skin, dark eyes and were Western Eurasian, closest to modern Sardinians. So I chose an untanned, long-faced Mediterranean soccer player from Sardinia to represent them.


Of course, they didn't all look exactly the same. We know that there was diversity and overlap in some of their traits (Gamba 2014). But in general, the phenotypic variation we see in Europe today is the result of waves of settlements by these two distinct types from Siberia and the Middle East since ancient times, and the mixing that occurred between them in different proportions (Haak 2015), plus selective pressures favoring further depigmentation in some places.


Related: Who's Really "More European"?

European Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews

According to a new genetic study, Ashkenazi Jews are mostly European on their maternal side, and that admixture comes from Western and Central Europe when diaspora males from the Levant arrived first in Rome and found wives among local Italian women who converted to Judaism. They then migrated further west and north and acquired other European admixture in the same way, before finally heading east. Intermixing slowed after that because they have very little Slavic or Turkic (Khazar) admixture. Their paternal side remains mostly Near Eastern. This all fits well with findings from anthropology some 75 years ago.

Overall, it seems that at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is due to the assimilation of mtDNAs indigenous to Europe, most likely through conversion. The phylogenetic nesting patterns suggest that the most frequent of the Ashkenazi mtDNA lineages were assimilated in Western Europe, ~2 ka or slightly earlier. Some in particular, including N1b2, M1a1b, K1a9 and perhaps even the major K1a1b1, point to a north Mediterranean source. It seems likely that the major founders were the result of the earliest and presumably most profound wave of founder effects, from the Mediterranean northwards into central Europe, and that most of the minor founders were assimilated in west/central Europe within the last 1,500 years. The sharing of rarer lineages with Eastern European populations may indicate further assimilation in some cases, but can often be explained by exchange via intermarriage in the reverse direction.

The Ashkenazim therefore resemble Jewish communities in Eastern Africa and India, and possibly also others across the Near East, Caucasus and Central Asia, which also carry a substantial fraction of maternal lineages from their 'host' communities. Despite widely differing interpretations of autosomal data, these results in fact fit well with genome-wide studies, which imply a significant European component, with particularly close relationships to Italians. As might be expected from the autosomal picture, Y-chromosome studies generally show the opposite trend to mtDNA (with a predominantly Near Eastern source) with the exception of the large fraction of European ancestry seen in Ashkenazi Levites.

Evidence for haplotype sharing with non-Ashkenazi Jews for each of the three main haplogroup K founders may imply a partial common ancestry in Mediterranean Europe for Ashkenazi and Spanish-exile Sephardic Jews, but may also, at least in part, be due to subsequent gene flow, especially into Bulgaria and Turkey, both of which witnessed substantial immigration from Ashkenazi communities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Gene flow could have been substantial in some cases—ongoing intermarriage is likely when these communities began living in closer proximity after the Spanish exile. A partial common ancestry for all European Jews—both Ashkenazi and Sephardic—is again strongly supported by the autosomal results.

Jewish communities were already spread across the Graeco-Roman and Persian world >2,000 years ago. It is thought that a substantial Jewish community was present in Rome from at least the mid-second century BCE, maintaining links to Jerusalem and numbering 30,000-50,000 by the first half of the first century CE. By the end of the first millennium CE, Ashkenazi communities were historically visible along the Rhine valley in Germany. After the wave of expulsions in Western Europe during the fifteenth century, they began to disperse once more, into Eastern Europe.

These analyses suggest that the first major wave of assimilation probably took place in Mediterranean Europe, most likely in the Italian peninsula ~2 ka, with substantial further assimilation of minor founders in west/central Europe. There is less evidence for assimilation in Eastern Europe, and almost none for a source in the North Caucasus/Chuvashia, as would be predicted by the Khazar hypothesis—rather, the results show strong genetic continuities between west and east European Ashkenazi communities, albeit with gradual clines of frequency of founders between east and west.

Costa et al. "A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages". Nature Communications, 2013.

The Jews have been left to the end because they do not as a whole fit into any single racial classification heretofore outlined. Historically the Jews of the Biblical period in Palestine were a Semitic-speaking people composed of various Mediterranean strains which had blended together at the time of the formation of the Jewish nation. These Mediterranean strains must have included a small Mediterranean type comparable to the present Yemeni Arabs; a taller, longer-faced strain with a tendency to nasal convexity, as is found among Irano-Afghan peoples today; and a straight-nosed, presumably Atlanto-Mediterranean element contributed by the Philistines.

The Jews began their expansion from Palestine as early as the time of the Babylonian Captivity; at this time they settled Mesopotamia in large numbers, and from there began an expansion into central Asia of which colonies still remain. In the Hellenistic period they migrated into Asia Minor and the Black Sea region, as well as into Egypt; these emigrants became Hellenistic Jews. Under the Romans they settled in Italy, France, and Spain, with especial concentrations in Spain and in the cities of the Rhineland. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and during previous expulsions became the Sephardim, whose descendants are to be found in various countries bordering on the Mediterranean, especially Morocco, the Salonika region of what is now Greece, and Turkey. The Rhineland Jews, persecuted at the time of the First Crusade, moved eastward into Poland, the Ukraine and other central European countries, and met there and absorbed a group of Hellenistic Jews moving westward, among whom were some who had lived among the Turkish Khazars in the Crimea and elsewhere. The two groups blended and the Germanic speech of the more numerous western element prevailed. The modern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim are the descendants of this amalgamated body. Racially they preserve to a large measure their Mediterranean character, altered partly by Alpine admixture which has in many cases produced Dinaricization. This Alpine, as well as some Nordic, admixture was probably obtained largely in France and Germany before their departure eastward. The most persistent Palestinian Mediterranean traits which the Jews preserve is a narrowness of the face. The Jewish facial expression, by which many Jews may be distinguished, is a cultural and not a genetic character.

Carleton Coon. The Races of Europe. New York: MacMillan, 1939.

Global Admixture Analysis at K=6

This new study has one of the biggest global admixture analyses ever done (185 populations at 293,832 SNPs), but it's a little hard to view so I made a more user friendly version of one of the runs. I chose K=6 because it shows clearly the divisions and admixture between the six main racial groups: Capoid (red), Negroid (orange), Caucasoid (blue), Americoid (green), Mongoloid (yellow) and Australoid (purple). Click the image below to enlarge it and scroll down for examples of the racial types.

K=2 separates African from non-African populations.

K=3 reveals a West Eurasian ancestry component [Blue].

K=4 breaks the African component into an African hunter-gatherer ancestry maximized in Bushmen such as the Ju_hoan_North [Red] and an African farmer component maximized in the Yoruba [Orange].

K=5 breaks the ENA [eastern non-African] component down into one maximized in the Karitiana from the Americas [Green] and one maximized in the Ami from Taiwan [Yellow].

K=6 reveals a south Eurasian component maximized in Papuans [Purple], which is also represented in South Asians.

Ju'hoan (Namibia) "Capoid"

Yoruba (Nigeria) "Negroid"

Sardinian (Italy) "Caucasoid"

Karitiana (Brazil) "Americoid"

Ami (Taiwan) "Mongoloid"

Papuan (PNG) "Australoid"

King Richard III Reconstruction

Link to story

Racial Composition and History of India

DNA evidence confirms what historians, linguists and anthropologists have long known but nationalists have denied: that Indians are mainly a mix of indigenous Australoids and intrusive Caucasoids. They're composed of two genetic components, one related to Andaman Islanders and the other to Western Eurasians, which is higher in upper castes. The estimated dates of admixture between the two are consistent with the introduction of Indo-Aryan languages from the northwest and probably also earlier events related to the spread of Dravidian languages and even agriculture.

India has been underrepresented in genome-wide surveys of human variation. We analyse 25 diverse groups in India to provide strong evidence for two ancient populations, genetically divergent, that are ancestral to most Indians today. One, the "Ancestral North Indians" (ANI), is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, whereas the other, the "Ancestral South Indians" (ASI), is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other. By introducing methods that can estimate ancestry without accurate ancestral populations, we show that ANI ancestry ranges from 39-71% in most Indian groups, and is higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers. Groups with only ASI ancestry may no longer exist in mainland India. However, the Andamanese are an ASI-related group without ANI ancestry, showing that the peopling of the islands must have occurred before ANI-ASI gene flow on the mainland. Allele frequency differences between groups in India are larger than in Europe, reflecting strong founder effects whose signatures have been maintained for thousands of years owing to endogamy. We therefore predict that there will be an excess of recessive diseases in India, which should be possible to screen and map genetically.

Reich et al. "Reconstructing Indian Population History". Nature, 2009.


Metspalu et al. "Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia". Am J Hum Genet, 2011.

Linguistic and genetic studies have shown that most Indian groups have ancestry from two genetically divergent populations, Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). However, the date of mixture still remains unknown. We analyze genome-wide data from about 60 South Asian groups using a newly developed method that utilizes information related to admixture linkage disequilibrium to estimate mixture dates. Our analyses suggest that major ANI-ASI mixture occurred in the ancestors of both northern and southern Indians 1,200-3,500 years ago, overlapping the time when Indo-European languages first began to be spoken in the subcontinent. These results suggest that this formative period of Indian history was accompanied by mixtures between two highly diverged populations, although our results do not rule out other, older ANI-ASI admixture events. A cultural shift subsequently led to widespread endogamy, which decreased the rate of additional population mixtures.

Moorjani et al. "Estimating a date of mixture of ancestral South Asian populations", Evolutionary and Population Genetics, 2012.

The paper provides an overview of the spatial and temporal aspects of human morphological variation in India. Four morphological types — Australoids, Negritos, Mongoloids and Caucasoids — have been discerned in the contemporary Indian population. The Australoids appear to be the oldest and have evolved in India. The Caucasoids are physically heterogeneous and suggests incorporation of more than one physical type involving more than one migration. The within-type variance compared to between-type variance for characters studied is smaller. The paper further discusses the observed variability in terms of Indian social organization as well as in terms of endogamy, small numerical strength of the groups and varying ecological conditions prevalent in India.

K.C. Malhotra. "Morphological Composition of the People of India". J Hum Evol, 1978.

Indian Male Composite

Indian Female Composite

Assumed parental groups:

Andamanese Australoid

Iranian Caucasoid

Degrees of admixture:

Austroasiatic speaker (Juang)

Austroasiatic speaker (Santhal)

Dravidian speaker (Paniya)

Dravidian speaker (Hallaki)

Indo-European speaker (Meghawal)

Indo-European speaker (Kashmiri Pandit)

Welsh Are the Most Ancient Britons

The Welsh (and Cornish) may be the Sardinians of the UK: relatively pure descendants of prehistoric Britons, minimally altered by post-Neolithic gene flow. Interestingly, they and Sardinians are each the darkest and most racially Mediterranean populations in their respective countries, having the highest rates of black hair and brown eyes and the lowest rates of blondism (Coon, 1939: Ch. X, Sec. 3 and Ch. XI, Sec. 16).

Welsh people could lay claim to be the most ancient Britons, according to scientists who have drawn up a genetic map of the British Isles.

Research suggests the Welsh are genetically distinct from the rest of mainland Britain.

Professor Peter Donnelly, of Oxford University, said the Welsh carry DNA which could be traced back to the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago.

The project surveyed 2,000 people in rural areas across Britain.

Participants, as well as their parents and grandparents, had to be born in those areas to be included in the study.

Prof Donnelly, a professor of statistical science at Oxford University and director of the Wellcome Trust centre for human genetics, said DNA samples were analysed at about 500,000 different points.

After comparing statistics, a map was compiled which showed Wales and Cornwall stood out.

Prof Donnelly said: "People from Wales are genetically relatively distinct, they look different genetically from much of the rest of mainland Britain, and actually people in north Wales look relatively distinct from people in south Wales."

While there were traces of migrant groups across the UK, there were fewer in Wales and Cornwall.

He said people from south and north Wales genetically have "fairly large similarities with the ancestry of people from Ireland on the one hand and France on the other, which we think is most likely to be a combination of remnants of very ancient populations who moved across into Britain after the last Ice Age.

"And potentially also, people travelling up the Atlantic coast of France and Spain and settling in Wales many thousands of years ago".

Mountains

He said it was possible that people came over from Ireland to north Wales because it was the closest point, and the same for people coming to south Wales from the continent, as it was nearer.

However he added: "We don't really have the historical evidence about what those genetic inputs were."

The geography of Wales made it more likely that ancient DNA would be retained.

Because of its westerly position and mountainous nature, Anglo-Saxons who moved into central and eastern England after the Romans left did not come that far west, and neither did the Vikings who arrived in around 900AD.

The professor said modern people from central and southern England had many genetic similarities to modern people in Denmark and Germany.

The mountains were also the reason why DNA may have remained relatively unchanged, as people would have found it harder to get from north to south Wales or into England compared with people trying to move across the flatter southern English counties, making them more likely to marry locally and conserve more ancient DNA.

"In north Wales, there has been relative isolation because people moved less because of geographical barriers," Prof Donnelly said.

He added that some of these factors also held true for the extreme edges of Scotland, while the Orkney islands showed DNA connections to Norway.

The next stage of the research will looking at physical similarities between different groups, in which the team will use photographs of people and make 3D models to measure quantitative similarities between related groups.

"Welsh people could be most ancient in UK, DNA suggests". BBC News, June 19, 2012.

Separate Origin of Blondism in Oceania

Science can't yet tell us whether they have more fun — but it has uncovered a new genetic change that makes people blonde. And contrary to long held belief, it seems golden hair hasn't simply been introduced across the globe by travelling tow heads, but instead evolved separately in different human populations.

Indigenous people of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific have some of the darkest skin pigmentation outside of Africa. But unlike most other tropical populations, they also have a high prevalence of blonde hair. Up to 10 per cent of the population is fair haired, the highest proportion outside of Europe. Until now, this odd trait had generally been attributed to the introduction of blonde genes by European explorers and traders in preceding centuries. "We originally thought, well that must be a Captain Cook allele," says Carlos Bustamante at Stanford University.

Yet a closer look revealed that the genetics behind blonde hair in Brussels are distinct from those leading to flaxen locks in the South Pacific.

Bustamante, Sean Myles and colleagues at Stanford discovered this after analysing saliva samples from 43 blondes and 42 dark-haired Solomon Islanders. A genome-wide scan pointed to a single strong difference between the groups at a gene called TYRP1. Further analysis revealed that a single-letter change in the gene accounted for 46 per cent of the population's hair colour variation, with the blonde allele being recessive to the dark hair allele. The blonde mutation wasn't found in any of the 900 other individuals sampled from outside the South Pacific (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1217849).

TYRP1 is known to be involved in skin and hair pigmentation in several species. In normally black mice, for example, a mutation in the gene produces light brown coats. A rare kind of human albinism is also caused by mutations in TYRP1, which produces reddish skin colour and ginger hair. TYRP1 isn't, however, one of the genes that produces blonde hair in Europeans. The novel blonde mutation in Solomon Islanders is likely to have cropped up around 10,000 years ago, and it appears to be the same one behind blondness in Fiji and other regions of the South Pacific.

"Before this, everybody would have thought, blonde hair evolved once in humans," says Bustamante. "This tells us we can't really assume that even these common mutations are common across different human populations. Non-European populations are critical to study to find mutations that may be underlying the vast phenotypic variation of humans."

Lisa Raffensperger. "Blonde hair evolved independently in Pacific islands". NewScientist, May 3, 2012.

Cro-Magnons Were Caucasoid, not Negroid

There's a fantasy among Afrocentrists that the first Europeans (Cro-Magnons and other Upper Paleolithic peoples) were totally unlike modern Europeans and instead had affinities with Sub-Saharan Africans. They cite Stringer and McKie (1998) who say that some Cro-Magnons "were more like present-day Australians or Africans", and Brace et al. (2005) who argue against continuity between Upper Paleolithic and later Europeans.

Prehistoric people were still evolving from a more generalized, archaic human morphology, so there's no reason to expect that they be exactly the same as their modern descendants. It's clear enough from the passage following the above quote that Stringer and McKie are not implying Negroid affinities:

It is a confused picture and suggests that racial differences were still developing relatively recently, and should be viewed as a very new part of the human condition. It is an important point, for it shows that humanity's modern African origin does not imply derivation from people like current Africans, because these populations must have also changed through the impact of evolution over the past 100,000 years.

And despite what Brace et al. conclude, their data still groups Cro-Magnon and Upper Paleolithic Europeans (blue) much closer to later and modern Western Eurasians than to Sub-Saharan Africans (red), while they acknowledge that prehistoric populations are distinguished by being "noticeably more robust than more recent human groups":


This robustness that links all prehistoric humans is likely what accounts for most misclassifications and the opinion that there lacks continuity with modern populations. But another factor is the condition of the skulls being analyzed. Jantz and Owsley (2003) found that poorly preserved, highly incomplete Upper Paleolithic crania are often misclassified as African, while those that have a large number of measurements show the expected European affinities:

Some of the discordance Van Vark et al. see between genetic and morphometric results may be attributable to their methodological choices. It is clear that the affiliation expressed by a given skull is not independent of the number of measurements taken from it. From their Table 3, it is evident that those skulls expressing Norse affinity are the most complete and have the highest number of measurements (x̄ = 50.8), while those expressing affinity to African populations (Bushman or Zulu) are the most incomplete, averaging just 16.8 measurements per skull. Use of highly incomplete or reconstructed crania may not yield a good estimate of their morphometric affinities. When one considers only those crania with 40 or more measurements, a majority express European affinity.

To examine this idea further, we use the eight Upper Paleolithic crania available from the test series of Howells (1995), all of which are complete. Our analysis of these eight, based on 55 measurements, is presented in Table 1. Using raw measurements, 6 of 8 express an affinity to Norse, and with the shape variables of Darroch and Mosimann (1985), 5 of 8 express a similarity to Norse. Using shape variables reduces the Mahalanobis distance, substantially in some cases. Typicality probabilities, particularly for the shape variables, show the crania to be fairly typical of recent populations. The results presented in Table 1 are consistent with the idea that Upper Paleolithic crania are, for the most part, larger and more generalized versions of recent Europeans. Howells (1995) reached a similar conclusion with respect to European Mesolithic crania.

That seems to be the general consensus, and Howells (1997) just comes right out and says it without mincing any words:

If Upper Paleolithic people were "European" from about 35,000 B.P., then such population distinctions are at least that old. And the Cro-Magnons were already racially European, i.e., Caucasoid. This has always been accepted because of the general appearance of the skulls: straight faces, narrow noses, and so forth. It is also possible to test this arithmetically. [...] Except for Predmosti 4, which is distant from every present and past population, all of these skulls show themselves to be closer to "Europeans" than to other peoples — Mladec and Abri Pataud comfortably so, the other two much more remotely.

Coon's Work Remains Valuable

Those who dislike the findings and racial classifications of early anthropologist Carleton S. Coon will try to write him off as outdated, argue that his research is superficial, or that all of his data should be thrown out because some of his theories were wrong. An appreciation written a few years after his death by a modern anthropologist disproves these claims and affirms the continuing value and influence of his work. It also shows that he was already dealing with the kind of unscientific race-denial that's so rampant today, and defending himself against the accusations of "racism" that go with it.

An enormous intellectual vigor allowed him to follow up hypotheses without becoming wedded to them. Never a writer of small papers, he looked for the larger significance. It may be said that Coon's major contributions to science were the fruitful formulations that followed from his assimilation and organization of massive amounts of information.

PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: RACIAL ADAPTATIONS

Carleton Coon's The Races of Europe (1939) began as a revision of W. Z. Ripley's 1900 work but ended as a new opus that used every scrap of published information on living populations and prehistoric human remains — and much recorded history besides. Though some of Coon's hypotheses seem dubious today, they allowed him to structure a mass of material in a way that remains impressive. This book was reprinted some years later and is still regarded as a valuable source of data.

[...]

Coon's desire was to use Darwinian adaptation to explain the physical characteristics of race. He defined these as the physical features that distinguish modern populations and in 1950 published, with S. M. Garn and J. B. Birdsell, Races: A Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man. He was exasperated by what he called the "hide-race" attitude of people who, from social or philosophical motives, seemed to deny the existence of obvious biological differences. He became indignant at any suggestion that his interest in race derived from racist motives. Although a good many articles had been written about environmental adaptation of such traits, this book was the first to address the problem as a whole.

[...]

After holding several serious ailments at bay for some years, Carl died on June 3, 1981, at his West Gloucester home, shortly before his seventy-seventh birthday. His brilliance left a lasting mark on a generation of anthropologists.

W. W. Howells. "Biographical Memoirs V.58". National Academy of Sciences, 1989.

Carthaginian Reconstruction

Science and art bring young Carthaginian 'back to life'

By Kaouther Larbi
Agence France Presse
Oct. 28, 2010

CARTHAGE, Tunisia (AFP) — Clad in a white linen tunic, sandals in the ancient Carthaginian style and a pendant and beads like those found with his remains, 2,500-year-old "Ariche" has virtually come back to life on the sacred hill of Byrsa where he was born.

The outcome of scientific cooperation between France and Tunisia, the young man has been remodelled and returned to his native soil in historical Carthage, a city state that lasted from 814 B.C. to 146 B.C. He will be given a place of honour in the museum of modern-day Carthage, north of Tunis.

"The distance that separates the centuries has been erased, the bones are given flesh and the eyes light up anew in a young man who lived right here six centuries before our own era," French ambassador Pierre Menat said at the opening of the exhibition last week.

The modern history of the youth of Byrsa began in 1994 with the fortuitous discovery of a sepulchre on the southern flank of the hill, which is one of the most famous sites of antique Carthage. A joint Franco-Tunisian team moved in to excavate.

"Gone too soon, taken prematurely from life and the love of those close to him (...) he was doubtless of noble birth and his body was buried in this generous African soil," said Leila Sebai, president of the International Council of Museums and commissioner of the exhibition.

An anthropological study of the skeleton showed that the man died between the age of 19 and 24, had a pretty robust physique and was 1.7 metres (five feet six inches) tall, according to a description by Jean Paul Morel, director of the French archaeological team at Carthage Byrsa.

The man from Byrsa has been rebaptised Ariche — meaning the desired man — at the initiative of Culture Minister Abderraouf Basti, who inaugurated the exhibition.

Ariche has regained an almost living human appearance very close in physiognomy to a Carthaginian of the 6th century B.C. after a dermoplastic reconstruction undertaken in Paris by Elisabeth Daynes, a sculptor specialising in hyper-realistic reconstructions.

"He comes back to us thanks to scientific rigour, notably that of paleo-anthropology and forensic medicine, but also the magic of art, that of Elisabeth Daynes, who knows how to bring many faces back from the distant past," Sebai said.

Dermoplastic reconstruction is based on a scientific technique that enables experts to restore the features of an individual with 95 percent accuracy, though some aspects, such as the colour of the eyes and the hair remain partially subjective, she added.

"We can clearly see that this exceptional witness to Carthage in the Punic era is a Mediterranean man, he has all the characteristics," noted Sihem Roudesli, a paleo-anthropologist at the Tunisian National Heritage Institute.

"I hope that like his contemporaries, legendary sailors and bringers of civilisation, this young man can travel across the seas to bear witness on other continents to the greatness of Carthage," Menat said.

Repatriated on September 24, Ariche will be on show at Byrsa until the end of March 2011 when he will travel to Lebanon, the land of the Phoenicians who founded Carthage, for an exhibition at the American University of Beirut.

Link

Oldest Negroid Skull?

I had previously posted that the 6500-year-old Asselar skeleton discovered in Mali was the earliest example of a Negroid African. But it turns out there's a slightly older skull with Negroid features from farther south in West Africa (Iwo Eleru, Nigeria) that seems to be a much better candidate.

Mauny, 1978:

The oldest-known skeleton of a West African was found in Nigeria at Iwo Eleru; it is of a negroid man and is dated to 9250 ± 150 BC.

Allsworth-Jones, 2002:

A human burial described as "proto-Negroid" was found at the base of the succession at Iwo Eleru with a date of 11200 ± 200 BP.

Phillipson, 2005:

A single human skeleton some 12,000 years old from the lowest level of Iwo Eleru has been described as already showing specifically negroid features....

Note that there have been other candidates for the oldest Negroid skull, but in East rather than West Africa, such as Nazlet Khater (33,000 B.P., Upper Egypt) and Jebel Sahaba or Wadi Halfa (Mesolithic Nubia). However, these are very contentious and in all likelihood not Negroid, given that East Africans were still non-Negroid until much more recently.

Brown-eyed Men Appear More Dominant

Eye color predicts but does not directly influence perceived dominance in men

Karel Kleisner et al. (2010)
Personality and Individual Differences

[...]

4. Discussion

In this study we found no effect of eye color on perceived dominance in women. On the contrary, we found a statistically significant association between the eye color and perceived dominance in men: brown-eyed men were perceived as more dominant. Furthermore, we show that iris color does not represent the trait that significantly influences perception of dominance in males. Hence, there must be some other facial characteristics responsible for the higher perceived dominance in brown-eyed males. It is evident, however, that the features standing for higher perceived dominance in males are correlated with presence of brown eyes; or alternatively, the features connected with higher perceived submissiveness in males with the blue eyes.

The question arises: why are brown-eyed males rated as more dominant than blue-eyed? Some facial features such as square jaws, thick eyebrows and broad cheekbones are linked with higher perceived dominance; facial submissiveness, on the other hand, is characterized by a round face with large eyes, smallish nose, and high eyebrows (Berry, 1990; Berry & Mcarthur, 1986; Cunningham, Barbee, & Pike, 1990; Mazur, Halpern, & Udry, 1994; Mueller & Mazur, 1997; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1994). The morphological differences between blue-eyed and brown-eyed males were visualized by deformation of thin-plate splines (Fig. 3). In contrast with blue-eyed males, brown-eyed males have statistically broader and rather massive chins, broader (laterally prolonged) mouths, larger noses, and eyes that are closer together with larger eyebrows. In contrast, blue-eyed males show smaller and sharper chins, mouths that are laterally narrower, noses smaller, and a greater span between the eyes. Especially the broader massive chin, bigger nose, and larger eyebrows of brown-eyed males may explain their higher perceived dominance.


Fig. 3. (a and b): Visualizations of shape regression on eye color in males by thin-plate spline deformation grids illustrating differences in facial shape between blue-eyed (a) and brown-eyed (b) males; the links connecting the landmarks are drawn for better imaging of differences in the shape of face. (c and d): Composite images of 20 photographs of each group unwarped to fixed landmark configuration predicted by shape regression of blue-eyed (c) and brown-eyed (d) male faces. The predictions are magnified three times for better readability. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
However, it is not easy to explain how iris color, which is determined mostly by one or a few genes, can correlate with physiognomic dominance/submissiveness, which is determined by a combination of several independent morphological traits. Theoretically, the allele for brown eyes should "move" from "submissive physiognomy genotype" to "dominant physiognomy genotype" and back again from generation to generation due to genetic recombination and segregation.

In principle, there are three possible explanations for the higher perceived dominance of brown-eyed males, the pleiotropy hypothesis, genetic linkage hypothesis and social feedback hypothesis. The pleiotropy hypothesis presumes that the genes for iris color (such as HERC2 or OCA2) also influence other morphological traits associated with perceived dominance due to its pleiotropy effect. One can speculate, for instance, that the gene influences the production or metabolism of common precursors of adrenaline and melanin, e.g. DOPA or tyrosine.

The genetic linkage hypothesis presumes that the genes influencing iris color are in genetic linkage with genes influencing morphological traits associated with perceived dominance, for example the gene influencing the production of testosterone. If this is so, strong linkage disequilibrium between these loci should exist in the current Czech population. Repeating this study in other populations with polymorphism in eye color can test this hypothesis.

The social feedback hypothesis is based on the presumption that blue and brown-eyed subjects are treated differently within their social surroundings, e.g. by their parents and peers. Young children usually have blue eyes, while definitive iris color develops during the first years of life (Bito, Matheny, Cruickshanks, Nondahl, & Carino, 1997). It is possible that subjects with blue eyes are treated as a small child for a longer period than brown-eyed children. Such early social experience may have been literally "inscribed" into their faces, preserved until adulthood, and finally bring on the perception of higher submissiveness. Rosenberg and Kagan (1987, 1989) investigated the association between eye color and behavioral inhibition, revealing that children with blue eyes are more inhibited. Coplan et al. (1998) found a significant interaction between eye color and social wariness within preschoolers. Blue-eyed males were rated as more socially wary, i.e. being more temperamentally inhibited, displaying more reticent behavior and having more internalizing problems, than males with brown eyes, though there were no differences between blue- and brown-eyed females (Coplan et al., 1998). To test the third hypothesis, it would be necessary to perform a longitudinal study on preschool children to search whether the differences in perceived dominance (and social wariness) develops only after the transformation of iris color from blue to brown.

Link (PDF)

Study Clarification V

This study claims Sub-Saharan African affinities in a Byzantine population from southwest Turkey, excavated at the archeological site of Sagalassos, and ridiculously extrapolates from that similar affinities in Mesolithic and Neolithic populations throughout North Africa, West Asia and Europe. The problem is, none of it is supported either by the present data or the other sources cited.

[NB: The study is much more noteworthy for demonstrating once again the Caucasoid affinities of Ancient Egyptians and Nubians, which the Afrocentrists who quote it selectively always fail to notice.]

Study:

Cranial Discrete Traits in a Byzantine Population and Eastern
Mediterranean Population Movements

Ricaut and Waelkens (2008)
Human Biology

Link to Abstract

Misused Quotes:

Finally, as noted previously, intriguing affinity patterns of the Sagalassos population have been detected without obvious explanations: on the one hand, with two populations from northern and central Europe (Scandinavia and Germany); and on the other hand, with two sub-Saharan populations (Somalia and Gabon).

[...]

From the Mesolithic to the early Neolithic period different lines of evidence support an out-of-Africa Mesolithic migration to the Levant by northeastern African groups that had biological affinities with sub-Saharan populations.

Clarification:

Affinities with Somalis are easy enough to explain, owing to that population's Caucasoid ancestry. Affinities with Gabon not so much. But it turns out that these are tenuous at best and not manifested in all of the data:

Finally, a detailed review of the different statistical tests (MMD_st; MDS and Ward clustering) shows that the unexpected biological proximity of some northern and central European and sub-Saharan populations to the Sagalassos population is not supported to the same significance. Indeed, as seen by the MMD_st values displayed in Table 3, Scandinavians and Germans (MMD_st of 0.72 and 1.02, respectively) present stronger affinity to Sagalassos than populations from Somalia and Gabon, which have nearly significant MMD_st values (1.68 and 1.93, respectively). In addition, only the biological affinity between the Sagalassos and Scandinavian populations suggested by the MMD_st values is preserved when all the comparative populations are considered (see Figures 2 and 3).

Indeed, Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate that the true affinities of the Sagalassos population (and also the Ancient Egyptians and Nubians) are with Western Eurasians/Caucasoids:

The MDS representation of the global data set of 28 populations (Figure 2) shows roughly three main population clusters: (1) Central, Northeast, and East Eurasian populations, which are found in the top left; (2) West Eurasian and ancient Egyptian and Sudanese populations in the lower part; and (3) recent sub-Saharan populations in the top right. The Sagalassos population clusters with the second group and is most closely related to Greek, Cypriot/Turkish, and Scandinavian populations.

The dendrogram produced by Ward's clustering procedure for the global data set is shown in Figure 3 and provides a relatively similar representation of the MMD_st distance matrix than that provide by the MDS analysis. The populations clearly fall into two groups. The first main group can be broken down into two subgroups: (1) all the recent sub-Saharan populations and (2) mainly Central, East, and Northeast Eurasians. West Eurasians form the second main group, which is also subdivided into two subgroups. One of these subgroups includes all the eastern Mediterranean populations (three ancient Egyptian/Sudanese populations from Naqada, Gizeh, and Kerma as well as the Cypriot/Turkish, Greek, and Sagalassian populations) and the Scandinavian sample; the second subgroup includes the other West Eurasian populations.

Yet even with this admitted lack of support for their main claim, the authors go on to speculate at length about how these non-existent "Sub-Saharan morphological elements" could have entered the Sagalassos population, which leads them to cite all sorts of dubious conclusions about Nazlet Khater Man, Mesolithic Nubians, Natufians and Neolithic Farmers, all tied together with the genetic "evidence" of adaptive sickle cell and North African haplogroup E-M78.

Another perfectly good study marred by poor analysis that unfortunately plays right into the hands of people with an Afrocentric racial agenda.