# Population Genetics > Paleogenetics > Paleolithic & Mesolithic >  The evolution of skin pigmentation-associated variation in West Eurasia.

## real expert

*Abstract:*




> Skin pigmentation is a classic example of a polygenic trait that has experienced directional selection in humans. Genome-wide association studies have identified well over a hundred pigmentation-associated loci, and genomic scans in present-day and ancient populations have identified selective sweeps for a small number of light pigmentation-associated alleles in Europeans. It is unclear whether selection has operated on all of the genetic variation associated with skin pigmentation as opposed to just a small number of large-effect variants. Here, we address this question using ancient DNA from 1,158 individuals from West Eurasia covering a period of 40,000 y combined with genome-wide association summary statistics from the UK Biobank. We find a robust signal of directional selection in ancient West Eurasians on 170 skin pigmentation-associated variants ascertained in the UK Biobank. However, we also show that this signal is driven by a limited number of large-effect variants. Consistent with this observation, we find that a polygenic selection test in present-day populations fails to detect selection with the full set of variants. Our data allow us to disentangle the effects of admixture and selection. Most notably, a large-effect variant at SLC24A5 was introduced to Western Europe by migrations of Neolithic farming populations but continued to be under selection post-admixture. This study shows that the response to selection for light skin pigmentation in West Eurasia was driven by a relatively small proportion of the variants that are associated with present-day phenotypic variation.


The authors pointed out, what was already assumed, that geneticists can‘t really predict the skin colour of very ancient people. Which means, that the very dark (dark brown till black) skin tone concluded for the Cheddar man, is rather speculative. In addition to that neither the Cheddar man, La Brana nor Lola possessed the loci TMEM138, OCA2 and HERC2 associated with the "black" skin pigmentation identified in Sub- Saharan African populations which is a modern, more recent mutation, too.







> Relatively dark skin pigmentation in Early Upper Paleolithic Europe would be consistent with those populations being relatively poorly adapted to high-latitude conditions as a result of having recently migrated from lower latitudes. On the other hand, although we have shown that these populations carried few of the light pigmentation alleles that are segregating in present-day Europe, they may have carried different alleles that we cannot now detect. As an extreme example,Neanderthals and the Altai Denisovan individual show genetic scores that are in a similar range to Early Upper Paleolithic individuals (_SIAppendix_,Table S1), *but it is highly plausible that these populations, who lived at high latitudes for hundreds of thousands of years, would have adapted independently to low UV levels. For this reason, we cannot confidently make statements about the skin pigmentation of ancient populations.*


source:
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/1/e2009227118

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## Anfänger

> *Abstract:*
> 
> 
> 
> The authors pointed out, what was already assumed, that geneticists can‘t really predict the skin colour of very ancient people. Which means, that the very dark (dark brown till black) skin tone concluded for the Cheddar man, is *rather speculative*. In addition to that neither the Cheddar man, La Brana nor Lola possessed the loci TMEM138, OCA2 and HERC2 associated with the "black" skin pigmentation identified in Sub- Saharan African populations which is a modern, more recent mutation, too.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It's not speculative, it's just that with the data available today, dark is the most likely skin colour. Maybe they will detect other skin depigmentation genes in the future. The study also show strong selection for the main skin depigmentation genes in Europe, you wouldn't expect selection for these genes if the WHG cluster was light skinned but instead we see selection for light skin AFTER these skin depigmentation genes come into the gene pool of former WHGs, for example SHG or Anatolian farmers.


Very interesting and plausible explanation, starting at about 25:40 :

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## real expert

> It's not speculative, it's just that with the data available today, dark is the most likely skin colour. Maybe they will detect other skin depigmentation genes in the future. The study also show strong selection for the main skin depigmentation genes in Europe, you wouldn't expect selection for these genes if the WHG cluster was light skinned but instead we see selection for light skin AFTER these skin depigmentation genes come into the gene pool of former WHGs, for example SHG or Anatolian farmers......




I think you don't get my point. The skin color of the Cheddar man was very likely darker than modern Europeans, which means he was dark-skinned. That being said, he was very likely not dark brown or even black as the involved researchers wanted us to believe. Hence, the Cheddar man was likely rather light brown, thus had a similar skin color, such as Native Americans, the Khoisans or some Indians. Darker than modern pale Europeans doesn’t automatically translate into SSA black- complexion. So, I very much doubt that the Cheddar man had a chocolate or even ebony skin tone, as in the reconstruction. The point is, that the authors exaggerated the swarthiness of the Cheddar man for clickbaits and sensationalism. Controversy sells. 

In my opinion a complexion like of these individuals make more sense for the Cheddar man and other WHGs.

7fca71da8b79c35b93ba4d83495ba18a--african-babies-african-children.jpg (511×720) (pinimg.com)

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## Anfänger

> I think you don't get my point. The skin color of the Cheddar man was very likely darker than modern Europeans, which means he was dark-skinned. That being said, he was very likely not dark brown or even black as the involved researchers wanted us to believe. Hence, the Cheddar man was likely rather light brown, thus had a similar skin color, such as Native Americans, the Khoisans or some Indians. Darker than modern pale Europeans doesn’t automatically translate into SSA black- complexion. So, I very much doubt that the Cheddar man had a chocolate or even ebony skin tone, as in the reconstruction. The point is, that the authors exaggerated the swarthiness of the Cheddar man for clickbaits and sensationalism. Controversy sells. 
> 
> In my opinion a complexion like of these individuals make more sense for the Cheddar man and other WHGs.
> 
> 7fca71da8b79c35b93ba4d83495ba18a--african-babies-african-children.jpg (511×720) (pinimg.com)



You are aware that all of those populations you mentioned have known skin depigmentation genes ? Actually most of them even have the same ones you see in europeans. I don't know why the predicted skin colour of WHGs bothers so many people...

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## kingjohn

Why do people care how a person
Look like if he lived 9000 ybp 🤔

P.s
And yes the farmers were lighter skin than the european hunters, but they did had darker eyes though compare to hunters

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## Angela

Well, the people in those pictures look pretty damn dark to me. A hell of a lot of African Americans are that color, and lighter.

So, what's the big difference. We won't know the exact shade, and I don't see how and why it matters. 

All we know is that the WHG didn't have the light pigmentation alleles which have been under selection in Europe since that time, and the farmers did.

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## Philjames100

There are various derived alleles for dark pigmentation found in sub-Saharan Africans and south Asian populations, but not in other Eurasian populations, which apparently weren't taken into account by those claiming that Cheddar Man and other WHGs had dark or very dark skin. Sub-Saharan Africans and south Asian populations also have various other ancestral alleles for dark pigmentation which other Eurasians don't have. So the claim that WHGs would have very dark or black skin because they lacked two alleles SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 doesn't seem to make sense. 


“Most alleles associated with light and dark pigmentation in our dataset are estimated to have originated prior to the origin of modern humans ~300 thousand years ago. … our results indicate that both light and dark alleles at MFSD12, DDB1, OCA2, and HERC2 have been segregating inthe hominin lineage for hundreds of thousands of years. Further, the ancestral allele is associated with light pigmentation in approximately half of the predicted causal SNPs ... These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that darker pigmentation is a derived trait.”

Crawford et al. 2017


“The derived rs56203814 and rsl0424065 (T) alleles associated with dark pigmentation are present only in African populations (or those of recent African descent) and are most common in East African populations with Nilo-Saharan ancestry (…)

The derived rs6510760 (A) and rs112332856 (C) alleles (associated with dark pigmentation) are common in all sub-Saharan Africans except the San, as well as in South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations (…)

The derived rs7948623 (T) allele near _TMEM138_ (associated with dark pigmentation) is most common in East African Nilo-Saharan populations and is at moderate to high frequency in South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations.
At SNP rs11230664, within _DDB1_, the ancestral (C) allele (associated with dark pigmentation) is common in all sub-Saharan African populations, having the highest frequency in East African Nilo-Saharan, Hadza, and San populations (88-96%), and is at moderate to high frequency in South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations (12 - 66%). The derived (T) allele (associated with light pigmentation) is nearly fixed in European, East Asian, and Native American populations. (…)

The TMRCA of a large number of haplotypes carrying the rs7948623 (A) allele in non-Africans, associated with light pigmentation, is 60 kya, close to the inferred time of the migration of modern humans out of Africa. (…)

The ancestral rs1800404 (C) allele, associated with dark pigmentation, is common in most Africans as well as southern/eastern Asians and Australo-Melanesians, whereas the derived (T) allele, associated with light pigmentation, is most common (frequency >70%) in Europeans and San. Coalescent analysis indicates that the TMRCA (time to most recent common ancestor)of lineages containing the derived (T) allele is 629 kya (95% CI 426-848 kya). (…)

The ancestral rs6497271 (A) allele associated with dark pigmentation is on haplotypes in South Asians and Australo-Melanesians similar or identical to those in Africans, suggesting they are identical by descent. The derived (G) allele associated with light skin pigmentation is most common in Europeans and San and dates to 921 kya (CI: 700 kya-1.3 mya). (…)

Individuals from South Asia and Australo-Melanesia share variants associated with dark pigmentation at _MFSD12, DDB1/TMEM138, OCA2_ and _HERC2_ that are identical by descent from Africans. This raises the possibility that other phenotypes shared between Africans and some South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations may also be due to genetic variants identical by descent from African populations rather than convergent evolution. This observation is consistent with a proposed southern migration route out of Africa ~80 kya. Alternatively, it is possible that light and dark pigmentation alleles segregated in a single African source population and that alleles associated with dark pigmentation were maintained outside of Africa only in the South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations due to selection.”

Crawford et al. 2017


“The importance of SLC24A5 in explaining pigmentation variation has been magnified due to the relatively low amount of genetic variation in Europe and the reduced phenotypic variation in lightly pigmented populations more broadly. As a result, SLC24A5 and other genes of large effect are repeatedly identified and replicated, especially in studies of admixed populations. (…) reconstructions of Mesolithic and Neolithic pigmentation phenotype using loci common in modern populations should be interpreted with some caution, as it is possible that other as yet unexamined loci may have also influenced phenotype.(…)

A long‐standing question in the evolution of human skin color is whether the darker pigmentation common in populations living in high UVR regions, including Africa, South Asia, and Melanesia, is due to shared ancestral alleles or if darker pigmentation, like lighter pigmentation, has evolved multiple times in recent human history. Crawford et al. (2017) reported that the haplotypes at loci associated with darker pigmentation in several regions of Africa are shared with southern Asian and Australo‐Melanesian populations, supporting a common‐origin model for the evolution of darker skin pigmentation in these populations. The authors also observed that both light and dark alleles at MFSD12, DDB1, OCA2, and HERC2 emerged prior to the origin of modern humans and roughly equal proportions of light and dark alleles are ancestral, suggesting that both types of alleles may have been segregating in early human populations migrating throughout Africa and the rest of the world. This raises the possibility that these loci may explain some of the variation in pigmentation phenotypes observed in equatorial climates outside of Africa. (…)

The derived MFSD12 alleles at rs56203814, a synonymous mutation, and intronic rs10424065 are associated with dark pigmentation and present only in African populations (Crawford et al., 2017). The derived alleles are most common in East African populations with Nilo‐Saharan ancestry while the ancestral alleles are associated with light skin pigmentation and are nearly fixed in East Asians and Europeans. In addition, the San, Ethiopian, and Tanzanian populations with Afro Asiatic ancestry also carry the ancestral alleles. This finding runs strikingly counter to the widely held assumption that ancestral alleles at pigmentation‐associated loci would all be associated with darker pigmentation. In the region of the genome containing TMEM138 and DDB1, variants associated with both lighter and darker skin color have been segregating for up to 600,000 years—well before the evolution of Homo sapiens. The derived, dark pigmentation‐associated allele at rs7948623 in TMEM138 and the derived, light pigmentation‐associated allele at rs11230664 in DDB1 have both undergone directional selection in Africans and non‐Africans. These results by Crawford and colleagues highlight that there are many ways to make enough melanin for a particular UVR regime. Furthermore, phenotypic evidence suggests perhaps a threshold necessity can be met for skin pigmentation and that other factors (sexual selection, drift, etc.) can drive skin to become more darkly pigmented, not just more lightly pigmented.”

Quillen et al 2019

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## real expert

> You are aware that all of those populations you mentioned have known skin depigmentation genes ? Actually most of them even have the same ones you see in europeans. I don't know why the predicted skin colour of WHGs bothers so many people...




You don't understand my point. I’m well aware that the posted individuals including the Khoisans carry the canonical Eurasian skin pigmentation gene, SLC24A5. However, just because the WHGs lacked the allele for pale skin found in modern Europeans we can’t automatically assume that they were dark brown or black. Bear in mind, that the WHGs also lacked alleles that cause the skin of SSAs to appear dark brown to nearly black. Hence, Sub-Saharan Africans are not defined merely by the lack of the main skin-lightening gene alleles found in Europeans. Furthermore, there are dozens if not hundreds of gene alleles that code for skin pigmentation, either lightening or darkening it. For instance, a recent study found out that Native Americans or East Asians, have their own skin-lightening allele.






> ...Now, a new study of the genes of more than 6000 people from five Latin American countries undercuts the simplistic An international team discovered a new genetic variant associated with lighter skin found only in Native American and East Asian populations.







> .......So the new variant sheds light on the genes underlying pale skin in East Asia. People at high latitudes in Europe and East Asia seem to have independently evolved lighter skin to produce vitamin D more efficiently with less sunlight, says Nina Jablonski, a biological anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park (Science, 21 November 2014, p. 934). But, “People have been scratching their heads” about which variants do this in East Asians. Now, researchers know MFSD12 is one. The ancestors of Native Americans presumably carried that variant over the Bering Strait into the Americas.




https://science.sciencemag.org/conte.../6425/333.full

So if Native Americans or East Asians have their own depigmentation genes it can't be rule out that the WHGs had their own too.
By the way, only ignorant or insecure people feel threatened or bothered by the fact that the Cheddar man wasn't lily-white. The irony is that genetically speaking it doesn't really make a difference whether the WHGs were pale or dark. Here is the thing, the issue I have is with the assertion of some authors of the cheddar man paper who pretended that they can predict with high confidence that Cheddar man was dark brown to black. This is not the case. In fact, the only thing they can predict with confidence is that the WHGs were likely darker than the present day pale Europeans. Darker than pale is hell of a range of skin tones and hues. The fact is, that the scientists can't know or be really sure that the Cheddar Man had exactly the same light-skin and dark-skin-related gene alleles that modern people have. He could’ve had a different combination of genes determining a certain skin pigmentation in a manner that doesn’t occur in any modern population. In my opinion, it doesn't make sense for the WHGs to have a complexion that is better suited in hotter places. 

Whatever, where there is no certainty people are free to have discourses, to debate or to question certain conclusions of genetic studies. As far as I know this forum was made for all that.

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## Anfänger

> You don't understand my point. I’m well aware that the posted individuals including the Khoisans carry the canonical Eurasian skin pigmentation gene, SLC24A5. However, just because the WHGs lacked the allele for pale skin found in modern Europeans we can’t automatically assume that they were dark brown or black. Bear in mind, that the WHGs also lacked alleles that cause the skin of SSAs to appear dark brown to nearly black. Hence, Sub-Saharan Africans are not defined merely by the lack of the main skin-lightening gene alleles found in Europeans. Furthermore, there are dozens if not hundreds of gene alleles that code for skin pigmentation, either lightening or darkening it. For instance, a recent study found out that Native Americans or East Asians, have their own skin-lightening allele.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://science.sciencemag.org/conte.../6425/333.full
> ...


I get your point, see I just wrote with the data available TODAY it´s the most likely and I know that East Asians have their own skin depigmentation genes, that's why wrote that all of those population you mentioned have known genes involved in skin depigmentation. Read the study carefully, there are many genes involved in skin pigmentation BUT it comes down to 5 if i am not mistaken which have a large effect. These 5 show strong selection in Europe. I know from personal experience how large the effect can be. Someone I know has the ancestral allels at SLC24A2 and is just as dark as those in the pictures while someone with the derived allels is pale like an average German. Just one out of the 5 main genes has a huge effect. I agree though there can be unknown genes we don't know of yet but you can say that about any ancient population. Basically phenotype prediction in ancient DNA would be useless if we use this logic with any sample. 

It doesn't make much sense for WHGs to be dark IF we don't take into account that they ate a lot of fish. Modern example would be the Inuits they are pretty dark even though they have the East Asian skin depigmentation genes.
The video I posted above has a very plausible explanation, including diet.

By the way, SSA are damn dark. IMHO there isn't much variation in skin colour in Africa. The lightest are probably the Khoisan and they have known westeurasian skin depigmentation genes.

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## Angela

^^Yes, I used to think the Khoi San might have been a good representation of the Africans who left for Eurasia, but then I found out that one of the "Eurasian" depigmentation genes passed down to them from East Africa, so we really don't know. Looking at the Andamanese, however, I would think they were still pretty dark.

The salient fact which has to be answered is why has there been such continuing and ongoing selection for fair skin if WHG were already fair? It wouldn't make sense.

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## kingjohn

If it makes people here feal good :Rolleyes: 
The SHG though were light skin as oposed to the WHG (they did carry the main derived allells)������


*In addition to performing this genome-wide scan, we studied the allele frequencies in three pigmentation genes (SLC24A5, SLC45A2, which have a strong effect on skin pigmentation, and OCA2/HERC2*, which has a strong effect on eye pigmentation) in which the derived alleles are virtually fixed in northern Europeans today. The differences in allele frequencies of those three loci are among the highest between human populations, suggesting that selection was driving the differences in eye color, skin, and hair pigmentation as part of the adaptation to different environments [50–53]. *All of the depigmentation variants at these three genes are in high frequency in SHGs in contrast to both WHGs and EHGs (**Fig 4B**)*. We conduct neutral simulations of the allele frequencies in an admixed SHG population to estimate _p_-values for observing these allele frequencies without selection (S9 Text). The _p_-values for all three SNPs are lower than 0.2; the combined _p_-value [54] for all three pigmentation SNPs is 0.028. Therefore, the unique configuration of the SHGs is not fully explained by the fact that SHGs are a mixture of EHGs and WHGs, but could rather be explained by a continued increase of the allele frequencies after the admixture event, likely caused by adaptation to high-latitude environments [50,52].


source: 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5760011/

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## real expert

> It doesn't make much sense for WHGs to be dark IF we don't take into account that they ate a lot of fish. Modern example would be the Inuits they are pretty dark even though they have the East Asian skin depigmentation genes.
> The video I posted above has a very plausible explanation, including diet.
> 
> By the way, SSA are damn dark. IMHO there isn't much variation in skin colour in Africa. The lightest are probably the Khoisan and they have known westeurasian skin depigmentation genes.



To me, it is not plausible that researchers took the darkest pigmentation possible for the Cheddar man. It's rather unlikely that he was as dark as modern SSAs or Australo-Melanesians, even if his diet was rich in fish. It's a matter of fact, that higher latitude humans tend to be paler, on average, than lower latitude humans, although they're not as pale as Northern European. Plus, I find a bit disingenuous when people say they don’t care about pigmentation in a forum whom purpose is to discuss anthropology and phenotype. If you don’t care about the pigmentation of ancient populations, fine. But don’t criticize others for being interested in accurate reconstructions of ancient people and wanting to know how they looked like. Bottom line predictions of phenotype are limited. Besides, people are and will be always interested in pigmentation differences, that's why there're plenty genetic studies about the origin of skin color. Nothing wrong with being curious why humans have different pigmentation. You can’t also really blame Europeans/Brits for being puzzled and perplex when hearing that the Cheddar man wasn’t pale as them, since even scientists used to assume that the WHGs had the same shade as modern Europeans. 
 Other genetic papers showed WHGs with similar complexion as the people I've posted, btw.




Quite different from the Cheddar man- reconstruction.

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## real expert

> ^^Yes, I used to think the Khoi San might have been a good representation of the Africans who left for Eurasia, but then I found out that one of the "Eurasian" depigmentation genes passed down to them from East Africa, so we really don't know. Looking at the Andamanese, however, I would think they were still pretty dark.
> 
> The salient fact which has to be answered is why has there been such continuing and ongoing selection for fair skin if WHG were already fair? It wouldn't make sense.



You have to take this fact into consideration the Andamanese live in tropical places, with the high ultraviolet radiation levels and strong sun exposure. Hence, dark brown to black- skinned populations almost exclusively live near the equator, in tropical areas with intense sunlight: Australia, Melanesia, New Guinea, South Asia, and Africa. So, it makes perfectly sense that the Andamanese, Australian Aborigines or Melanesians didn’t develop light skin. In contrast to that, the Cheddar man lived in a much colder region and in higher latitude. Therefore, I find it rather unrealistic that the researchers gave him the darkest complexion, pigmentation possible, as if he lived in a tropical place.

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## MOESAN

> You are aware that all of those populations you mentioned have known skin depigmentation genes ? Actually most of them even have the same ones you see in europeans. I don't know why the predicted skin colour of WHGs bothers so many people...



Search of reality matters, for someones of us!
You are doing your best to not understand or to make people to think you don't understand what Real Expert writes. I understand him very easily...
It's true the pic's he posted are not in themselves a proof of his point. That said differences in pigmentation exists among SSA pop's that are not due to light skinned Europoid intruders in their genomes, and as said Real Expert, the darkerst skins of SSA are due to darkening mutations, so a 'nilotic' black kind of skin is far to be credible for European HG's.

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## Anfänger

> Search of reality matters, for someones of us!
> You are doing your best to not understand or to make people to think you don't understand what Real Expert writes. I understand him very easily...
> It's true the pic's he posted are not in themselves a proof of his point. That said differences in pigmentation exists among SSA pop's that are not due to light skinned Europoid intruders in their genomes, and as said Real Expert, the darkerst skins of SSA are due to darkening mutations, so a 'nilotic' black kind of skin is far to be credible for European HG's.


All SSAs look dark brown or even black(Nilotics) to me except the Khoi san and guys, there are maybe 20-30 threads where we have talked about pigmentation. Most of my posts on this forum are related to pigmentation. You can use the search option, by the way. We have talked about this paper when it was a preprint and now again and when exactly did I say you can't discuss pigmentation or anything else ?! What are we doing right now ? Discussing pigmentation ! If you have problem with Cheddar Mans skin colour go and contact the main genetics. I hope you have serious data that supports your notion of Cheddar Mans skin colour not being that dark because all I hear out of your posts is: "IN MY OPINION HE WASN`T THAT DARK! NO WAY! I DON`T HAVE DATA BUT NEVER EVER THAT DARK!."

Show me data and a plausible explanation and I change the idea of WHGs being dark in a second.

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## MOESAN

> All SSAs look dark brown or even black(Nilotics) to me except the Khoi san and guys, there are maybe 20-30 threads where we have talked about pigmentation. Most of my posts on this forum are related to pigmentation. You can use the search option, by the way. We have talked about this paper when it was a preprint and now again and when exactly did I say you can't discuss pigmentation or anything else ?! What are we doing right now ? Discussing pigmentation ! If you have problem with Cheddar Mans skin colour go and contact the main genetics. I hope you have serious data that supports your notion of Cheddar Mans skin colour not being that dark because all I hear out of your posts is: "IN MY OPINION HE WASN`T THAT DARK! NO WAY! I DON`T HAVE DATA BUT NEVER EVER THAT DARK!."
> 
> Show me data and a plausible explanation and I change the idea of WHGs being dark in a second.


Wow! Keep cool.
Others than me explained why they THINK (as me, I never said I KNEW) Cheddar man had few chances to be very "black": his geographic place of life, with surely far ancestors already living in Europe latitudes, and I add the fact that we cannot affirm even its African ancestors had a very black skin. NO all SSA people and tribes have not very black skins, even the ones with almost no recent Europoid input, and surveys showed that some mutations in the genome produced darkening over more ancient pops of SS Africa, what supposes some of them were lighter skinned before. I can tell you I see a lot of diverse hues of skin among SSA African: surely not stupid if we consider that skin color is tied to a big extense to latitude hen pop's stay in place a long time. 
I have no clue to be precise about Cheddar man, i can only say I doubt it's was black or very dark skinned, what is not to say he had a modern Europoid tone of skin (because he had not our current lightening mutations! 
To be serious now, if you have a study that says Cheddar man had the (rare?) darkening mutations foud in SSAfrica, make me know.
On my side I 'll try to find the survey speaking about darkening mutations;

And don't forget to take your pills, or maybe, more gently said, keep cool and drink fresh!

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## real expert

> All SSAs look dark brown or even black(Nilotics) to me except the Khoi san and guys, there are maybe 20-30 threads where we have talked about pigmentation. Most of my posts on this forum are related to pigmentation. You can use the search option, by the way. We have talked about this paper when it was a preprint and now again and when exactly did I say you can't discuss pigmentation or anything else ?! What are we doing right now ? Discussing pigmentation ! If you have problem with Cheddar Mans skin colour go and contact the main genetics. I hope you have serious data that supports your notion of Cheddar Mans skin colour not being that dark because all I hear out of your posts is: "IN MY OPINION HE WASN`T THAT DARK! NO WAY! I DON`T HAVE DATA BUT NEVER EVER THAT DARK!."
> 
> Show me data and a plausible explanation and I change the idea of WHGs being dark in a second.



Here's the thing, the scientists don't even totally rule out that the Cheddar man could've been fair- skinned. That being said, nobody here argues for the CM being pale, only that he was of intermediate skin complexion, and that the authors made his skin tone a lot darker than he likely was. Keep in mind, that WHGs lived under glacial weather, climate for 20000 years, a skin tone that is more suitable in the tropical regions wouldn’t make sense during the so-called little Ice Age. In addition to that, there was enough time for the WHGs to develop a lighter skin tone than dark brown or black. Furthermore, Loschbour had the same derived variants as Cheddar Man or La Brana but the calculator/algorithm predicted his skin complexion as "intermediate". 


FromWiki:



> Loschbour man was a hunter-gatherer,and the flint tools used for stalking and killing prey (wild boar and deer) were found by his body. He was one of the last of his kind, soon to be supplanted by new populations more likely to herd rather than hunt—and with paler skins.[3] According to DNA tests reported in 2014, Loschbour man was male,[4]* was described as being "a light skinned (white) individual"(intermediate skin with a probability of 90%), brown or black hair (98%), and likely blue eyes (56%).*[5] In contrast to 90% of modern Europeans, he was lactose-intolerant.[6] When he died, he was between 34 and 47 years old, 1.6 m (5.2 ft)tall, and weighed between 58 and 62 kg (128–137 lb).[1]
> 
> Loschbour man lived over 8,000 years ago, making the skeleton the oldest human remains found in the country.[6] There mains contained Y-DNA of the Haplogroup I2a-M423*.[8] DNA testing (two molars presented good samples) indicates that Western Hunter-Gatherers like Loschbour man "contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to near-Easterners".




I can't verify it, but a user from anthrogenica wrote this:



> He does already have genes that are associated with extremely light skin pigmentation and freckles in modern day Europeans namely IRF4 and he was heterozygous for one of the red hair mutations which in and of itself causes a lot of depigmentation.


 He pointed out, that t_he 10 SNPs panel predicts it to have Black skin based on 4 SNPs; however Loschbour get a vastly__ different prediction when adding 3 more SNPs in spite of having a similar genetic profile in those SNPs._

Blue-eyed,dark-skinned, earliest modern Briton. - Page 56 (anthrogenica.com)

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## real expert

> Search of reality matters, for someones of us!
> You are doing your best to not understand or to make people to think you don't understand what Real Expert writes. I understand him very easily...
> It's true the pic's he posted are not in themselves a proof of his point. That said differences in pigmentation exists among SSA pop's that are not due to light skinned Europoid intruders in their genomes, and as said Real Expert, the darkerst skins of SSA are due to darkening mutations, so a 'nilotic' black kind of skin is far to be credible for European HG's.


Thanks a lot for understanding what I mean. To make one thing clear, I’m not referring to Anfänger, KJ or Angela here. However, I see this virtue signalling, sanctimonious bunch who insert themselves into discussions about pigmentation of WHGs or other ancient populations, etc. Solely to pride themselves with NOT CARING and not seeing color, thus being superior to those who are genuinely interested in human genetics including pigmentation/phenotype. Hence, whenever people want to point out that the Cheddar man was rather of intermediate, tanned color, academics and those who were full of glee, gotcha moment, and enthusiastically reported that CM was a black man, suddenly _pretend like it doesn't matter what shade he was. The fact is, that the black Cheddar man reconstruction got the click-baits and publicity_ _the authors and mass media wanted._ So, skin color obviously only matters to certain people when you can “prove“ that ancient European populations were black.

----------


## Anfänger

> Wow! Keep cool.
> Others than me explained why they THINK (as me, I never said I KNEW) Cheddar man had few chances to be very "black": his geographic place of life, with surely far ancestors already living in Europe latitudes, and I add the fact that we cannot affirm even its African ancestors had a very black skin. NO all SSA people and tribes have not very black skins, even the ones with almost no recent Europoid input, and surveys showed that some mutations in the genome produced darkening over more ancient pops of SS Africa, what supposes some of them were lighter skinned before. I can tell you I see a lot of diverse hues of skin among SSA African: surely not stupid if we consider that skin color is tied to a big extense to latitude hen pop's stay in place a long time. 
> I have no clue to be precise about Cheddar man, i can only say I doubt it's was black or very dark skinned, what is not to say he had a modern Europoid tone of skin (because he had not our current lightening mutations! 
> To be serious now, if you have a study that says Cheddar man had the (rare?) darkening mutations foud in SSAfrica, make me know.
> On my side I 'll try to find the survey speaking about darkening mutations;
> 
> And don't forget to take your pills, or maybe, more gently said, keep cool and drink fresh!


You guys come and pretend that I tried to shut someones speech or didn't want to discuss pigmentation and then I reply with my opinion about your motivations, I should take my pills, now that's fair and very polite lol. Which pills? I don't take any. Usually people see and judge the world from their own perspective so maybe you should take yours ?  :Rolleyes:  



Yes others explained and out of all those only you hadn't had anything useful to say. That's why I am done replying to your answers and I think admins shouldn´t allow personal attacks like yours directed to me.

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## Anfänger

So this is also my last post on this thread.

Yes, WHGs lived for a long time in northern latitudes. That's why it is surprising that they hadn't genes we usually see everywhere around the world involved in skin depigmentation. There are 3 explanation discussed in the video above why it is still likely that WHGs had dark skin. How dark ? Possibly as dark as someone who hasn't got the main skin depigmentation genes ---> dark brown.

This study shows that many genes are involved in skin pigmentation but it comes down to five which a very large effect. We see strong selection for these genes after they come into the gene pool of former WHGs. SHG, Baltic HGs, farmers coming in from Anatolia. You wouldn't expect selection for genes involved in ligther skin if WHGs were light or intermediate because none of the SHGs, Baltics HGs and Anatolian farmers were as light as modern europeans. They were described as light to intermediate. Why are you ignoring this strong sign that there was lighting going on ?

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## MOESAN

> You guys come and pretend that I tried to shut someones speech or didn't want to discuss pigmentation and then I reply with my opinion about your motivations, I should take my pills, now that's fair and very polite lol. Which pills? I don't take any. Usually people see and judge the world from their own perspective so maybe you should take yours ?  
> 
> 
> 
> Yes others explained and out of all those only you hadn't had anything useful to say. That's why I am done replying to your answers and I think admins shouldn´t allow personal attacks like yours directed to me.



_I suppose you feels well now? I had the impression I was the attacked person. But some observations of mine were on the general plan, and were not by force centered on you, except the ones concerning your refusal to accept Real Expert valuable arguments.
_
_To show that pigmentation question is not so simple, see under (extracted from it ; bold letters are mine)_  



Science. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2018 May 17.
Published in final edited form as:
Science. 2017 Nov 17; 358(6365): eaan8433.  
Published online 2017 Oct 12. doi: 10.1126/science.aan8433
PMCID: PMC5759959
NIHMSID: NIHMS929213
PMID: 29025994
*Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations* Skin pigmentation is highly variable within Africa. Populations such as the San from southern Africa are almost as lightly pigmented as Asians (1), while the East African Nilo- Saharan populations are the most darkly pigmented in the world (Fig. 1). Most alleles associated with light and dark pigmentation in our dataset are estimated to have originated prior to the origin of modern humans ~300 ky ago (26). In contrast to the lack of variation at _MC1R_, which is under purifying selection in Africa (61), our results indicate that both light and dark alleles at _MFSD12, DDB1, OCA2_, and _HERC2_ have been segregating in the hominin lineage for hundreds of thousands of years (Fig. 4). Further, the ancestral allele is associated with light pigmentation in approximately half of the predicted causal SNPs; Neanderthal and Denisovan genome sequences, which diverged from modern human sequences 804 kya (62), contain the ancestral allele at all loci. *These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that darker pigmentation is a derived trait that originated in the genus* _Homo_* within the past ~2 million years after human ancestors lost most of their protective body hair, though these ancestral hominins may have been moderately, rather than darkly, pigmented (63, 64). Moreover, it appears that both light and dark pigmentation has continued to evolve over hominid history.*
Individuals from South Asia and Australo-Melanesia share variants associated with dark pigmentation at _MFSD12, DDB1/TMEM138, OCA2_ and _HERC2_ that are identical by descent from Africans. *This raises the possibility that other phenotypes shared between Africans and some South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations may also be due to genetic variants identical by descent from African populations rather than convergent evolution* (65). This observation is consistent with a proposed southern migration route out of Africa ~80 kya (66). Alternatively, it is possible that light and dark pigmentation alleles segregated in a single African source population (13, 48) and that alleles associated with dark pigmentation were maintained outside of Africa only in the South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations due to selection.

By studying ethnically, genetically, and phenotypically diverse Africans, we identify novel pigmentation loci that are not highly polymorphic in other populations. Interestingly, the loci identified in this study appear to affect multiple phenotypes. For example, DDB1influences pigmentation (42), cellular response to the mutagenic effect of UVR (39) and female fertility (41). Thus, some of the pigmentation-associated variants identified here may be maintained due to pleiotropic effects on other aspects of human physiology.

Have a quiet night.

----------


## Angela

I'm quite surprised to see what look to me like personal attacks at Anfanger for having a different point of view.

I want that kind of behavior to end right now.

We've discussed this over and over again on God knows how many threads. People's take on it differs; we know that. What is the point of rehashing it over and over again? Why is it so important to convince the people who think he probably "was" dark skinned? And, for God's sake, does it matter what shade of brown he was??? If he was the color of the San it's ok, but not if he was the color of Nigerians or Senegalese (which I doubt for what it's worth)?

I honestly don't get it.

As for my personal opinion, I take the point that the WHG might have had skin lightening genes we don't recognize. Great. The question still remains, as Anfanger succinctly put it: why then did the WHG living in those northern climes select so strongly for genes we KNOW lighten pigmentation. It would be unnecessary, wouldn't it? I haven't seen that addressed at all. 

To me that's illogical. If you don't see that and want to believe otherwise, fine, believe what you want.

Just stop beating this topic into the ground. We know what some of you think; you've made it clear in thread after thread. It's no skin off my nose; it's not like it's some unhinged theory like all modern Jews are really Carthaginians.

Also and most important, keep it civil.

----------


## Angela

I'm quite surprised to see what look to me like personal attacks at Anfanger for having a different point of view.

I want that kind of behavior to end right now.

We've discussed this over and over again on God knows how many threads. People's take on it differs; we know that. What is the point of rehashing it over and over again? Why is it so important to convince the people who think he probably "was" dark skinned? And, for God's sake, does it matter what shade of brown he was??? If he was the color of the San it's ok, but not if he was the color of Nigerians or Senegalese (which I doubt for what it's worth)?

I honestly don't get it.

As for my personal opinion, I take the point that the WHG might have had skin lightening genes we don't recognize. Great. The question still remains, as Anfanger succinctly put it: why then did the WHG living in those northern climes select so strongly for genes we KNOW lighten pigmentation. It would be unnecessary, wouldn't it? I haven't seen that addressed at all. 

To me that's illogical. If you don't see that and want to believe otherwise, fine, believe what you want.

Just stop beating this topic into the ground. We know what some of you think; you've made it clear in thread after thread. It's no skin off my nose; it's not like it's some unhinged theory like all modern Jews are really Carthaginians.

Also and most important, keep it civil. 

Ed. Some of you also need to refresh your knowledge a bit. As Anfanger explained, different alleles have different effects. We know the ones which have large scale effects. We know that you need a combination of certain high impact alleles to significantly reduce pigmentation in the skin, so a stray small effect allele which shows up in some ancient is, by itself, irrelevant. 

The only possibility is that there are unknown skin lightening alleles not currently recognized. You are still left with the problem that if they were already light skinned why have the alleles we do recognize swept through populations in northern latitudes?

----------


## ThirdTerm

Figure 4 shows that 100% of WHGs had the OCA2/HERC2 gene, which is associated with blue eye color and light skin. However, most studies only link this OCA2/HERC2 gene to blue eyes, concluding that WHGs had blue eyes and dark skin. The OCA2 gene is independently involved in the evolution of light skin pigmentation in East Asia and Europe. Two OCA2 polymorphisms (rs1800414 and rs74653330) have been associated with lighter skin pigmentation in East Asian populations. Aside from three genes associated with light skin in Europe (SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and TYRP1) which began to increase in frequency between 19,000 and 11,000 years ago, OCA2 also showed a potential signal of selection in Europeans and played part in light skin pigmentation in Europe. WHGs had only one depigmentation gene but they were probably as light-skinned as East Asians. 


Fig 4. Adaptation to high-latitude environments.




> The Scandinavian peninsula was the last part of Europe to be colonized after the Last Glacial Maximum. The migration routes, cultural networks, and the genetic makeup of the first Scandinavians remain elusive and several hypotheses exist based on archaeology, climate modeling, and genetics. By analyzing the genomes of early Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, we show that their migrations followed two routes: one from the south and another from the northeast along the ice-free Norwegian Atlantic coast. These groups met and mixed in Scandinavia, creating a population more diverse than contemporaneous central and western European hunter-gatherers. As northern Europe is associated with cold and low light conditions, we investigated genomic patterns of adaptation to these conditions and genes known to be involved in skin pigmentation. We demonstrate that Mesolithic Scandinavians had higher levels of light pigmentation variants compared to the respective source populations of the migrations, suggesting adaptation to low light levels and a surprising signal of genetic continuity in _TMEM131_, a gene that may be involved in long-term adaptation to the cold.
> https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003703

----------


## MOESAN

> I'm quite surprised to see what look to me like personal attacks at Anfanger for having a different point of view.
> 
> I want that kind of behavior to end right now.


Personal attacks at Anfanger? Concerning myself, I posted my opinion and the fact that Anfanger, who very often has good points, did not seem to accept some Real Expert points.
Now, pigmentation matters for me, as everything else, to depict aspects of reality (sometimes supposed reality when speaking about ancient times). But it is not by itself the most important thing, agree. In this thread, I have said what I had to say. I have not tackled every post nor taken a big part in it. Moderating is a good thing, but I have not found in these later posts, any true personal or collective, ethnic, politic, nationalist attacks as we can see in some other threads. Or I ignored them, by nature.
I 'll pass to other threads

----------


## MOESAN

_As for my personal opinion, I take the point that the WHG might have had skin lightening genes we don't recognize. Great. The question still remains, as Anfanger succinctly put it: why then did the WHG living in those northern climes select so strongly for genes we KNOW lighten pigmentation. It would be unnecessary, wouldn't it? I haven't seen that addressed at all. 

To me that's illogical. If you don't see that and want to believe otherwise, fine, believe what you want.

_Angela, you are right here, personally I believe since long ago that our HG's ancestors were rather brown skinned (maybe dark enough brown). I have just a big "touch of doubt" when I see the reconstruction of Cheddar man, so dark "chocolate"!!!.

----------


## Angela

> Figure 4 shows that 100% of WHGs had the OCA2/HERC2 gene, which is associated with blue eye color and light skin. However, most studies only link this OCA2/HERC2 gene to blue eyes, concluding that WHGs had blue eyes and dark skin. The OCA2 gene is independently involved in the evolution of light skin pigmentation in East Asia and Europe. Two OCA2 polymorphisms (rs1800414 and rs74653330) have been associated with lighter skin pigmentation in East Asian populations. Aside from three genes associated with light skin in Europe (SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and TYRP1) which began to increase in frequency between 19,000 and 11,000 years ago, OCA2 also showed a potential signal of selection in Europeans and played part in light skin pigmentation in Europe. WHGs had only one depigmentation gene but they were probably as light-skinned as East Asians. 
> 
> 
> Fig 4. Adaptation to high-latitude environments.


Sorry, that won't fly. It takes a combination of snps to result in lighter skin pigmentation. We have decades of practical experience with it by law enforcement agencies. There are algorithms which are highly accurate into which you feed the snps. Someone with the blue eye gene but not the rest of the essential five will have a predicted pigmentation of dark skin and blue eyes. Now, it may not be a prediction for "black" skin, but no way would it come out as a prediction for light skin. 

As has been said repeatedly, the only way the WHG could have had light skin is if they had unknown skin depigmentation genes.

----------


## real expert

> I'm quite surprised to see what look to me like personal attacks at Anfanger for having a different point of view.
> 
> I want that kind of behavior to end right now.
> 
> We've discussed this over and over again on God knows how many threads. People's take on it differs; we know that. What is the point of rehashing it over and over again? Why is it so important to convince the people who think he probably "was" dark skinned? And, for God's sake, does it matter what shade of brown he was??? If he was the color of the San it's ok, but not if he was the color of Nigerians or Senegalese (which I doubt for what it's worth)?
> 
> I honestly don't get it.
> 
> Also and most important, keep it civil.






Well, I haven’t seen the aforementioned discussions about WHGs and their pigmentation. Therefore, I wasn’t aware of the several threads about him. Furthermore, I brought up a very recent study where the researchers made clear, that they can't really predict the pigmentation of ancient population with confidence. However, dear Angela the issue isn’t about light or very dark brown/ black tone being okay or not. The question was rather about how realistic is that the Cheddar man had the skin color of people who live in a tropical, low latitude region. The WHGs were no newcomers in Europe. Why was for instance, the Lochbour, a WHG like CM predicted as having intermediate color?




Besides, I didn’t attack anyone here. Nonetheless, I find it odd that I have to justify myself in a forum about archaeogenetics and anthropology (that is full of classification of people and discussions about phenotype), why I’m interested in the CM's physical appearance. :Confused:  

It’s beyond me, why people assume the worst or get suspicious when you doubt that the CM was black, but instead rather believe he was intermediate. Anyway, it’s totally normal that if you're not convinced that the WHGs were dark brown/black, that you bring up arguments that support your position. Normal debating behavior, with pros and cons. Anyway, I can assure you that my well-being doesn’t depend on what hue, complexion the Cheddar man had. So, my world won’t be shattered if it turns out that the Cheddar man was the darkest person on the planet.

It just would mean that I was wrong. Let’s be honest, if pigmentation doesn't matter at all, why do then scientists, geneticists waste their time and funds to create algorithm in order to predict the phenotype of people from the distant past? 


Plus,when normal people say that the accurate phenotype matters, it doesn't mean that they attach any value on it or pass judgement. It's rather that they want to see ancient people they find interesting, to come alive, so to speak. Surely, some people with agendas will use pigmentation for their ideologies, but the normal archaeogenetics- enthusiasts, nerds just want to satisfy their curiosity. Nevertheless, it's really sad, that even on Eupedia we can't talk chilled and relaxed about the phenotype, skin color of ancient folks without people questioning your motives.

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## ThirdTerm

Fig. S6. Light allele frequencies in ancient and present-day European populations for select SNPs (A) rs2675345, (B) rs4778123, (C) rs2153271, (D) rs3758833, (E) rs12203592, and (F) rs1325132. Nearest genes are labelled at the top of each bar plot.

In the supplementary section of this paper (Ju and Mathieson 2021), OCA2 and TYRP1 are identified as light skin alleles for WHGs. Their frequencies are 50% and 100%, respectively. There are several other pigmentation genes attributed to WHGs such as CTSC (55%) and IRF4 (40%). The IRF4 gene is strongly associated with pigmentation and sensitivity of skin to sun exposure. Previous papers on human pigmentation (Günther et al. 2018) had not found these pigmentation genes in WHGs. 




> At SLC24A5, rs2675345 shows evidence of change with both ancestry and time, suggesting that even after the spread of the light allele from Anatolia into Western Europe in the Neolithic (7) selection continued to occur post-admixture. Again, not all of these cases involve an increase in the frequency of the light pigmentation allele over time. The light allele of rs4778123 (OCA2) was at high frequency in hunter-gatherers but lower in later populations (SI Appendix, Fig. S6B). From the manually curated set of SNPs (Fig. 2 D–F), rs12203592 near IRF4 also displays a marked effect of ancestry with higher light allele frequency in hunter-gatherers (SI Appendix, Fig. S6E). While rs12203592 was not present in the UK Biobank summary statistics, another SNP at the IRF4 locus, rs3778607, was present but with a smaller ancestry effect (SI Appendix, Fig. S7).
> https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/su...27118.sapp.pdf

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## Angela

> Fig. S6. Light allele frequencies in ancient and present-day European populations for select SNPs (A) rs2675345, (B) rs4778123, (C) rs2153271, (D) rs3758833, (E) rs12203592, and (F) rs1325132. Nearest genes are labelled at the top of each bar plot.
> 
> In the supplementary section of this paper (Ju and Mathieson 2021), OCA2 and TYRP1 are identified as light skin alleles for WHGs. Their frequencies are 50% and 100%, respectively.


Please look up all the papers on the algorithms used for pigmentation prediction. You will see there in clear statements that one allele alone won't result in light skin pigmentation, a bit lighter perhaps, but not "light", and also that some of these are very low effect genes. The "big" effect genes are SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. Plus, the choice of samples in that study was all screwed up. If I remember correctly it also included SHG, so it throws the figures off.

This isn't rocket science. 

It's a fact which has been known for at least a decade and there are multiple papers on it and on the algorithms. Just use google for goodness sakes.

I also have personal experience with them. They "work". NO ONE with only the "blue eye" gene is going to turn out pale skinned when you catch him. 

Now, if some of you want to ignore the science on that aspect of this discussion, I have nothing more to say.

If you believe they "might" have had hitherto unknown de-pigmentation genes, that's a different story. It's a reasonable, not a-scientific position to take. It's just that until we find them it's only a possibility, not a certainty by any means, and a possibility which seems illogical to me. That's it. No big deal as far as I'm concerned.

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## real expert

> _As for my personal opinion, I take the point that the WHG might have had skin lightening genes we don't recognize. Great. The question still remains, as Anfanger succinctly put it: why then did the WHG living in those northern climes select so strongly for genes we KNOW lighten pigmentation. It would be unnecessary, wouldn't it? I haven't seen that addressed at all. 
> 
> To me that's illogical. If you don't see that and want to believe otherwise, fine, believe what you want.
> 
> _Angela, you are right here, personally I believe since long ago that our HG's ancestors were rather brown skinned (maybe dark enough brown). I have just a big "touch of doubt" when I see the reconstruction of Cheddar man, so dark "chocolate"!!!.







In my opinion Razib Khan‘s take on the prediction of pigmentation of ancient population is very balanced and informative. He basically says what I try to bring across here.







> There are a lot of moving parts in this preprint.* Look closely, and you will notice that the authors are careful to stipulate that they can’t really infer the pigmentation of ancient peoples, only the alleles ascertained in modern populations*. *This matters, because naive deployments of polygenic risk score models trained on modern populations projected on ancient ones seem highly suspect.* *I’m thinking here mostly of the “Cheddar Man is black”meme.* It is true that using modern SNP batteries Mesolithic Europeans are predicted to be rather dark-skinned, but higher latitude humans tend to be paler, on average, than lower latitude humans (albeit, not as pale as the typical Northern European!). But, we can be sure about the alleles we do know about, and, their likely effect (the functional understanding of these pathways is pretty good).
> 
> 
> The best modern genetic analyses of pigmentation suggest that variation is dominated by some large-effect loci, but that there is a large residual of smaller-effect loci segregating within the population(I’ve seen 50% accounted for with SNPs, and 50% as “ancestry”,which really masks small-effect QTLs). This is in contrast with the architecture in height, where there are few large-effect loci, and almost all of the variance is small-effect loci. What Ju et al.confirm is that selection “for pigmentation” is due to the large-effect loci; there’s no polygenic selection detectable on the smaller-effect loci for the ancient populations. Importantly, the change in allele frequency isn’t just due to admixture. It’s also due to selection after admixture.
> 
> I use quotes above because honestly, I think these sorts of results make it unclear what the selection was for. The general prior is conditioned on the fact that even after a few decades we still think of _EDAR_ asa hair-thickness gene, but it’s one of the strongest signals of selection in the human genome. The “light” allele in _SLC24A5_ is at an incredibly high frequency in Europe today, and has increased in the last 4,000 years. Though this SNP is impactful for the complexion, it’s hard to imagine how strong selection must be to drive it from 95% to 99.5% (as per 2005 paper on this SNP, the“light” allele exhibits some phenotypic dominance).
> 
> As noted in the preprint, there’s not enough data on other regions of the world. It’s hard to assess what’s going on Europe without assessing other regions. The authors do present an intriguing suggestion: that lighter pigmentation in East Asia is driven by smaller-effect genes shifted through polygenic selection.
> 
> ...



https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/...-pigmentation/

----------


## Ailchu

In a recent Interview in a swiss magazine Krause drops some interesting facts. not everything is relevant for this discussion but i'll just sum up the whole interview a bit:

-4.1-4.2 million differences in genome between 2 central europeans, only 4.3-4.4 million differences in genome between central european and person from Peking.

*-If we would meet an ancient Hunter Gatherer in european forests we would probably not be able to see a difference between him and modern Sub-Saharan Africans. their skin was very dark. except that they had blue or green eyes.
*
-blue eyes probably product of sexual selection. 

*-developements in agriculture come from a group of migrants from Anatolia.

-the skin colour of this group was similar to modern populations around the mediterranean. lighter than hunter gatherers in europe because of different diet.

-farmers had to develop lighter skin for more northern regions.

-modern scandinavians have lightest skin because scandinavia is the most northern region in the world where people are farmers. that's possible because of the gulf stream.*

-farmer women had more children than hunter gatherers because they were able to survive famines better and feed their babies with grain so that women were able to get pregnant again faster.

-not much mixing between them and farmers. mostly farmer male/hunter gatherer female pairs.

-new migrants from southern russia, called the yamnaya, who developed wheels and carts come in.

-six times more men than women.

-modern central europeans, including swiss have 70-80% of genes from these migrants?!(i think this is an error because he probably ment so say paternal DNA? or he does not really talk about the "pure" yamna anymore.)

-in the past this culture was called streitaxt culture(CWC), the nazis called them "aryans". people always thought they came from north but they actually came from southern russia.

-parallel comunities of farmers and steppe for thousand years.

-not that much stealing of women by steppe men but rather farmers marrying off their daughters to steppe people to secure good relations like it was done during middle ages.

-farmers were pushed into the mountains.

-migrations were rarely completely peacefull but without migrations europe would not have gotten very far.

-many who try to stop migration nowadays try to secure a success model that never worked without migration.

-to create a replacement like the one from 5000 years ago, 100 million people from india or the near east would have to immigrate into switzerland.

-migrants from 5000 years ago probably colonised empty land because of pest that killed the previous inhabitants.

----------


## real expert

[QUOTE=Ailchu;617983]


> In a recent Interview in a swiss magazine Krause drops some interesting facts. not everything is relevant for this discussion but i'll just sum up the whole interview a bit:
> 
> 
> *-If we would meet an ancient Hunter Gatherer in european forests we would probably not be able to see a difference between him and modern Sub-Saharan Africans. their skin was very dark. except that they had blue or green eyes.
> *


This claim of Krause is misleading.

A Tamil Indian with nearly black skin can be still be told apart from a sub-Saharan African even by people who are not anthropologists. 

The fact is, that WHGs had a clearly distinct morphology/physiognomy from sub-Saharan Africans. Hence, despite their presumed dark skin they would be distinguishable from sub-Saharan Africans, with their own distinctive looks. The need of some researchers to associate WHGs with SSAs, in spite of the fact, that WHGs are one of the most genetically distant people from Africans, is getting ridiculous, weird and neurotic now. 

Anyway, it's not unusual that in interviews scientists make unscientific, misleading remarks. The irony is, that Krause can stress the "blackness/darkness" of WHGs all he wants, that won't redeem him in the eyes of Afro-centrists who will never forgive him for his Ancient Egyptian DNA study. In the Abusir paper he said that AEs had more in common with Levantine people and EEF than SSAs. Therefore, On ES, an Afrocentric forum, Krause is accused of conspiracy to suppress the blackness of Ancient Egyptians, and he's also accused of being a white supremacist, or worse, a Nazi. 








> -in the past this culture was called streitaxt culture(CWC), the nazis called them "aryans". people always thought they came from north but they actually came from southern russia.


Indo-Europeans speakers were called Aryans prior to the Nazis. The theory of an "Aryan race" appeared in the mid-19th century, thus the Nazis didn't invent the term or the people referred as Aryans. When, will people move on and stop associating Indo-Europeans/Aryans with Nazis or make everything about Nazi ideologies when dealing or discussing the Aryans/Indo-Europeans. Jeez. :Useless:  Besides, the usage of the term "Indo-Aryan"is still common in scientist's circle.

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## MOESAN

@Real Expert
I agree with a lot of your points in this thread. Just we don't know how was precisely the pigmentation of our old HG's, spite I doubt they were so dark as say someones. But in a post of yours, you mention:

[ ... Originally Posted by *MOESAN*  _As for my personal opinion, I take the point that the WHG might have had skin lightening genes we don't recognize. Great. The question still remains, as Anfanger succinctly put it: why then did the WHG living in those northern climes select so strongly for genes we KNOW lighten pigmentation. It would be unnecessary, wouldn't it? I haven't seen that addressed at all. 

To me that's illogical. If you don't see that and want to believe otherwise, fine, believe what you want.

_Angela, you are right here, personally I believe since long ago that our HG's ancestors were rather brown skinned (maybe dark enough brown). I have just a big "touch of doubt" when I see the reconstruction of Cheddar man, so dark "chocolate"!!!...]

In fact, only the vertical letters are by myself. The inclined ones are by Angela.

----------


## Gnarl

I think, if we have to assume the presence of hypothetical, extinct and undetected gene variants to get the skin color we want, we have left science behind. Not to mention, why do we bother to predict anything from genetics if we have to assume there could have been unknown and undetected genes affecting everything.




> Keep in mind, that WHGs lived under glacial weather, climate for 20000 years, a skin tone that is more suitable in the tropical regions wouldn’t make sense during the so-called little Ice Age.


I think there may be some confusion about temperature and insolation here. But first, Cheddar Man was a WHG. As I remember, they were fairly homogeneous genetically, and it is assumed that they were exchanging genes across the population. They do go back a ways in Europe. I would speculate that their population towards the edge of the ice-sheet during the ice age was thinner than further south. In other words, they were mainly a Mediterranean population, thinning as they went further north.

Now speaking as someone who lives further north than almost everyone else, solar radiation decreases with the angle of the sunlight. In other words, the lower the sun is in the sky, the greater the distance the rays has to travel through atmosphere. And that weakens them. It is pretty much impossible to get sunburned here in summer, even with the palest white skin.

However, it is _easily possible_ in winter (except when the sun is gone totally). The high albedo of the snow will reflect the UV radiation in the sunlight leading to a far higher UV load than you'd get in summer. The radiation does not care if the temperature is low. This has consequences for an ice age population. Because although the climate during the ice age was colder, the solar radiation falling on them was not significantly different from todays today.

So if you are going to be spending a lot of time active on snowfields at Mediterranean latitudes, where even the summer sun is strong enough to burn, pigmentation might be a real good idea. Might not be enough pressure to redevelop pigmentation if you've already dropped it, but if you arrived with it, it might not be a bad idea to keep it up.

As far as the development of lighter skin goes; SHGs did most of their lightening before farming. There has been noticeable lightening in Scandinavia in the last 1 000 years. I don't think diet is as central to it as we assume. Maybe sexual selection?

----------


## Angela

> I think, if we have to assume the presence of hypothetical, extinct and undetected gene variants to get the skin color we want, we have left science behind. Not to mention, why do we bother to predict anything from genetics if we have to assume there could have been unknown and undetected genes affecting everything.
> 
> 
> 
> I think there may be some confusion about temperature and insolation here. But first, Cheddar Man was a WHG. As I remember, they were fairly homogeneous genetically, and it is assumed that they were exchanging genes across the population. They do go back a ways in Europe. I would speculate that their population towards the edge of the ice-sheet during the ice age was thinner than further south. In other words, they were mainly a Mediterranean population, thinning as they went further north.
> 
> Now speaking as someone who lives further north than almost everyone else, solar radiation decreases with the angle of the sunlight. In other words, the lower the sun is in the sky, the greater the distance the rays has to travel through atmosphere. And that weakens them. It is pretty much impossible to get sunburned here in summer, even with the palest white skin.
> 
> However, it is _easily possible_ in winter (except when the sun is gone totally). The high albedo of the snow will reflect the UV radiation in the sunlight leading to a far higher UV load than you'd get in summer. The radiation does not care if the temperature is low. This has consequences for an ice age population. Because although the climate during the ice age was colder, the solar radiation falling on them was not significantly different from todays today.
> ...


I've been reading a lot about Vitamin D since speaking to my doctor about Covid. It's apparently standard now to recommend 5,000 units a day as a preventative. The doctor explained to me that up to 40% of white Americans are Vitamin D deficient. That's amazing to me given that all milk and dairy products and cereals etc. are fortified with it, and we used to be told you didn't need to be out in the sun all that long to get enough.

It makes sense to me that SHG, bundled in furs all the time in the far north might have gotten paler over time in order to get enough Vitamin D. However, they first had to get the allele in order to select it, and the source seems to be the Caucasus. Perhaps mountain living mimics those conditions.

Or it may be tied to another beneficial process and the skin lightening is just a byproduct.

----------


## Gnarl

I can't imagine a setting where the ancient SHGs were not heavy consumers of fish though. Theres just not that much else here, and only the coast was icefree for a long time. Seems to me that the earliest cases of lightening skin seems to be about the time the snow and icefields go away. Might be a case of competing pressures. Getting extra vitamin D in addition to you diet is good, skin cancer bad. R

----------


## Silesian

> I've been reading a lot about Vitamin D since speaking to my doctor about Covid. It's apparently standard now to recommend 5,000 units a day as a preventative. The doctor explained to me that up to 40% of white Americans are Vitamin D deficient. That's amazing to me given that all milk and dairy products and cereals etc. are fortified with it, and we used to be told you didn't need to be out in the sun all that long to get enough.
> 
> It makes sense to me that SHG, bundled in furs all the time in the far north might have gotten paler over time in order to get enough Vitamin D. However, they first had to *get the allele* in order to select it, and the source seems to be the Caucasus. Perhaps mountain living mimics those conditions.
> 
> Or it may be tied to another beneficial process and the skin lightening is just a byproduct.


Don't count out your microbiome, for converting all your nutrients. There are more of them in your body than your own cells. Dairy-Kefir(fresh fizzy type) and or yogurts might be a good alternative. Electrolytes, sodium, potassium, calcium(works with vit D) to lessen the stress of those nasty bugs going around now.




> The *human microbiome is the aggregate of all microbiota that reside on or within human tissues and biofluids along with the corresponding anatomical sites in which they reside,[1] including the skin, mammary glands, placenta, seminal fluid, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, biliary tract, and gastrointestinal tract. Types of human microbiota include bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists and viruses.*

----------


## Gnarl

> lol... I read that melanin protects the skin from the dangerous radiation from the Sun. So, why would the human body produce melanin if it lives in cold regions where it has to dress anyway to protect itself from the cold?!


Melanin does protect from UV radiation. You cannot count on high radiation overlapping with low temperatures. Especially if you live in a place with Mediterranean sun and a snowy climate. Your definition of "need to dress up" temperatures likely does not overlap entirely with that of people living in polar regions.

----------


## Angela

> I can't imagine a setting where the ancient SHGs were not heavy consumers of fish though. Theres just not that much else here, and only the coast was icefree for a long time. Seems to me that the earliest cases of lightening skin seems to be about the time the snow and icefields go away. Might be a case of competing pressures. Getting extra vitamin D in addition to you diet is good, skin cancer bad. R


Exactly right. I had two bouts of terrible sun poisoning as a young woman, one on my face, with my face swelling hugely and covered with blisters. Once it was my arm. The first time was on a New Jersey beach because I fell asleep for about two hours lying on my stomach. The second time was in Mexico because I was holding on to a pole of an open jeep. Both times I had to have shots of steroids and stay indoors for three days. Even my eyes got burned in the summer sun of Florida, and I was told I had to wear wrap around sunglasses all the time.

I was told by numerous dermatologists that I had so little melanin that going sunbathing was absolutely out for me. Even high temperatures are a problem because my pores are apparently so small that I don't sweat enough and so my body gets overheated. 

I did listen, either always hunting for shade or slathering myself with high level sunscreen, but the result was that I was diagnosed with Vitamin D deficiency a number of times, requiring prescription strength pills for two months each time. 

Yet still, I've had three precancerous lesions burned off. Thankfully, squamous cell, not melanoma, but I have to have full body scans every six months. My father, whose skin pigmentation I inherited, had numerous squamous cell cancers removed, one that was pretty serious. His entire family lived in the high Apennines for at least six hundred years. I don't know if that had anything to do with it. It's winter for six months a year there, but I think it's also pretty cloudy.

Black people have the same problem in the U.S. for the opposite reason. No matter how long they stay outdoors, they can't get enough Vitamin D because they have too much melanin. 

Also, it is reported that Africans around the equator carry snps to produce LOTS of melanin, to protect them from the sun. 

It's all one of those unfair things in life because I adore the sun and the sea, and hate cloudy and rainy climates.

----------


## real expert

> @Real Expert
> I agree with a lot of your points in this thread. Just we don't know how was precisely the pigmentation of our old HG's, spite I doubt they were so dark as say someones. But in a post of yours, you mention:
> 
> [ ... Originally Posted by *MOESAN*  _As for my personal opinion, I take the point that the WHG might have had skin lightening genes we don't recognize. Great. The question still remains, as Anfanger succinctly put it: why then did the WHG living in those northern climes select so strongly for genes we KNOW lighten pigmentation. It would be unnecessary, wouldn't it? I haven't seen that addressed at all. 
> 
> To me that's illogical. If you don't see that and want to believe otherwise, fine, believe what you want.
> 
> _Angela, you are right here, personally I believe since long ago that our HG's ancestors were rather brown skinned (maybe dark enough brown). I have just a big "touch of doubt" when I see the reconstruction of Cheddar man, so dark "chocolate"!!!...]
> 
> In fact, only the vertical letters are by myself. The inclined ones are by Angela.


_To be honest, I don’t know, haven't figured out why WHGs selected so strongly for genes that lighten the skin when having a very dark skin as scientists assert was working fine for them in their environment. My speculation is that the strong selection was for very light skin. It's said that the development of light/pale skin was due to sexual selection. However, in nature nothing develops for aesthetic reasons only but there must be some benefits attached to it , too. Again, why did the WHGs strongly select for genes who make the skin lighter, in the first place, if being dark brown to black was not a problem and beneficial? The Australian Aborigines or Melanesians, for instance, didn’t select genes for light skin for obvious reasons. Besides, I_ _can‘t speak for everybody, but I personally_ _don’t ignore science, I’m just sceptical that predictions for pigmentation of modern people are as accurate as for archaic ones._

----------


## matp

> All SSAs look dark brown or even black(Nilotics) to me except the Khoi san and guys, there are maybe 20-30 threads where we have talked about ***mentation. Most of my posts on this forum are related to ***mentation. You can use the search option, by the way. We have talked about this paper when it was a preprint and now again and when exactly did I say you can't discuss ***mentation or anything else ?! What are we doing right now ? Discussing ***mentation ! If you have problem with Cheddar Mans skin colour go and contact the main genetics. I hope you have serious data that supports your notion of Cheddar Mans skin colour not being that dark because all I hear out of your posts is: "IN MY OPINION HE WASN`T THAT DARK! NO WAY! I DON`T HAVE DATA BUT NEVER EVER THAT DARK!."
> 
> Show me data and a plausible explanation and I change the idea of WHGs being dark in a second.


You would have to use the prediction model (hirisplex-s) to understand why the predictions are so flawed, and compare them to modern populations. 

Loschbour was predicted 0.89 for 'intermediate' when compared to La Brana who was predicted 0.75 'Dark to black', despite only three small differences on lesser effect snps. 

And it appears that Loschbour is the only correct and consistent prediction of the three WHGs in the study- La Brana is predicted only as having 'dark' skin, if you swap the HERC2 alleles associated with blue eyes he had with the ancestral brown eye alleles. On modern predictions the HERC2 blue eye alleles will give the effect of a slightly lighter skin prediction also, which is consistent with the Loschbour prediction.

I would post screenshots but as I am a new user it does not permit me to post links at current.

----------


## Angela

I don't know if the WHG had relatively lighter skin than has been argued.

However, from the data we have, they selected for de***mentation snps only in the far northeast, where it is extremely foggy, with few days of sun. They didn't select strongly for the "modern" de-***mentation snp arriving from the Near East in places like Iberia, at least while maintaining their traditional diet, which is another factor. On the old threads where this was discussed to death, the incoming farmers are darker than farmers in, say, the Balkans, because there were more WHG with whom they admixed, although the percentages aren't large.

Also, if the WHG had de-***mentation snps which produced relatively lighter skin, why select at all for the modern de***mentation snps of which we're aware?

Furthermore, the connection of paler skin with modern de-***mentation snps in certain environmental conditions like more northern latitudes, and particularly areas in northern latitudes with very foggy, low sunlight levels, and snps for "darker" skin in areas with levels of solar radiation is clear. There's a reason the Africans living around the equator are extremely dark, and we have found the snps which code for more melanin, so this isn't just speculation.

----------


## matp

> I don't know if the WHG had relatively lighter skin than has been argued.
> 
> However, from the data we have, they selected for de***mentation snps only in the far northeast, where it is extremely foggy, with few days of sun. They didn't select strongly for the "modern" de-***mentation snp arriving from the Near East in places like Iberia, at least while maintaining their traditional diet, which is another factor. On the old threads where this was discussed to death, the incoming farmers are darker than farmers in, say, the Balkans, because there were more WHG with whom they admixed, although the percentages aren't large.
> 
> Also, if the WHG had de-***mentation snps which produced relatively lighter skin, why select at all for the modern de***mentation snps of which we're aware?
> 
> Furthermore, the connection of paler skin with modern de-***mentation snps in certain environmental conditions like more northern latitudes, and particularly areas in northern latitudes with very foggy, low sunlight levels, and snps for "darker" skin in areas with levels of solar radiation is clear. There's a reason the Africans living around the equator are extremely dark, and we have found the snps which code for more melanin, so this isn't just speculation.


Should remember that WHG were almost fully derived on many of the HERC2/ OCA2/ IRF4/ APBA2 ect variants - in particular IRF4 is especially associated with the palest complexions in Europe. Even on hirisplex it is number 2 on the rankings out of 36 and the most significant contributor to the very pale and pale categories. This alone is evidence that they were selecting towards lighter complexions - so many of them have been found to be homozygote derived - remember most modern Europeans do not have this.

Although SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 are known to have stronger effects, we should also be asking, what is the actual effect of these two genes? Most studies seem to suggest the derived alleles might lighten the skin by around 15 melanin units combined. All East Asians are ancestral on the two main loci on these two genes - of course they have a couple of differing variants that result in de***mentation, however not all have the HERC2/ OCA2 variants that WHG have been found to have, and none have IRF4. Maybe the selection for these genes occurred for the simple reason they are stronger effect but also more advantageous than say IRF4 which has has also negative consequences such as far greater likelihood of sunburn and freckling.

Also have noticed that a few WHG have some of variants found in neanderthals that have been associated with both lighter (and darker) complexion as mentioned in a study from a few years back - one of which is much less common in Europe today.

----------


## Angela

> Should remember that WHG were almost fully derived on many of the HERC2/ OCA2/ IRF4/ APBA2 ect variants - in particular IRF4 is especially associated with the palest complexions in Europe. Even on hirisplex it is number 2 on the rankings out of 36 and the most significant contributor to the very pale and pale categories. This alone is evidence that they were selecting towards lighter complexions - so many of them have been found to be homozygote derived - remember most modern Europeans do not have this.
> 
> Although SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 are known to have stronger effects, we should also be asking, what is the actual effect of these two genes? Most studies seem to suggest the derived alleles might lighten the skin by around 15 melanin units combined. All East Asians are ancestral on the two main loci on these two genes - of course they have a couple of differing variants that result in de***mentation, however not all have the HERC2/ OCA2 variants that WHG have been found to have, and none have IRF4. Maybe the selection for these genes occurred for the simple reason they are stronger effect but also more advantageous than say IRF4 which has has also negative consequences such as far greater likelihood of sunburn and freckling.
> 
> Also have noticed that a few WHG have some of variants found in neanderthals that have been associated with both lighter (and darker) complexion as mentioned in a study from a few years back - one of which is much less common in Europe today.


I've said this what seems like a million times. I've worked with the hirisplex system professionally, and I can tell you categorically that if you have only HERC2/ OCA2/ IRF4/ APBA2 variants for de***mentation, i.e. not SLC24A5 and SLC4502 you will NOT come out as having pale skin. PERIOD.

Could they have had de-***mentation snps of which we're not aware? Yes. However, if so why the hell would there have been such strong selection for the "modern" de***mentation snps from the Caucasus and Anatolia? Why would they need them so much that there's this massive sweep? 

Believe what you want, of course. Out.

----------


## matp

> I've said this what seems like a million times. I've worked with the hirisplex system professionally, and I can tell you categorically that if you have only HERC2/ OCA2/ IRF4/ APBA2 variants for de***mentation, i.e. not SLC24A5 and SLC4502 you will NOT come out as having pale skin. PERIOD.
> 
> Could they have had de-***mentation snps of which we're not aware? Yes. However, if so why the hell would there have been such strong selection for the "modern" de***mentation snps from the Caucasus and Anatolia? Why would they need them so much that there's this massive sweep? 
> 
> Believe what you want, of course. Out.


It is not just these variants, there are lots of of other variants that could be included - and btw I am not suggesting they were red head pale skin, but I certainly see no reason why they could not have been similar to say a lightish complexion East Asian - or just tinted skin - if you have worked with hirisplex professionally then you should be at least questioning why alleles most unique to Europe and associated with blue eyes are directly contributing to dark to black predictions? I can provide the data and it seems to be a problem on this prediction model that is unique to WHG... even Sunghir 2 and Kostenki 14 only get predicted dark, and they obviously predate WHG considerably. 

P.S have a look at the Whitehawk woman reconstruction of a neolithic farmer - do you agree this is an accurate portrayal? Given we actually have living populations living in far hotter climates (Sardinians) that have very similar ***mentation variants to EEF and in no way look anything like the Whitehawk reconstruction..

----------


## real expert

An interesting fact, that the Peştera Muierii woman from 34, 000 years ago was predicted to have intermediate/ olive skin color. This old European woman big times predates the Anatolian farmers who carried genes for light skin.





> *Phenotypic analysis*
> 
> We used HIrisplex-S77
> to predict ***mentation phenotypes for PM1. HIrisplex-S uses 41 SNPs to predict eye, skin and hair color and it has been shown to perform well on modern Eurasians. This prediction is associated with some uncertainty in ancient individuals as we do not know if there were functional alleles in these populations that are unknown today. The presence of unknown functional variants is not unlikely considering the complex genetic architecture of ***mentation phenotypes.124
> ,125
> 
> We did not include the insertion polymorphism rs312262906 into the prediction model. The HIrisPlexS model predicts the following phenotype for PM1: brown eyes (p = 0.995), brown (p = 0.566) to black hair (p = 0.382) with dark shade (p = 0.931) and intermediate skin color (p = 0.999). These results are similar to other European hunter-gatherers who are mainly ancestral for the known ***mentation variants.14
> ,126



https://www.cell.com/current-biology...showall%3Dtrue

----------


## matp

Thanks, very interesting to know, most EEF score darker than intermediate also - seems hirisplex-s cannot actually distinguish between med European complexions versus darkish South Asians

----------


## MOESAN

@matp:
I'm tempted to support your points of view, partly at least. I don't think the most of European Meso HG's were truly black or even very dark. But what we have today don't help us to precise the kind of intermediary hues their skins had. Apparently not light ones, even "olive"; Concerning effectiveness Angela has a point when she speak of the 2 principal mutated genes selected at SLC24A5 SLC45A2; now the partly lightening genes among WHG's could have helped to an even lighter ***mentation, when EEF and WHG's mixed? Maybe I'mnaive?
BTW? We ar'nt sure the ***mentation, even in average, was exactly the same among all foragers groups.

----------


## matp

...........

----------


## MOESAN

It’s hard to know the exact de***mentation effects of the so called ‘derived’ genes.
If a rely on the maps of distribution of the mutated forms for SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 in the world, and on what I think I know about all these people skin ***mentation, i’m tempted to say :
- SLC24A5 is almost alone or very very dominant in Europe (a bit less roughly said in South, the lest in Sardigna) and in Levant and Northern Arabia ; it’s very dominant too among northern Iranians and ethnic Afghans, even more north-east, Hindu Kush and north of western Himalaya ; Mozabites have significantly less, but they are not on the maps I’ve. In western Algeria (Sahel) it accounts for around 80% (what ethny?) so les than in the northern Indo-Iranian lands.
- SLC45A2 is still very dominant among Europeans, but less than SC24A5 ; the doc I’ve is unprecise for some regions, and I don’t know precisely but it seems the derived alleles spite dominant, are very less present in a southern region of Italy (Sicily ? Basilicate ? Calabre?) ; in Levant and Nth-Arabia, it represents about 50 %, and in Iran, Hindu Kush and around it’s around 20 % only. In western Algeria (Sahel), it’s around 40-45 % so more than in northern Indo-Iranian lands.
So, what about the « whiting power » of these derived alleles ?
In Europe, the skin colours are very close (light or very light) in winter time, from milky white to yellowish olive, not as dark (brunet white) as Levantines and Nth-Arabians or Iranians and Afghans.
I have to say that at the individual level, Levantines, eg Druzes and Kurds, show often the same skin colour than the most of darkest Europe regions inhabitants (Southerners is a « bag term » in Europe which covers a lot of different and diverse people, all Mediterranean are not ‘mediter’like) ; Jordanians, Saudi Arabs and Asia ‘europoids’ are a bit darker but not so much.
I don’t speak about the pops with more ‘mongoloid’ crossings, where the specific east-asian mutation has produced visible lightening effects, whatever would be the %’s of specific Europoid mutations.
I see that SLC24A5 derived alleles has surely more effects than SLC45A2 derived alleles, since the Iranian, Afghan and Tadjik pop’s, very dominant for the SLC24A5 mutation close here to Europeans but very poor for the SLC45A2, opposed here to Europeans and even neatly poorer than Levantines Arabians, have skin colours not too far from the darkest Europeans, if not so close (and this could be discussed but the reflectance measures of not exposed skin colour confirms it: Sth-West Asia, Near-East, Nth of Sth-Asia and NW Africa are very close one to another : the slightly darkest would be due too to some input of SSA genes, concerning the Semitic-Hamitic pop’s. (BTW, among the less dark ones, we have some Kurds and Northern Amazighs).
I avow that my conclusion about both SLC’s is a bit fast made, because I don’t know the input that could have other loci, even if weak everyone of them… Just a bet.


Concerning « black » skin, let’s remember that SSAfricans have derived alleles for *reinforce**d****mentation so we aren’t obliged to believe our far ancestors in Africa were « blackish black » skinned (BTW it seems their ***mentation has changed there and then, according to families, darker or lighter).

----------


## real expert

> P.S have a look at the Whitehawk woman reconstruction of a neolithic farmer - do you agree this is an accurate portrayal? Given we actually have living populations living in far hotter climates (Sardinians) that have very similar ***mentation variants to EEF and in no way look anything like the Whitehawk reconstruction..


Given the fact that the Whitehawk woman was a Neolithic farmer, it is rather likely that she was several shades lighter than the reconstruction. That said, the researchers explained that they think the Whitehawk women's complexion was that dark due to the fact, that she had significant WHG admixture. So, to these researchers the WHG genetic input didn't lighten the Anatolian farmers' complexion, but made them rather darker.

----------


## Angela

So far as I know there is no dna available for the "Whitehawk" Neolithic woman, so it's impossible to gauge the accuracy of the skin tone. 

I personally know people who are homogeneous derived for SLC24A5, but heterogeneous for derived SLC45A2 who look like normal Mediterranean Europeans, although slightly on the darker side. That combination is pretty common in parts of Iberia. However, the ones I know have other depigmentation snps. I don't know any Europeans who are completely ancestral for SLC45.

As I've said a thousand times, you can't tell predicted pigmentation without a bunch of snps, as pigmentation is CUMULATIVE in nature. 


What I can say is that if you go back and check the pigmentation snps of the early farmers in the Balkans, and compare them to the early farmers in Iberia where the farmers have more WHG, the farmers in Iberia would be predicted to be "darker".

As always, these things are relative. 

Has anyone run La Brana through the online calculator? Are there enough good quality snps to fit the requirement for the calculator?

----------


## Angela

> So far as I know there is no dna available for the "Whitehawk" Neolithic woman, so it's impossible to gauge the accuracy of the skin tone. 
> 
> I personally know people who are homogeneous derived for SLC24A5, but heterogeneous for derived SLC45A2 who look like normal Mediterranean Europeans, although slightly on the darker side. That combination is pretty common in parts of Iberia. However, the ones I know have other depigmentation snps. I don't know any Europeans who are completely ancestral for SLC45.
> 
> As I've said a thousand times, you can't tell predicted pigmentation without a bunch of snps, as pigmentation is CUMULATIVE in nature. 
> 
> 
> What I can say is that if you go back and check the pigmentation snps of the early farmers in the Balkans, and compare them to the early farmers in Iberia where the farmers have more WHG, the farmers in Iberia would be predicted to be "darker".
> 
> ...


Again, I've posted these before, but for newcomers...



This is the only study of which I'm aware that has data for each province. That's because the data is from a melanoma study.

However, Lucotte et al has spotty data from the rest of West Eurasia for 374f or 45A2:





* Table 1.* Distribution of _374F_ allele frequencies in 32 populations of West Europe and North Africa (N = sample size).*No*.
*Country*
*Region/population*
*Latitude (°)*
*N*
*Frequency of 374f*
*References*

1
Germany
Northrhine-Whestphali
50.9
241
0.965
Yuasa et al. (2006)

2

Munich
48.1
93
0.962
 “

3
France
Rheims
49.2
98
0.893
 “

4
Italy
Genoa
44.5
97
0.85
 “

5
Denmark
Copenhagen
56
51
0.98
Lucotte et al.(2010)

6
England
London
51.5
56
0.955
 “

7
Belgium
Brussels
50.5
53
0.934
 “

8
France
Lille
50.5
64
0.945
 “

9

Rennes
48
52
0.971
 “

10

Marseilles
43.2
312
0.888
 “

11

Perpignan
43
101
0.827
 “

12

Corsica
42
328
0.878
 “









13
Germany
Mulheim
50
59
0.975
 “

14
Switzerland
Basel
47.2
51
0.961
 “

15
Italy
Roma
41.9
64
0.898
 “

16

Napoli
41
128
0.859
 “

17

Sicily
38
39
0.833
 “

18

Sardinia
40
100
0.805
 “

19
Spain
Barcelona
41
59
0.856
 “

20

Sevilla
37.5
71
0.725
 “

21
Portugal
North
42
79
0.725
 “

22

South
38
59
0.780
 “

23
Morocco
Tangier
35.8
123
0.691
 “

24
Algeria
Algier
36.5
141
0.709
 “

25
Tunisia
Tunis
36.5
73
0.610
 “

26
England
Orcades
59
16
1
Norton et al. (2007)

27
France

46
29
0.91
 “

28

Basque
43
24
0.94
 “

29
Italy
Bergamo
46
14
0.96
 “

30

Tuscan
43
8
0.94
 “

31

Sardinia
40
28
0.68
 “

32
Algeria
Mozabite
32
30
0.40
 “

----------


## real expert

> So far as I know there is no dna available for the "Whitehawk" Neolithic woman, so it's impossible to gauge the accuracy of the skin tone................




The researchers indirectly gauged the complexion of the Whitewawk woman by comparing her to other Neolithic Brits, and by going from the information they've got from the "Cheddar Man" team. 
From recalling reading the British Neolithic folks had substantial WHG genetic input.




> The same team of scientists released results of research to the public in 2018 about ‘Cheddar Man’, a ten thousand year old modern human from the Mesolithic Period, whose ancient DNA demonstrated that he was dark skinned.





> *While DNA could not be retrieved from Whitehawk Woman, the ‘Cheddar Man’ team advised that she would probably have had dark skin of a southern Mediterranean/Near Eastern/North African colour, brown hair and brown eyes. This is based on the genetic analysis of ancient individuals dating to the Neolithic from around Europe as well as from Britain specifically. This information was passed on to our forensic artist who included it within the facial reconstruction on display in the new gallery.*
> The same analysis produced predictions of lighter skin for other individuals included in the gallery and these predictions were also included in their facial reconstructions.
> In each instance where ancient DNA was not recoverable from our individuals, we followed the same scientific advice on likelihood of their physical characteristics.


https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/disco...has-dark-skin/

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## Angela

> The researchers indirectly gauged the complexion of the Whitewawk woman by comparing her to other Neolithic Brits, and by going from the information they've got from the "Cheddar Man" team. 
> From recalling reading the British Neolithic folks had substantial WHG genetic input.
> 
> 
> 
> https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/disco...has-dark-skin/


Sorry to be a pain in the neck, but unless I see all the snps they used from these other Neolithic people and then some evidence those snps were run through the algorithm, color me sceptical.

If you take a look at the parts of Europe where the people are 100% derived for SLC 24A5, as were most of the Early Neolithic farmers, and had only one or no derived SLC 45A2, they are no where near as dark as that. 

So, everything depends on which "modern" depigmentation snps those "other" Neolithic farmers carried in addition to derived SLC24A5. It's unlikely the early ones carried derived SLC45A2, but there are other depigmentation snps coded on the newest algorithms.

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## real expert

> Sorry to be a pain in the neck, but unless I see all the snps they used from these other Neolithic people and then some evidence those snps were run through the algorithm, color me sceptical.
> 
> If you take a look at the parts of Europe where the people are 100% derived for SLC 24A5, as were most of the Early Neolithic farmers, and had only one or no derived SLC 45A2, they are no where near as dark as that. 
> 
> So, everything depends on which "modern" depigmentation snps those "other" Neolithic farmers carried in addition to derived SLC24A5. It's unlikely the early ones carried derived SLC45A2, but there are other depigmentation snps coded on the newest algorithms.



I’m actually skeptical, too. As you can see from my response to matp, I doubt that she was that dark. However, I brought the arguments of the researchers why they assume that she was of a dark complexion.

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## matp

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## matp

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## Angela

> I have run La Brana and several other higher coverage WHG through on the calculator, they all get lighter skin predictions when you swap the blue eye associated variants for the ancestral brown eye alleles. I cannot post screenshots but if you want to put the data through yourself here is the number of alleles to input for each snp for La Brana for the darker prediction range suggested in the original study:
> 
> 12: 2
> 13: 2
> 16: 1
> 19: 1
> 27: 2
> 29: 1
> 35: 2
> ...


So, academics putting out a major paper just decided not to input the snps for eye color???

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## matp

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## Ailchu

> I have run La Brana and several other higher coverage WHG through on the calculator, they all get lighter skin predictions when you swap the blue eye associated variants for the ancestral brown eye alleles. I cannot post screenshots but if you want to put the data through yourself here is the number of alleles to input for each snp for La Brana for the darker prediction range suggested in the original study:
> 
> 12: 2
> 13: 2
> 16: 1
> 19: 1
> 27: 2
> 29: 1
> 35: 2
> ...


did you enter NA for all the others?

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## matp

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

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## Ailchu

> All of the other snps you leave as '0' with no inputs as 'NA'


is that really correct? we don't know the data for those snp's right? i assume you are using this right? https://hirisplex.erasmusmc.nl/

i already wrote this somewhere else but i don't get that site. 

for example for rs1129038(31) it says "G" but when i google that snp it says that there is a C and a T allele not G

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## matp

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## Ailchu

> Have a look on snpedia and search for 'orientation' - in this instance the C/G allele represents the ancestral brown eye associated variant, and the T/A allele represents the derived associated blue eye variant at highest frequency to North Europe


thanks. i thought that it might be because of the reversed/non-reversed strand. but didn't think people would actually label SNP's based on the non-coding strand or mix everything up.

tried the different snp's and it seems for the different HERC2 variants nr.20, 28, 30 leads to darker skin prediction while 31 and 32 lead to a lighter one. it's a bit strange but i'm not sure how accurate this is if you just put in 0 in those where we don't know the value.

something that might be a sign of this problem that you really shouldn't just add 0 everywhere: if you leave everything at 0 and just change 31 and 32 then they actually lead to somewhat darker skin prediction while before with the values of la brana they lead to lighter skin prediction.

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## matp

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## Ailchu

> Yes 20 and 28 are giving what I would consider a consistent effect as with modern populations, 31 and 32 are inconsistent with modern populations - especially 31 - and the derived allele is almost unique to North Europe and does not appear anywhere else at any great frequencies bar the Americas of course. 
> 
> So what you have here is alleles most unique to North Europe contributing directly to heightened likelihood of black skin...
> 
> Now see what happens when applying the same conditions to this modern day Finnish prediction; inputs are:
> 
> 12: 1
> 13: 1
> 22: 1
> ...



for those predictions ancestral version of 31 and 32 lead to higher likelyhood of dark skin. isn't that what you would expect?

imo it shows that it is highly dependant on the context and that it's probably not accurate if we put in 0 everywhere instead of NA.

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## matp

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## Ailchu

> Yes that is my point. The Loschbour WHG prediction of 0.90 for intermediate is consistent - so 31 and 32 ancestral give the darkening effect to the prediction just like the modern day Finnish. 
> 
> However with La Brana the identical ancestral alleles at highest frequency to Africa/ East Asia contribute significantly to a lighter prediction. Remember these HGs were relatively homogenous, so any factors such as epistasis or variants not included in the model that could be influencing skin pigmentation on the hirisplex-s database subjects is not likely to be relevant to such similar individuals. 
> 
> We have to also remember that there is not a single actual WHG on the hirisplex database - but, of all potential comparative subjects, would it be more relevant to compare a WHG to say a Finnish person, or a heavily mixed African American - of which there will be numerous on the hirisplex database? I should also mention that on the snipper skin prediction model, all WHG score intermediate - Loschbour and La Brana actually score identical on the snipper.


can you link me to the allele table for the WHG's? are those values you put in 0 really not there or are they NA?

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## Ailchu

> Yes that is my point. The Loschbour WHG prediction of 0.90 for intermediate is consistent - so 31 and 32 ancestral give the darkening effect to the prediction just like the modern day Finnish. 
> 
> However with La Brana the identical ancestral alleles at highest frequency to Africa/ East Asia contribute significantly to a lighter prediction. Remember these HGs were relatively homogenous, so any factors such as epistasis or variants not included in the model that could be influencing skin pigmentation on the hirisplex-s database subjects is not likely to be relevant to such similar individuals. 
> 
> We have to also remember that there is not a single actual WHG on the hirisplex database - but, of all potential comparative subjects, would it be more relevant to compare a WHG to say a Finnish person, or a heavily mixed African American - of which there will be numerous on the hirisplex database? I should also mention that on the snipper skin prediction model, all WHG score intermediate - Loschbour and La Brana actually score identical on the snipper.



i tried Snipper now too and i have one question. in Snipper rs16891982 is C among 84% of "whites" so i assume if you enter C in Snipper for that snp it will give you a lighter skin prediction. however i believe the C from Hirisplex is actually not the C from Snipper because if you google that snp the ancestral allele is C and there are 2 possible mutations either A or G which means depending on which strand people look at, in case of the G muation couldn't it be that this mutation and the ancestral allele potentially get confused for each other?
in that case i would enter G instead of C in snipper for that SNP and then you will get intermediate and black prediction.

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## Ailchu

> i tried Snipper now too and i have one question. in Snipper rs16891982 is C among 84% of "whites" so i assume if you enter C in Snipper for that snp it will give you a lighter skin prediction. however i believe the C from Hirisplex is actually not the C from Snipper because if you google that snp the ancestral allele is C and there are 2 possible mutations either A or G which means depending on which strand people look at, in case of the G muation couldn't it be that this mutation and the ancestral allele potentially get confused for each other?
> in that case i would enter G instead of C in snipper for that SNP and then you will get intermediate and black prediction.



i checked again, the variant most common in europe is derived not ancestral, which means you probably really have to enter G instead of C in Snipper which will yield an intermediate to black skin prediction.

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## matp

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## matp

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## matp

repeat post

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## real expert

> Yes C would represent the derived allele on the snipper, also rs13289 the derived allele you input C rather than G


What I found more puzzling than the prediction of the Cheddar man being "dark dot black" was the phenotype analysis for the BA Aegeans. HIrisPLex predicted 1 BA Aegean individual to be in the "dark" category while the other two were predicted to be most likely "dark to black". These 3 individuals are AA on rs1426654 (SLC24A5) but CC and CG (overwhelmingly GG in contemporary Europeans) on rsrs16891982 (SLC45A2). With that being said, the two Aegeans that scored "dark to black" carried OCA2 which also contributes to pigmentation. How realistic do you find the phenotype analysis in terms of BA Greeks having dark to black skin tone?

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## Palermo Trapani

> What I found more puzzling than the prediction of the Cheddar man being "dark dot black" was the phenotype analysis for the BA Aegeans. HIrisPLex predicted 1 BA Aegean individual to be in the "dark" category while the other two were predicted to be most likely "dark to black". These 3 individuals are AA on rs1426654 (SLC24A5) but CC and CG (overwhelmingly GG in contemporary Europeans) on rsrs16891982 (SLC45A2). With that being said, the two Aegeans that scored "dark to black" carried OCA2 which also contributes to pigmentation. How realistic do you find the phenotype analysis in terms of BA Greeks having dark to black skin tone?


Wow that is some interesting information. The AA alleles SNP rs1426654 has been shown to explain 25% to 38% of the variation in skin tone between Europeans and West Africans, etc. (I have the paper in my files somewhere). The rs16891982 SNP on SLC45A2 does impact skin tone, but I don't think as much as SLC24A5.

The US Department of Justice (USDOJ) published a study on genetics and skin tone which showed that 3 single polymorphisms on SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and ASIP in a Multiple Regression analysis explain 45.6% of skin tone variation across populations. When they added an Interaction term (ASIP*SLC45A2) to the model, they get 49.6% of the skin tone variation.

So it would be something like Y (Skin Tone) = Constant + B1 (SLC24A5) + B2 (SLC45A2) + B3 (ASIP) + B4 (SLC45A2*ASIP).....and other variables + error term.

USDOJ Final Copy of Research Paper conducted by Academicians at the University of Arizona (USA).

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/223980.pdf

The 2 SNP's in ASIP that impact Skin tone are rs6058017 and rs2424984. Both were significant in an ANOVA approach but the rs2424984 gave a slightly better fit in the Multiple Linear Regression analysis

From the USDOJ study (page 10):

"Using MLR, we found that both SNPs rs1426654 (SLC24A5) and rs16891982 (SLC45A2) described much of the variation in skin pigmentation across populations. The third most significant genetic contributor in a three-SNP MLR model was SNP rs2424984 (ASIP). ASIP has been shown to be associated with skin pigmentation, namely for rs6058017 (BONILLA et al. 2005; KANETSKY et al. 2002). Although we found rs6058017 to be significant by ANOVA, we did not find it to be a better predictor in skin reflectance than rs2424984. For both a single SNP analysis and a three-SNP model, rs2424984 was a better predictor for skin reflectance."

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## matp

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## Ailchu

> What I found more puzzling than the prediction of the Cheddar man being "dark dot black" was the phenotype analysis for the BA Aegeans. HIrisPLex predicted 1 BA Aegean individual to be in the "dark" category while the other two were predicted to be most likely "dark to black". These 3 individuals are AA on rs1426654 (SLC24A5) but CC and CG (overwhelmingly GG in contemporary Europeans) on rsrs16891982 (SLC45A2). With that being said, the two Aegeans that scored "dark to black" carried OCA2 which also contributes to pigmentation. How realistic do you find the phenotype analysis in terms of BA Greeks having dark to black skin tone?


looking at the frequencies of those genes in modern populations i would guess they were probably intermediate. but those are only very few genes. for example the derived allele of SLC24A5 is at more than 50% frequency in ethiopians and somalis but they aren't really light skinned. i imagine them to have had the skin complexion of modern day north african, levantine populations. those are also almost fixated for SLC24A5. Krause said somewhere that the farmers in europe had the complexion of modern populations from around the mediterranean so the same probably applies to bronze age aegeans.

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## real expert

> looking at the frequencies of those genes in modern populations i would guess they were probably intermediate. but those are only very few genes. for example the derived allele of SLC24A5 is at more than 50% frequency in ethiopians and somalis but they aren't really light skinned. i imagine them to have had the skin complexion of modern day north african, levantine populations. those are also almost fixated for SLC24A5. Krause said somewhere that the farmers in europe had the complexion of modern populations from around the mediterranean so the same probably applies to bronze age aegeans.



 I agree with you that the BA Aegeans were likely intermediate/olive skinned and not "dark to black". However, the academic paper concluded the opposite. Besides, many Ethio-Semites from Eritrea and North Ethiopia are (when not over-exposed to the sun) often light brown, yellowish. Somalis and Ethiopians from the largest Ethiopian ethnicity, the Oromo, are darker than the Ethio-Semites, though. We have to take into consideration that Horners have varying degrees of Western Eurasian admixture. They have also inherited certain genes for extremely dark skin. For instance, the African component in Somalis/ Ethiopians is largely Dinka-like and the Dinkas are not seldom literally black. Thus, they must have genes that makes them extremely dark even for African standard. When the Egyptians were depicting Nubians with literally black skin, they were not exaggerating.


Here a picture of a Dinka man who is literally black. 





One picture of an Ethio-Semitic female from the Tigrinya tribe(Eritrea) with light brown skin tone. The second pic shows an Ethio-Semite women from Ethiopia. Anyway, Ethio-Semites have some additional Arab/Southern Arabian admixture. Bottom line, SLC24A5 has definitely a significant lightening effect.

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## John Baker

I've been doing some work on this area and made a rather disturbing discovery. HIrisPlex-S is not only imperfect but severely broken. Has anyone here actually tried testing it with their own DNA?

It gets 2 out three wrong for me. In fact, it doesn't really shift from the default. The only one it gets right is because it's the default of blond hair. I'm not a memory of any poorly surveyed populations or anything so it shouldn't be this inaccurate. I'd expect accuracy issues but not this bad. 23andme gets two out of three right and the one it gets wrong still makes a fairly close prediction.

The tool said I had 95% chance of blue eyes, I have fairly dark brown eyes. It also said I have intermediate skin. Given my family have much of the same genetics, none of these features are very present at all in my relatives. The results I get don't match the manuals statements about accuracy.

I've written about these issues but I can't share links at this point.

I guess search quora for "What-is-the-evidence-that-Cheddar-Man-was-not-black-Scientists-who-sequenced-his-DNA-said-he-had-no-genes-for-light-coloured-skin-He-had-genes-for-skin-colour-consistent-with-Subsaharan-populations" and then look for my answer there.

Someone in this topic said they use HIrisPlex-S. I wonder how they get around the issue. From what I understand, a lot of the problems come from that DNA, being double stranded is ambiguous.

Rather than fully standardising it, G/C and T/A are potentially the same or get confused. I guarantee you bits are getting flipped when people are using these tools.

HIrisPlex-S has a confusing mention of this in the manual:

"*if you are using sequencing data, than you may need to flip strand orientation in your
result before inputting into this prediction model. The only SNP that may cause
confusion and therefore must be converted (from NCBI’s forward orientation) is
rs6119471. All other G/C, A/T SNPs are in the correct orientation for input or are
opposite alleles i.e. SNP G/A, input requests C/T."

Basically, it's got some convention but it's not really telling you exactly when and when not to flip your results.

This is a hidden disaster in genomics. The endian is messed up and it's like someone has encrypted the input with an XOR. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure things are the right way around when comparing. This software probably uses an older convention rather than a standard one. I don't know what scientists are thinking but it's very very hard to work like this.

You can see that it's very likely they didn't read the manual for Cheddar Man. I didn't read the manual fully either until after my analysis. They seem to have gotten ASIP wrong which seems to be important in differentiating east Asian pigmentation from African pigmentation. You fix that and you get brown hair, blue eyes and intermediate skin. However, I can't say that the rest of their alleles are properly matched.

To save me having to do code breaking on this, can someone tell me how you manage to get the alleles in the right orientation each time around?

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## real expert

> There are various derived alleles for dark pigmentation found in sub-Saharan Africans and south Asian populations, but not in other Eurasian populations, which apparently weren't taken into account by those claiming that Cheddar Man and other WHGs had dark or very dark skin. Sub-Saharan Africans and south Asian populations also have various other ancestral alleles for dark pigmentation which other Eurasians don't have. So the claim that WHGs would have very dark or black skin because they lacked two alleles SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 doesn't seem to make sense......


Hi Philjames a bit offtopic. I've read some comments about the Cheddar Man on AG: One user showed cherry picked images of Minoans/ Mycenaeans that were depicted dark to reinforce his claim that the pale depicted Minoans/Mycenaeans(females) were most likely not realistically depicted. He argues for women using makeup like the Geisha from Japan. So according to him only the dark painted Minoans/ Mycenaeans reflect the real phenotype of them BA Aegeans. The thing is that the pale Minoan/ Mycenaean women were not only pale on their face but on their entire body and while working. What this poster also seems not to know is the fact, that some Minoan males were also depicted as pale.

Two pale male Minoans.

 

Minoan females working







Dark and pale depicted Minoans.


Mycenaeans

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