Milk does not naturally contain very much vitamin D, so that's a silly reason to expect lactase persistence to have evolved. A much simpler explanation is that it massively increases the calories available to pastoralist populations.
SLC24A5 is an interesting gene - I don't think Vitamin D is the full story. It's an SNP that is alone responsible for 25-40% of skin tone difference between Europeans and West Africans, and is virtually fixed in European populations (99%). However it's also under selection in places like the Ethiopian highlands, where sun exposure is presumably not an issue. Furthermore, if it were just about Vitamin D, you would expect that just about any loss-of-function allele would do. Compare to mutations that confer malaria resistance - there's a whole wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_resistance_to_ma... - why do we not see the same for skin tone variation in Europe? Why is this single point mutation omnipresent, if it's theoretically only lightening the skin so that Vitamin D synthesis is easier?
Milk does not naturally contain very much vitamin D, so that's a silly reason to expect lactase persistence to have evolved.
The original study[1] doesn't suggest a connection between lactase persistence and vitamin D. It does discuss those topics in close proximity, though, which I suspect misled the author of the (popularizing) Science article.
That is the driving force for lighter skin (unless your diet is mostly fish, such as the Inuit). Skin gets darker again when migration towards sunnier climates happens: while UV light is essential for the synthesis of D3, it also destroys folic acid / vitamin B9 [1], which is essential when the neural tube of a fetus is being formed.
And since this mutation is so very visible, maybe here sexual selection plays a role, just like it is suspected with blond hair?
I'm not saying vitamin D isn't involved; I'm just wondering whether it's the whole story. Is this single nucleotide change in SLC24A5 really the only way to decrease melanin production without having other harmful side effects? Naively I would expect lots of ways to have a loss-of-function mutation; why is this one so common? Sexual selection could be a factor, but that is not politically correct to say.
> Is this single nucleotide change in SLC24A5 really the only way to decrease melanin production without having other harmful side effects? Naively I would expect lots of ways to have a loss-of-function mutation
In Asia, light skin evolved separately and is using different genes.
>>However it's also under selection in places like the Ethiopian highlands, where sun exposure is presumably not an issue.
The Ethiopian highlands have been historically productive in agriculture. Agricultural diets contain less Vitamin D, increasing the selective pressure for lighter skin tones.
The highlands are also cooler than other regions of Africa at similar latitudes, resulting in more clothing being required on average. More clothing necessitates more UVB absorption per unit of skin exposed, which would further select for lighten skin tones.
Completely different set of mutations. So whatever advantage is conferred by SLC24A5 mutation is probably matched by something else in East Asians (possibly EDAR)
So vitamin D is the driving factor: either you lose melanin, or become lactose tolerant, or you die. With dark skin, you can't make enough D from sunlight. If you can't drink milk, you can't get it from diet. Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny.
> So vitamin D is the driving factor: either you lose melanin, or become lactose tolerant
That doesn't make any sense, unless it's reinforced milk contains almost no vitamin D (2 IU per 100g, recommendations are 2500 IU/day for children aged 1~3 to 4000 IU/day for adults). Plus there are lactase persistence clusters outside Europe which make even less sense given the Vitamin D hypothesis (e.g. arabian peninsula, Western Africa).
Lactase persistence overlaps much better with historical pastoralism, which makes a lot more sense: milk is high in calories[0], being able to use these calories when they're available is advantageous. Plus it also provides some fat, proteins and B2, B12 and Calcium micro-nutrients in appreciable quantities (15, 20 and 10% DRI respectively for un-fortified whole milk).
edit: even more so local, small-scale pastoralism: before refrigeration you'd have had to consume the milk within hours so either a few familial animals or a small herd at the tribal/village level. That could also explain why some cultures have a history of dairy products but not of consuming milk directly (and thus low lactase persistence).
[0] cow milk is ~250kJ/100g, and much of that is locked in the ~5g of lactose
Wouldn’t cheese be concentrating the vitamins in milk, sort of fortifying it in as much as it’s making it easier to consume the amounts of milk you need for vitamin d?
Milk does not naturally contain vitamin D; fish, mushrooms, and egg yolks are the only natural sources, but the mushrooms have to be exposed to sunlight (which is unlikely; they grow in the shade) and nobody eats that many eggs, so only pescetarian cultures retain darker skin at northern latitudes.
> Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny.
A (perhaps pedantic) correction: it's more accurate to say that mutants who were pale-skinned milk drinkers were more successful at surviving and proliferating in Northern Europe, and so the population gained this mutation. Natural selection is not a driven process, it doesn't have an objective; it is, however, a driving process, where it favors one aspect of a population over another.
I think the correct wording is always important when talking about natural selection because these processes are more stochastic then we tend to believe.
This seems like an over-application of the (valid) claim that evolution doesn’t have any specific objective. The sentence you quote doesn’t describe an objective. It only describes a necessity.
Milk is calcium. Colder climate - bigger body. That needs calcium. Thus milk and vitamin D, both are necessary. Thus pale skin and lactose. Either alone isn't enough.
I'm struggling to understand this, tallness? Didn't that only happen to some European countries in the past hundred years? Because of diet? The ability to digest milk? The Hindu civilisation is one of the oldest in the world and milk and cows are very much a first class thing, suggesting it's not jsut Europeans that could digest milk, but other culture for a very long time. Maybe I'm reading this wrong but how does this explain the colour difference between black people and Asian people? Some black people are very dark compared to other black people but from the same areas
Some of this is tricky to untangle, because it's easy to intentionally or unintentionally conflate genetics/race, culture, and language, but at least culturally/linguistically the people of North India are related to the majority of the peoples of Europe. So Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Assamese, Nepali etc. are all Indo-European languages, as are Latin, Greek, Russian, Danish, Icelandic, English, Welsh etc. Comparison of early Indo-European texts strongly suggest that the first classness of cows/milk in India is a feature of (early) Indo-European cultures more generally. Indian skin colour shows a great deal of variation, including very pale and very dark and points inbetween. Which presumably correlates in part to the India having experienced a large number of migrations over a fairly long period of time.
So India likely has milk-digesting ability at least in part from the same root as the European milk-digesting ability. But the (Indo-)European mutation doesn't seem to have been the only one: https://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-... Also in Western Africa, as well as in the Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Africa there seem to have been independent mutations.
Just to be clear, the Indo European migration is presumed to be a trade/culture migration—there’s not a lot (any?) evidence that this resulted in much increased genetic transfer.
Furthermore, I was under the impression milk consumption generally spread from the middle east with rudimentary cheese production with rennet, reducing the lactase to an easier to digest level. This might have been after the europeans started their genetic movement, but I don’t believe that culturally the practice of milk consumption originated from Europe. Also, milk consumption has never been directly proportional to genetic disposition to it. Even now milk products can be popular in largely lactose intolerant cultures—maybe the ice cream is worth the farting!
Of course I’d love to be corrected. But you seem to be conflating two or three separate narratives here—this might be how you end up with stuff like Jared Diamond pseudoscience. In particular, I don’t believe Indo European migration was a physical migration of any particular people—and genes typically take a bit longer to move than evidence points to with the Indo European linguistic/cultural migration. This was at one point particularly key in debunking arguments like, say, “the aryan people taught the indians how to speak”. Now of course we have much richer tools at demonstrating both the diversity of known languages and deep roots connecting them, and better narratives to explain them.
But hey, I’ve also made arguments that milk drinking might provide a huge resource advantage in a world where nobody drank it, allowing for economic and reproductive benefit.... maybe the milk drinking did europeans “sprint” east.
> Just to be clear, the Indo European migration is presumed to be a trade/culture migration
Not the case. You're making the "pots, not people" case, which ancient DNA evidence has thoroughly debunked. Changes in material culture usually do indicate large-scale population movements. Yamnaya remains from the Caucuses, for example, are genetically almost identical to the ones buried in the Corded Ware culture that spread through Europe ~5000 years before present. The Yamnaya, a steppe people, completely overran Europe, and today, contribute just over 50% of the ancestry of Western European populations and who spread Indo-European languages there and elsewhere.
The idea that prehistory was full of peace, love, and gradual and voluntary cultural change is ridiculous and indefensible, especially in light of modern genetic evidence, but also on the grounds of common sense.
Why wouldn't you expect to see large scale folk migrations? We have historical records of large-scale movements (e.g., Germanic tribes from Tacitus), and one would expect similar movements, of even greater scope and intensity, to have occurred in prehistory. This kind of movement was the norm, not the exception, in prehistory.
Post-1970s thought in this area seriously annoys me. It presumes a gradual, peaceful transition everywhere at all times despite stark evidence to the contrary. Read Ward-Perkins for a good rant on how fellow historians believe, against all historical and archaeological evidence, that Rome never fell. He's as frustrated and baffled by this thinking as I am.
Though, at the same time, some of the overly racialised interpretations of the 19th-century have been shown to be rather off track. There was a picture painted of pale-skinned Sanskrit speakers sweeping into India on chariots and dominating and slaughtering dark-skinned Dravidians (and others). That does not seem well supported. The Indo-Aryan speakers certainly were warlike, but the battles narrated in the Rgveda involved Indo-Aryans on both sides, allied with non-Indo-Aryan speakers on both sides; as well as people with overtly non-Indo-Aryan names sponsoring rituals in the Rgveda. (None of this goes against your primary point. And certainly we know of plenty of militaristic invasions of India in more recent times, including the Mughals.)
> Changes in material culture usually do indicate large-scale population movements.
I wasn’t trying to contradict this, rather that the any genetic migration correlated with a culture/language migration would have likely trailed significantly speed wise and should be demonstrated, not assumed. I am certainly not arguing for a lack of conflict :)
We know of quite a number of large scale migrations into India, I don't know why we should doubt that the Indo-European entry into India contributed significant genetic material. I know there are some fairly recent studies on the actual genetic DNA material linking Indians with Europeans, but I'll have to dig these up (the language side is my area; not the genetic side).
The place of milk in especially early north Indian culture (but continuing into today, esp. say in the Punjab) is not like ice cream parlours in China or whatever. It is quite clear that a large percentage of caloric intake would have been from milk products, and seemingly not primarily cheese, but milk/cream and butter/ghee. The prominence of milk products in India for the last few thousand years is not at all in doubt (and, again, not in the sense of eating the occasional ice cream and farting).
No-one is saying that Indo-Aryan was the first language in India, so I don't know where you're bringing that in from. The Dravidian speakers emigrated into India either around the same time or before the Indo-Aryans, and the Munda speakers seem to have been there earlier than either, and it is quite clear that there was at least one other language family well established in India before the Munda speakers entered (quite possible multiple language families) as attested by the large percentage of words of completely unknown origin in languages like Hindi for agriculture/crops, as well as the languages of the Andaman islands.
>Which presumably correlates in part to the India having experienced a large number of migrations over a fairly long period of time.
This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor tens of thousands of years ago.
Another example is the eponymous R1 signature that people use to construct a particular narrative leave out the fact that R1 originated at the very least in Asia. Where exactly scientist have argued anywhere from Central, to South, to East Asia.
A more sane, and logical argument would be that at different points in time people have immigrated to India, and emigrated out of India. And not just India, through Eurasia people have traded genetics, linguistics, and culture with each other for at least 80,000 years.
That is there is not just a single large number of migration from one area to another, but multiple, and in various directions.
> This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor tens of thousands of years ago.
But presumably an ancestor shared by lots of other peoples too - I would guess European, North African, Middle Eastern, perhaps as well.
> A more sane, and logical argument would be that at different points in time people have immigrated to India, and emigrated out of India. And not just India, through Eurasia people have traded genetics, linguistics, and culture with each other for at least 80,000 years.
Yes, and in interesting ways. But speaking a language and borrowing words from a language are two different things.
I don't see how any of this argues against the linguistic and sociocultural similarities between subsets of early Europeans and subsets of early Indians which point towards shared ancestry for these two subsets.
>I don't see how any of this argues against the linguistic and sociocultural similarities between subsets of early Europeans and subsets of early Indians which point towards shared ancestry for these two subsets.
I'm not arguing against the similarities, but arguing against a central singular expansion of some group of peoples that just so coincidently called themselves "Aryan". That is there is no evidence for a singular people/civilization that originated the whole "indo-aryans". The only "Aryans" are the Vedic era nobility that has its roots in India/sanskrit.
That is the word "Aryan" is a gross example of extreme racism, prejudice, and cultural appropriate to further a racist model of human history.
"Indo-Aryan" is a widely-used technical term for a particular branch of Indo-European (actually, a sub-branch of Indo-Iranian): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages. We could call it "Indic" if that is your preference.
[Racists usurping "Aryan" for a different meaning is not what I'm talking about here, in any shape or form.
Edit to add: Yes, extending 'Aryan' to cover any larger entity than Indo-Iranian is not justified, but "Aryan" is not limited to Indic speakers:--- the Iranians certainly used a form of "Aryan" as well: thus derives the name of "Iran" itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_(word) ]
The nature of the entry of Indo-Aryan speakers into India has been discussed in more nuanced ways, but the relation of Sanskrit et al. to European languages (and the unrelatedness of Indo-Aryan to Dravidian and Munda and so) is all well established and not under debate. Either Indo-Aryan speakers migrated into India from outside, or all of the other Indo-European groups migrated out of India. The latter, while not completely out of the question, is much less likely than the former.
>"With the information currently available, it is difficult to deduce the direction of haplogroup R1a migration either into India or out of India, although the genetic data certainly show that there was migration between the regions. Currently, CSIR-CCMB and Harvard Medical School are investigating a larger number of samples, which will hopefully throw more light on this debate." //
What is the proof Aryan Invasion. Note the current research says that ANI (Ancestral North India) and ASI (Ancestral South India) both are ancient genetically divergent (same even older ancestry) that recently went through and admixture a 1400-4000 years ago.
That is in that admixture there is no recent central asian genetics other than the one that was already there in India prior, about 12,000 years ago.
Europeans are not a homogeneous group with respect to height; for example the Dutch tend to be taller than the Italians. According to the article, even though average height did increase recently, some disposition and possibly some difference was already there in the genes of people from different parts of Europe.
It's not dairy alone that causes height gain. High dietary protein correlates with production of IGF-1 which correlates with bone growth. Casein stimulates IGF-1 production somewhat more than other proteins, but not by much. Indians eat a relatively low-protein diet due to the prevalence of vegetarianism and not actually that much dairy; most of it is fermented, which, IIRC, deactivates casein.
And, as a side note, height correlates with cancer risk "Its results found that for every extra 10cm (4in) of height, when fully grown, the risk of developing cancer increased by 18% in women and 11% in men.": https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34414446
Mechanism unknown, but the mentioned growth factors might be the cause, similar to the increased insulin presence wrt. obesity.
The most convincing explanation for me is that larger people simply have more volume for cancer to start in. If you assume an equal chance for a cancer to start in any cubic centimeter of human body, you'd expect men to be more vulnerable than women to cancer, which is true. You'd also expect height differences to raise the likelihood of cancer with more height and lower it with less, and specifically you'd expect that effect to be stronger (when measured absolutely - "10cm (4in) of height", rather than proportionally to mean volume or mean height) in women, because on average, women are shorter.
You'd also expect fat people to get more cancer, and native American Hispanic or East Asian descended populations in the US to get less than the US average. This is what happens.
Of course there are a million other factors and all cancers are different, but in the general case you can guess the relative cancer occurrence between populations with a guess at the difference in their mean volumes.
This won't keep people from trying to sell you a diet, though. Cancer is terrifying, and the idea that we can control it makes us relax. If you eat very little food, especially in childhood when you need calories to grow, you will get less cancer.
Isn't it obvious? So their heads are closer to the Sun and don't freeze up ;-)
Regarding skin tones: What often registers simply as 'black' or 'Asian' from a predominantly white perspective comprises a wide variety of phenotypes and backgrounds, just as there's considerable variation in how white people from different regions or countries look.
WARNING! GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION: Potential for tallness is genetic. How much individuals realise of that potential is a matter of childhood diet and health, which has grown very good in Europe during the last 5-10 generations.
> suggesting it's not jsut Europeans that could digest milk, but other culture for a very long time.
The same flood of people moved into Europe, the Indian subcontinent and Persia around the same time, bringing genes, language, religion etc with them.
(They presumably went elsewhere too with less success.)
> Maybe I'm reading this wrong but how does this explain the colour difference between black people and Asian people?
It doesn't; you're reading the summary title correctly but that doesn't reflect what the study actually says.
The study finds evidence that the general european population acquired a light skin and some other traits due to an influx of people carrying a bunch of genetic, linguistic and cultural traits who arrived about 4500 years ago. (Some of those same people are believed to have also headed around the same time in India and Persia, among other places). The study notes that there were already light skinned people in scandinavia around the same time.
So it doesn't explain "how", just points out evidence that most European dwellers (including those in the British Isles) were dark skinned until fairly recently, unlike the dioramas one finds in museums.
Most people can consume cheese and yogurt, but cannot consume raw milk. This is the distinction commonly meant by lactose tolerance (whether it holds up to a technical analysis or not).
I assume you meant raw pasteurized milk. I've seen anecdotal claims that drinking actual raw milk causes an increase in lactose tolerance, the hypothesis being that you lose some beneficial bacteria during the pasteurization process (not to mention various proteins are denatured).
Some types of cheese and yogurt have greatly reduced amounts of lactose compared to plain milk. Many people who can't tolerate plain milk can still tolerate some types of cheese and yogurt.
I was surprised to see the article state "The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes."
"presumed"??!!
I've always thought there was some scientific evidence for this and not mere presumption. Is there not some evidence about the skin coloration of our African ancestors of different periods?
To say the least, it's kind of difficult to scientifically prove the skin color of someone from 40,000 years ago. Fossilized bones don't tell you if someone was black or white or whatever. We're not even entirely sure what skin color ancient Egyptians had.
Much of what we know about pre-history is educated guesses based on a tiny amount of evidence and a lot of critical thinking.
No, because there is NO WAY Europeans came directly from Africans. There is no similarity, no common language, nothing to suggest that there was a close relationship between Africans and Europeans. On the other hand, Europeans have much more similarity with certain Arabic tribes.
Why did we evolve to rely on vitamin D in the first place? It's a hormonal substance, and doesn't carry any energy by itself, so why do we need it so badly?
Short answer it is needed for a few things in all animals, so a source is needed. Most animals can synthesize it.
In evolution, sometimes a mutation will take away the ability to synthesize a vitamin. If the organism gets enough of it from diet, this is not disadvantageous and won't be selected out.
Vitamin D deficiency is present in all primates. So that give you some notion of how long ago the synthesis was lost.
Vitamin C is similar since it is readily available in fresh meat and many plants. It is absent in Haplorhini (the dry-nosed primates).
People are so hopelessly confused about race. I recently made the mistake of reading Facebook comments on a widely shared public post of an article not unlike this one. And... So many comments attempting to graft our contemporary divisions and yes, racism, onto a story like this. It's pretty simple to think that so many years ago, the distinctions were simply not there, to the extent where you would have seemed like a crazy person trying to impose them. And yet all people wanted to do on that thread was talk about present differences.
You might want to read some introductory anthropology textbooks. For as long as there have been humans it has been us against them. Them/the others/the strangers/the not us are dangerous and cannot be trusted. There are specific rituals that an other must go through to become a part of the community - the means by which one of the others can become one of us. What separates us from them? It might be skin color, it might be language, it might be religion, it might be you live in the mountains and we live in the valley, you are a herder and we are farmers, you are rural and we are urban, you have curly hair and we have straight hair, etc. ad naseum.
You're not wrong, but it's worth saying that contemporary racism is qualitatively quite different from, say, Greek ideas about their own superiority or tribal conflicts generally.
It's very nearly a caste system- you can be born next door, speak the same language, eat the same food, think the same way, and you will be treated differently based on racial judgements. That's quite different from "we Hill People hate the River Folk and always will!"
The modern notions of race come from a specific historical moment: the invention of the African slave trade by Western European powers. If the slave trade had not happened, ideas about race would probably be radically different. Chattel slavery on an industrial scale was a new idea and its echoes will probably always be with us.
"It's very nearly a caste system- you can be born next door, speak the same language, eat the same food, think the same way, and you will be treated differently based on racial judgements."
Caste systems are nearly as much an anthropological universal (at least for civilizations) as the suspicion of outsiders that the OP mentions. Across the world you can find examples of two neighbours brought up in virtually identical conditions, but with restrictions on one due to ancestry.
One difference from a caste system- foreigners are assigned the same racial categories as locals, whereas if I visited a society with a caste system, I simply wouldn't have a caste, at least not by default. Black Africans in America are considered the same race as black Americans, regardless of sharing absolutely no recent ancestry whatsoever, and white Africans are the same race as white Americans, again without sharing any meaningful recent ancestry. A white Hispanic person will be treated as white (see: Ted Cruz) but a black one will be treated as black, even if they're literally siblings.
Racial categories mean that a white American can feel more common ground with a white Russian than his black American neighbor. American white nationalist fellow-feeling toward Russian nationalists suggests to me that it's not really about suspicion of outsiders. Racial categories cut across borders, ancestry, language, and culture.
Feeling confident that one can judge what category someone is in on sight without seeing their clothes, hearing them speak, learning their name, or knowing their ancestry is maybe not quite unique to modern racial ideas, but it certainly makes it stand out.
What do you mean by "speak the same language, eat the same food, think the same way"? It is pretty evident that this is not the case, there are a lot of variations between different groups of people and in many time it is divided by racial lines. Cast systems on the other hand is exactly the opposite, it is a system that divide people on family lineage even though all else is similiar.
We strip humanity of the old caste system- which was beeing defined by there jobs- and they go and search for new definitions, and we - the shivas, the destroyers of worlds, stand in the ruins and wrench our hands? The priest beeing shocked on the existance of untoucheables..
We crafted this moment, this is what we worked for all along.
If you can not accomplish anything in life as a commoner, you will draw meaning from what as who you where born and who your ancestors where..
You can not shake a world in its foundations and expect for good things to magically appear.
Also, the africa situation debunked a lot of left myths. All that aid, all those campaigns and ralleys, and in the end, some cultures rise and shine (china, korea, japan) from the ashes, while others just stagnate and decay, often with a painfully strong contrast existing nearby (israel).
If one does not discuss culture, and does not offer a powerfull alternative explenation, just leaving a discourse hole- people will find a answer for themselves.
The islamic worlds decay and the african mess, spilling out in all directions- sometimes the world produces the racism by just show and tell.
And yes, i know the usual explenations- africa is exploited, the islamic world has one huge conspiracy against it- but honestly they are as hollow as a bell.
South korea had a conspiracy against it, china was exploited. Yet there they are.
India is independent as long as china.
At the same time, the western culture has proofen itself to be unsubstainable, with a giant economic footprint demographically dwindling away, another fact conveniently never discussed to avoid unsettling the holy cows of the sun god.
It would be a miracle if with all those holes in the narrative, the old working defaults wouldnt rear there ugly heads.
The people replying this to me don't get what I was saying. It's not worth it to apply a 21st century us or them when the particular us-es and thems in reference have not yet evolved. I would further say that if you look that far back and rather than add perspective you can only see current tensions frozen in time you are petty.
> For as long as there have been humans it has been us against them. Them/the others/the strangers/the not us are dangerous and cannot be trusted.
It's important to add that the definition of 'other' changes. In the U.S., Protestants and Catholics, Italians and Irish used to riot against each other. 'No Irish Need Apply' was appended to job postings. Jews faced significant discrimination.
Sometime around the 1930s, it shifted so that all Protestants became 'white'. Since then, all white-skinned people, including Jews, Mormons, Catholics, became 'white', generally one ethnic group. Nobody seemed to care that Mitt Romney was Mormon; none seem to care or even notice that the US Supreme Court has no Protestants (unless Gorsuch is one).
Not only that but we are talking about a timeframe in which any of our present divisions are totally not fathomable let alone in existence.
I take exception even with your examples. How long has there been an "Italy"? In one sense, since the current state emerged in 1861. In another, Italia would only have meant land south of the Rubicon, excluding northern Italy. In another still, it's probably some Etruscan word with some completely different meaning. (Just a guess, I have not looked it up.)
So when you go all the way back to when Europeans adapted for lighter skin and before... There is no "Italy". Maybe even there isn't any "Europe". I think the people answering my comment with "but it's always been us vs them" are really grasping for some cynicism to make themselves feel superior, because I would ask, who exactly is the us or the them they are talking about? Because no current group existed. It is constantly changing. That is the whole point.
Race, religion, nationalism, social status, me vs. you.. we’ve been at this for ages. Has there really been a point in time where the human collective consciousness hasn’t involved a sense of duality?
> Has there really been a point in time where the human collective consciousness hasn’t involved a sense of duality?
Of course not, but that's a binary distinction - there 0 'duality' or there is >0 duality. There is a big difference in civil rights, integration, etc. between now and 200 years ago.
> It's pretty simple to think that so many years ago, the distinctions were simply not there, to the extent where you would have seemed like a crazy person trying to impose them. And yet all people wanted to do on that thread was talk about present differences.
Far of "the other" has existed about as long as humans.
SLC24A5 is an interesting gene - I don't think Vitamin D is the full story. It's an SNP that is alone responsible for 25-40% of skin tone difference between Europeans and West Africans, and is virtually fixed in European populations (99%). However it's also under selection in places like the Ethiopian highlands, where sun exposure is presumably not an issue. Furthermore, if it were just about Vitamin D, you would expect that just about any loss-of-function allele would do. Compare to mutations that confer malaria resistance - there's a whole wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_resistance_to_ma... - why do we not see the same for skin tone variation in Europe? Why is this single point mutation omnipresent, if it's theoretically only lightening the skin so that Vitamin D synthesis is easier?
The original study[1] doesn't suggest a connection between lactase persistence and vitamin D. It does discuss those topics in close proximity, though, which I suspect misled the author of the (popularizing) Science article.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/10/016477
That is the driving force for lighter skin (unless your diet is mostly fish, such as the Inuit). Skin gets darker again when migration towards sunnier climates happens: while UV light is essential for the synthesis of D3, it also destroys folic acid / vitamin B9 [1], which is essential when the neural tube of a fetus is being formed.
And since this mutation is so very visible, maybe here sexual selection plays a role, just like it is suspected with blond hair?
1: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140321095240.h...
In Asia, light skin evolved separately and is using different genes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#East_Asia
The Ethiopian highlands have been historically productive in agriculture. Agricultural diets contain less Vitamin D, increasing the selective pressure for lighter skin tones.
The highlands are also cooler than other regions of Africa at similar latitudes, resulting in more clothing being required on average. More clothing necessitates more UVB absorption per unit of skin exposed, which would further select for lighten skin tones.
Cool.
That doesn't make any sense, unless it's reinforced milk contains almost no vitamin D (2 IU per 100g, recommendations are 2500 IU/day for children aged 1~3 to 4000 IU/day for adults). Plus there are lactase persistence clusters outside Europe which make even less sense given the Vitamin D hypothesis (e.g. arabian peninsula, Western Africa).
Lactase persistence overlaps much better with historical pastoralism, which makes a lot more sense: milk is high in calories[0], being able to use these calories when they're available is advantageous. Plus it also provides some fat, proteins and B2, B12 and Calcium micro-nutrients in appreciable quantities (15, 20 and 10% DRI respectively for un-fortified whole milk).
edit: even more so local, small-scale pastoralism: before refrigeration you'd have had to consume the milk within hours so either a few familial animals or a small herd at the tribal/village level. That could also explain why some cultures have a history of dairy products but not of consuming milk directly (and thus low lactase persistence).
[0] cow milk is ~250kJ/100g, and much of that is locked in the ~5g of lactose
A (perhaps pedantic) correction: it's more accurate to say that mutants who were pale-skinned milk drinkers were more successful at surviving and proliferating in Northern Europe, and so the population gained this mutation. Natural selection is not a driven process, it doesn't have an objective; it is, however, a driving process, where it favors one aspect of a population over another.
I think the correct wording is always important when talking about natural selection because these processes are more stochastic then we tend to believe.
So India likely has milk-digesting ability at least in part from the same root as the European milk-digesting ability. But the (Indo-)European mutation doesn't seem to have been the only one: https://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-... Also in Western Africa, as well as in the Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Africa there seem to have been independent mutations.
Furthermore, I was under the impression milk consumption generally spread from the middle east with rudimentary cheese production with rennet, reducing the lactase to an easier to digest level. This might have been after the europeans started their genetic movement, but I don’t believe that culturally the practice of milk consumption originated from Europe. Also, milk consumption has never been directly proportional to genetic disposition to it. Even now milk products can be popular in largely lactose intolerant cultures—maybe the ice cream is worth the farting!
Of course I’d love to be corrected. But you seem to be conflating two or three separate narratives here—this might be how you end up with stuff like Jared Diamond pseudoscience. In particular, I don’t believe Indo European migration was a physical migration of any particular people—and genes typically take a bit longer to move than evidence points to with the Indo European linguistic/cultural migration. This was at one point particularly key in debunking arguments like, say, “the aryan people taught the indians how to speak”. Now of course we have much richer tools at demonstrating both the diversity of known languages and deep roots connecting them, and better narratives to explain them.
But hey, I’ve also made arguments that milk drinking might provide a huge resource advantage in a world where nobody drank it, allowing for economic and reproductive benefit.... maybe the milk drinking did europeans “sprint” east.
Not the case. You're making the "pots, not people" case, which ancient DNA evidence has thoroughly debunked. Changes in material culture usually do indicate large-scale population movements. Yamnaya remains from the Caucuses, for example, are genetically almost identical to the ones buried in the Corded Ware culture that spread through Europe ~5000 years before present. The Yamnaya, a steppe people, completely overran Europe, and today, contribute just over 50% of the ancestry of Western European populations and who spread Indo-European languages there and elsewhere.
The idea that prehistory was full of peace, love, and gradual and voluntary cultural change is ridiculous and indefensible, especially in light of modern genetic evidence, but also on the grounds of common sense.
Why wouldn't you expect to see large scale folk migrations? We have historical records of large-scale movements (e.g., Germanic tribes from Tacitus), and one would expect similar movements, of even greater scope and intensity, to have occurred in prehistory. This kind of movement was the norm, not the exception, in prehistory.
Post-1970s thought in this area seriously annoys me. It presumes a gradual, peaceful transition everywhere at all times despite stark evidence to the contrary. Read Ward-Perkins for a good rant on how fellow historians believe, against all historical and archaeological evidence, that Rome never fell. He's as frustrated and baffled by this thinking as I am.
I wasn’t trying to contradict this, rather that the any genetic migration correlated with a culture/language migration would have likely trailed significantly speed wise and should be demonstrated, not assumed. I am certainly not arguing for a lack of conflict :)
The place of milk in especially early north Indian culture (but continuing into today, esp. say in the Punjab) is not like ice cream parlours in China or whatever. It is quite clear that a large percentage of caloric intake would have been from milk products, and seemingly not primarily cheese, but milk/cream and butter/ghee. The prominence of milk products in India for the last few thousand years is not at all in doubt (and, again, not in the sense of eating the occasional ice cream and farting).
No-one is saying that Indo-Aryan was the first language in India, so I don't know where you're bringing that in from. The Dravidian speakers emigrated into India either around the same time or before the Indo-Aryans, and the Munda speakers seem to have been there earlier than either, and it is quite clear that there was at least one other language family well established in India before the Munda speakers entered (quite possible multiple language families) as attested by the large percentage of words of completely unknown origin in languages like Hindi for agriculture/crops, as well as the languages of the Andaman islands.
So there is some type of link but most likely both came from the Eurasian steppe and have an ancestral link.
This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor tens of thousands of years ago.
Another example is the eponymous R1 signature that people use to construct a particular narrative leave out the fact that R1 originated at the very least in Asia. Where exactly scientist have argued anywhere from Central, to South, to East Asia.
A more sane, and logical argument would be that at different points in time people have immigrated to India, and emigrated out of India. And not just India, through Eurasia people have traded genetics, linguistics, and culture with each other for at least 80,000 years.
That is there is not just a single large number of migration from one area to another, but multiple, and in various directions.
But presumably an ancestor shared by lots of other peoples too - I would guess European, North African, Middle Eastern, perhaps as well.
> A more sane, and logical argument would be that at different points in time people have immigrated to India, and emigrated out of India. And not just India, through Eurasia people have traded genetics, linguistics, and culture with each other for at least 80,000 years.
Yes, and in interesting ways. But speaking a language and borrowing words from a language are two different things.
I don't see how any of this argues against the linguistic and sociocultural similarities between subsets of early Europeans and subsets of early Indians which point towards shared ancestry for these two subsets.
I'm not arguing against the similarities, but arguing against a central singular expansion of some group of peoples that just so coincidently called themselves "Aryan". That is there is no evidence for a singular people/civilization that originated the whole "indo-aryans". The only "Aryans" are the Vedic era nobility that has its roots in India/sanskrit.
That is the word "Aryan" is a gross example of extreme racism, prejudice, and cultural appropriate to further a racist model of human history.
[Racists usurping "Aryan" for a different meaning is not what I'm talking about here, in any shape or form.
Edit to add: Yes, extending 'Aryan' to cover any larger entity than Indo-Iranian is not justified, but "Aryan" is not limited to Indic speakers:--- the Iranians certainly used a form of "Aryan" as well: thus derives the name of "Iran" itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_(word) ]
]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/how-europeans-m...
I look forward to a rebuttal from the Daily Mail.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/too-early-to-settle-th... has this:
>"With the information currently available, it is difficult to deduce the direction of haplogroup R1a migration either into India or out of India, although the genetic data certainly show that there was migration between the regions. Currently, CSIR-CCMB and Harvard Medical School are investigating a larger number of samples, which will hopefully throw more light on this debate." //
That is in that admixture there is no recent central asian genetics other than the one that was already there in India prior, about 12,000 years ago.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3769933/
Mechanism unknown, but the mentioned growth factors might be the cause, similar to the increased insulin presence wrt. obesity.
You'd also expect fat people to get more cancer, and native American Hispanic or East Asian descended populations in the US to get less than the US average. This is what happens.
Of course there are a million other factors and all cancers are different, but in the general case you can guess the relative cancer occurrence between populations with a guess at the difference in their mean volumes.
This won't keep people from trying to sell you a diet, though. Cancer is terrifying, and the idea that we can control it makes us relax. If you eat very little food, especially in childhood when you need calories to grow, you will get less cancer.
Regarding skin tones: What often registers simply as 'black' or 'Asian' from a predominantly white perspective comprises a wide variety of phenotypes and backgrounds, just as there's considerable variation in how white people from different regions or countries look.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The same flood of people moved into Europe, the Indian subcontinent and Persia around the same time, bringing genes, language, religion etc with them.
(They presumably went elsewhere too with less success.)
> Maybe I'm reading this wrong but how does this explain the colour difference between black people and Asian people?
It doesn't; you're reading the summary title correctly but that doesn't reflect what the study actually says.
The study finds evidence that the general european population acquired a light skin and some other traits due to an influx of people carrying a bunch of genetic, linguistic and cultural traits who arrived about 4500 years ago. (Some of those same people are believed to have also headed around the same time in India and Persia, among other places). The study notes that there were already light skinned people in scandinavia around the same time.
So it doesn't explain "how", just points out evidence that most European dwellers (including those in the British Isles) were dark skinned until fairly recently, unlike the dioramas one finds in museums.
"presumed"??!!
I've always thought there was some scientific evidence for this and not mere presumption. Is there not some evidence about the skin coloration of our African ancestors of different periods?
Much of what we know about pre-history is educated guesses based on a tiny amount of evidence and a lot of critical thinking.
In evolution, sometimes a mutation will take away the ability to synthesize a vitamin. If the organism gets enough of it from diet, this is not disadvantageous and won't be selected out.
Vitamin D deficiency is present in all primates. So that give you some notion of how long ago the synthesis was lost.
Vitamin C is similar since it is readily available in fresh meat and many plants. It is absent in Haplorhini (the dry-nosed primates).
It's very nearly a caste system- you can be born next door, speak the same language, eat the same food, think the same way, and you will be treated differently based on racial judgements. That's quite different from "we Hill People hate the River Folk and always will!"
The modern notions of race come from a specific historical moment: the invention of the African slave trade by Western European powers. If the slave trade had not happened, ideas about race would probably be radically different. Chattel slavery on an industrial scale was a new idea and its echoes will probably always be with us.
Caste systems are nearly as much an anthropological universal (at least for civilizations) as the suspicion of outsiders that the OP mentions. Across the world you can find examples of two neighbours brought up in virtually identical conditions, but with restrictions on one due to ancestry.
Racial categories mean that a white American can feel more common ground with a white Russian than his black American neighbor. American white nationalist fellow-feeling toward Russian nationalists suggests to me that it's not really about suspicion of outsiders. Racial categories cut across borders, ancestry, language, and culture.
Feeling confident that one can judge what category someone is in on sight without seeing their clothes, hearing them speak, learning their name, or knowing their ancestry is maybe not quite unique to modern racial ideas, but it certainly makes it stand out.
We strip humanity of the old caste system- which was beeing defined by there jobs- and they go and search for new definitions, and we - the shivas, the destroyers of worlds, stand in the ruins and wrench our hands? The priest beeing shocked on the existance of untoucheables..
We crafted this moment, this is what we worked for all along. If you can not accomplish anything in life as a commoner, you will draw meaning from what as who you where born and who your ancestors where..
You can not shake a world in its foundations and expect for good things to magically appear.
Also, the africa situation debunked a lot of left myths. All that aid, all those campaigns and ralleys, and in the end, some cultures rise and shine (china, korea, japan) from the ashes, while others just stagnate and decay, often with a painfully strong contrast existing nearby (israel).
If one does not discuss culture, and does not offer a powerfull alternative explenation, just leaving a discourse hole- people will find a answer for themselves.
The islamic worlds decay and the african mess, spilling out in all directions- sometimes the world produces the racism by just show and tell.
And yes, i know the usual explenations- africa is exploited, the islamic world has one huge conspiracy against it- but honestly they are as hollow as a bell. South korea had a conspiracy against it, china was exploited. Yet there they are. India is independent as long as china.
At the same time, the western culture has proofen itself to be unsubstainable, with a giant economic footprint demographically dwindling away, another fact conveniently never discussed to avoid unsettling the holy cows of the sun god.
It would be a miracle if with all those holes in the narrative, the old working defaults wouldnt rear there ugly heads.
It's important to add that the definition of 'other' changes. In the U.S., Protestants and Catholics, Italians and Irish used to riot against each other. 'No Irish Need Apply' was appended to job postings. Jews faced significant discrimination.
Sometime around the 1930s, it shifted so that all Protestants became 'white'. Since then, all white-skinned people, including Jews, Mormons, Catholics, became 'white', generally one ethnic group. Nobody seemed to care that Mitt Romney was Mormon; none seem to care or even notice that the US Supreme Court has no Protestants (unless Gorsuch is one).
I take exception even with your examples. How long has there been an "Italy"? In one sense, since the current state emerged in 1861. In another, Italia would only have meant land south of the Rubicon, excluding northern Italy. In another still, it's probably some Etruscan word with some completely different meaning. (Just a guess, I have not looked it up.)
So when you go all the way back to when Europeans adapted for lighter skin and before... There is no "Italy". Maybe even there isn't any "Europe". I think the people answering my comment with "but it's always been us vs them" are really grasping for some cynicism to make themselves feel superior, because I would ask, who exactly is the us or the them they are talking about? Because no current group existed. It is constantly changing. That is the whole point.
(I'm responding to it shifted so that all Protestants became 'white'. which could just be an accidental misphrasing)
One supposed exchange from over 2,500 years ago: https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/buddha-talks-brahmin-suprema...
Of course not, but that's a binary distinction - there 0 'duality' or there is >0 duality. There is a big difference in civil rights, integration, etc. between now and 200 years ago.
Far of "the other" has existed about as long as humans.
;)
(it's a joke in case someone is unsure about it)