Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans(Lazaridis 2013)

[Artek]

If by previous, you mean roughly a century ago...

Let's be honest, those representations exist primarily on anthroforums and in the books of early 20th century, moustache-twirling armchair anthropologists who wanted their pasty-faced likeness to be the pinnacle of human ascendency.

Past 5,000 years ago, swarthoids were predominate in the European population and the world.

I've never said that was in another way as you write . People just looked on anthrophoras on those depigmented, modern Dalofaelids and they imagined - "wow, that must be a representation of pre-neolithic European Race. It's so awesome". Of course that's a nonsense, especially after recent discoveries. We'll learn more than that, in the next year many aDNA results from Northern Europe are coming!

[Artek]

It could be something to do with that ANE component, or maybe a later development that just happened to coincide with areas that were already high in blue eyes? From what i remember in most places light hair correlates very well with light eyes, and not so well with dark eyes, and vice-versa - at least in central-northern Europe (the ratio is probably a bit different in the British Isles, where there's more/the same light eyes but also more dark hair):
http://www.haar-und-psychologie.de/h...itzerland.html

That's undeniable. I think some miscorelations may be caused by slightly different character of recessiveness in light hair and light eyes allele(aren't light hair more recessive than light eyes?)

Either that or we just haven't found any hunter-gatherers yet that had light hair - the Hunter-Gatherer does have slightly more chance for light hair than the farmer, but it's negligible in both. So i'd guess it was something later.

So for now - we have a pigmentation data for an UP example, mesolithic examples and neolithic farmers. Then we have a gap till the Iron Age R1a Andronovo samples, which were predominantly light. We also have some other steppe examples, that were considered to be rather light haired but darker-eyed on average.(abstract of this germany study was published some time ago("neue Blick auf Die Eurasischen Steppe or something) but detailed information will come later. This aforementioned gap is relevant.

In terms of genetics, it's surprising that the Scots have almost as much ANE as the Estonians, although the Estonians being overall lowest in EEF contribution is not surprising i guess. Things emanating from the south and south-east always seem to get to north-east Europe last, like Christianity as well as farming, and of course the Roman Empire never got there either.

I haven't read all the data, but it can be an issue with sampling.

[Gospodine]

Yeah it's in the supplementary data afaik. Both had dark brown hair, the farmer had brown eyes, hunter had blue or light eyes, and the farmer had lighter skin than the hunter-gatherer.

That shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
The Neolithic farmer lived in rudimentary dwellings, wore more clothing, and exposed himself less to the elements in general while the hunter-gatherer might have found solace in a cave or shady area from time to time, but that was in between incredibly long intervals of continually hunting, rain or shine. The necessity of hunting invariably meant the hunter would be exposed to the sun far more of the time, while the farmer could grow grain, harvest and store it and then live off it until planting season came around again.

To me it seems logical that there would have been a stage in the history of Europe where the WHG's were darker than Near Easterners and Asians, due to our very, very late adoption of farming and the incredibly fast-warming climate post-LGM, 20,000 years ago.

That's quite the opposite to the previous imaginations of Mesolithic hunters-gatherers as a very light-pigmented individuals(only a robustness is undeniable). So how the light pigmentation spread? That's the question.

The mutation for lighter-pigmented skin arose in Europe and Asia independently between 20,000 to 6,000 years ago (earliest estimates are 20,000 years BP). Where the two populations overlapped along the Urals/west of the Pontic Steppes and in Near East (Anatolia) is where the genes likely recombined to produce our first N0rd1ds!11!11! who then moved Westward and Northward after the LGM.

Remember the Near East at the time was extremely desertified (the Sahara was much bigger than it is now); a combination of sub-tropical desert and Savannah while Central Asia and Siberia were composed of ice sheets and polar deserts. Neither of which are ideal for hunter-gatherers.

Europe and its immediate surroundings were basically two extremes until ~20,000 years BP; frozen solid above the Alps and boiling hot south of the Caucasus with a very narrow "Goldilocks zone" somewhere to the West of the Black Sea where the Neolithic farmers first set up shop.

The evolutionary need for it is obvious; darker-skinned people require about six times as much UVB than lightly pigmented people to synthesize Vitamin D. Prolonged Vitamin D deficiency basically leads to everything from cancers to a softening of the bones (due to the inability to absorb calcium without Vitamin D) and subsequent problems with childbirth, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and everything you don't want when you're trying not to freeze to death.

There are only so many places in Europe and Asia where there is such a lack of UVB radiation that it would have thinned out the ranks of darker-skinned individuals to the point of enforcing the selection of lighter traits. Europeans reached the Arctic Circle as early as 40,000 years ago but that was in incredibly small number, before the ice melted; so realistically you're looking at somewhere around the Komi Republic or Karelia in Russia and far eastern Siberia circa 10,000 years BP for the first noticeably lighter humans to emerge.

There is evidenced of lighter-pigmentation even earlier than 20,000 years BP; e.g. the Shanidar cave in the Zagros Mountains of Iran where two Neanderthal individuals from 70,000 years ago carried an allele which reduced hair and skin pigmentation:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17962522

But imo, that's the exception, not the rule until you get to 5,000 years BP.

[Jackson]

That's undeniable. I think some miscorelations may be caused by slightly different character of recessiveness in light hair and light eyes allele(aren't light hair more recessive than light eyes?)


So for now - we have a pigmentation data for an UP example, mesolithic examples and neolithic farmers. Then we have a gap till the Iron Age R1a Andronovo samples, which were predominantly light. We also have some other steppe examples, that were considered to be rather light haired but darker-eyed on average.(abstract of this germany study was published some time ago("neue Blick auf Die Eurasischen Steppe or something) but detailed information will come later. This aforementioned gap is relevant.



I haven't read all the data, but it can be an issue with sampling.

So i guess know we can say what it looks like happened, but that gap you mention needs to be filled in to confirm it. It would make sense though, the combination of a people with high levels of light hair and some light eyes with another of dark hair and largely light eyes, you'd expect a population with reasonably high levels of both, and that correlates fairly well with areas that have retained the most of these combined ancestries.

The increased recessiveness of hair compared to eyes would certainly make sense, given that in any area in northern Europe (as far as i'm aware), if light hair is common - light eyes are more common still. Either that or the incoming light haired populations had proportionally less light hair compared to dark hair than the other population had light eyes to dark eyes, or what we see today is the result of various changes after these two groups met.

[Argang]

They checked IBD sharing, and the results are as expected. The Loschbour hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg shares the most with Northwest Europeans (the results might be a bit different for Scandinavian HG's) and the Stuttgart farmer sample shares the most with Sardinians, not with Sicilians or Ashkenazi.

[Prince Carlo]

So for now - we have a pigmentation data for an UP example, mesolithic examples and neolithic farmers. Then we have a gap till the Iron Age R1a Andronovo samples, which were predominantly light. We also have some other steppe examples, that were considered to be rather light haired but darker-eyed on average.(abstract of this germany study was published some time ago("neue Blick auf Die Eurasischen Steppe or something) but detailed information will come later. This aforementioned gap is relevant.

La Brana 1 had blue eyes.

http://eurogenes.blogspot.it/2013/12...blue-eyes.html

They checked IBD sharing, and the results are as expected. The Loschbour hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg shares the most with Northwest Europeans (the results might be a bit different for Scandinavian HG's) and the Stuttgart farmer sample shares the most with Sardinians, not with Sicilians or Ashkenazi.

That is an IBD sharing analysis, not a genome-wide analysis.

[Accountant]

Interesting stuff!



Are Finns, Mordvins and Russians too stronk for this research?

[MfA_]

[sevruk]

It's interesting as Mordvinians and Russian close to Afontova Gora sample (Upper Paleolithic people in Siberia)

[Jackson]

Interesting!