Why are Europeans White?
essays.backintyme.com
essays.backintyme.com
For an example of this line of thinking in the evolutionary literature see: "European hair and eye color: A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection?" (Frost 2006) [1]
Human hair and eye color is unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe. The many alleles involved (at least seven for hair color) and their independent origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicate some kind of selection. Sexual selection is particularly indicated because it is known to favor color traits and color polymorphisms. In addition, hair and eye color is most diverse in what used to be, when first peopled by hunter-gatherers, a unique ecozone of low-latitude continental tundra. This type of environment skews the operational sex ratio (OSR) of hunter-gatherers toward a male shortage in two ways: (1) men have to hunt highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores over longer distances, with no alternate food sources in case of failure, the result being more deaths among young men; (2) women have fewer opportunities for food gathering and thus require more male provisioning, the result being less polygyny. These two factors combine to leave more women than men unmated at any one time. Such an OSR imbalance would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of color traits: hair- and eye-color diversity and, possibly, extreme skin depigmentation.
[1]: http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(05)00059-0/abstr...
In this theory, for some reason the women with those traits (which in all likelyhood existed before) became to be seen more desirable, thus lead to more offspring, thus becoming dominant.
I've heard it argued that the existence of decorative traits indicates fitness because it shows that an organism has a enough extra energy to devote to decoration.
But that's speculative. Sexual selection isn't really a logical proces. It's just an accumulating response to stimuli, over time.
The crops are of course not nearly as good as in Germany, but you cant find similar area from the same latitude in Russia or Canada.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Liminka....
The author may be spot on with his cereal theory, but I'm not convinced by the suggested mechanism. The nascent fluid dynamicist in me doesn't see how a sea with only one tight opening can exchange enough water for a significant thermal exchange, one which would have to be pretty sizeable given the freezing. I could be wrong, but I do note that the 'gulf stream' graphic barely gets past Newfoundland, let alone showing the North Sea or the Baltic...
But usually wind and weather comes from west. So as golf current warms up the coast of Norway, some of that warmth comes here. It's a weather pattern, but I don't seem to find a good picture now, sorry. http://www.weatherwise.org/sebin/x/a/russian-inferno-photo6....
I remember from geography class that we are in this climate zone and it's called a Hadley cell. And inside that cell air circulates, but it cannot really break away. So kind of Golf course breaks into that cell from below. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell
EDIT: sorry, lost in translation, I meant a Ferrel cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation#Ferrel_... Ans that's not very accurate as Finland seems to be in polar front.
Nowadays only gulfs properly freeze in winter but there are reports from XV century of people travelling over the ice in sleighs and even tales of inns being built on the ice. That was a little anomalous due to the Little Ace Age but even in the XX century ice floe would cover over 90% of the Sea once in a while.
Do you have any sources or links for this? This sounds really interesting, I want to read up on it!
http://montessorimuddle.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Annua...
EDIT: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Sea_ice....
There's good evidence that Homo sapiens sapiens first arrived in Europe during a warm period sometime around 45,000 years ago, then lived through the last glaciation maximum covering most of the continent with a peak around 18,000 years ago, driving the population through a harsh bottleneck that strongly selected for traits that aided survival in the cold climate. The population rebounded in numbers and in latitude from that bottleneck as the climate warmed again. A higher initial population under greater selective pressure for a longer period of time than elsewhere suffices to explain the resulting traits.
Notice how the painting is monochrome. Maybe they just didn't have the artistic skill required?
The pictures posted by the author about child blondness look suspiciously like cases of malnutrition [1][2].
[1]http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(... (search for "vitamin")
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hair_color#Medical_condit...
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=melanesian+blonde&hl=en&...
I felt this is a bit of a loose statement. I would think, like light skin, there would be a reason a recessive genes became so prevalent.
Edit: spelling
Humans are subject to a lot of these effects. Our head shape is very similar to the head shape of a baby chimp or gorilla, which obviously changes later in the ape's life. We have much smaller teeth and jaws than other apes our size.
Anyways, the point is that many alleles can be linked to a specific gene, so the fact that blue eyes and blond hair become more prevalent when less skin tone is selected for makes sense.
That said, I don't agree with some of the points made. He's kind of jumping to conclusions. You really can't rely on art to guide your research on skin tone. I draw art where humans are #FFFFFF because that's the color of the paper. Nobody in their right mind would trust something as symbolic as art.
I think the theory as a whole makes sense, though. Grains can grow, need moar vitamin D, lighter skin, other alleles come along for the ride. Now that's a pretty valid theory IMO.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Domestication [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1G2yZMUNUQ
So your conjecture is that the author is insane?
Essential background reading on this topic can be found in a user bibliography on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...
Any hypothesis about the origin, in deep prehistoric time, of a human characteristic will be just that, a hypothesis, now that we are remote in time from when our ancestors settled the earth. Tracing geographic patterns of gene distribution for genes that are under WEAK selection pressure helps suggest where the founder populations of different regions of the world most likely came from, and there is no longer any serious doubt that species H. sapiens originated in Africa and settled first the Old World (including Australia, which required sea-crossing canoes to cross the Wallace Line) and then the New World, with islands such as Madagascar and New Zealand being some of the last places on earth to be settled.
My ancestors are known to have lived in recent historic times in the region the author of the submitted article mentions the most, the shores of the Baltic and North seas. People in my family line are quite pale-skinned although not invariably blond or blue-eyed. My wife's family are known to have lived in recent historic times in the region spanning both sides of the Taiwan Strait at the edge of the tropics. There is a large difference in annual sunlight exposure between those two regions, but my wife's family is like many families from east Asia in also being quite pale-skinned as a baseline, although always black-haired and dark-eyed. As several of the previous comments have correctly pointed out, there is LARGE variation of skin color in all geographic populations anywhere on earth. Moreover, there is large individual variation in skin color in most individuals subject to lifestyle variations (more or less outdoor activity) and seasonal variations (sunny summers contrasted with cloudy winters). My children's skin color varies over a wide range, with my son who plays the most travel soccer becoming the most dark during the summer and my son who is a hacker staying the most pale year-round.
The deep ancestral condition of all hominins was pale skin. Beneath their black hair, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have pale skin at birth and in youth.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/text_pop/l_07...
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/skin-color
The hominin line of descent that branched into H. sapiens had to develop skin that began dark and persisted as dark as humans lost body hair and began living in savannah environments with less shade than forests, according to the currently accepted hypothesis. As population bottlenecks in Africa formed the species H. sapiens, presumptively the typical skin color of all modern humans was dark (within a pattern of continued variation among individuals and a continued capacity for individual skin color to vary over the course of seasons). Then as different founder populations settled in Europe (high latitude) and east Asia (cloudy even when not at high latitude in many coastal areas), the local populations were under selection pressure for selective sweeps of mutations that increased the gene frequency of paler skin. Generally, both Europeans and east Asians are pale, but they aren't usually pale because of the same novel gene patterns.
By the way, the "race" categories that are used in the United States are arbitrary, subject to rewriting from time to time for political considerations, and do not correspond to any scientific view of geographical populations. In any event, it is clear that human beings have been traveling back and forth and exchanging genes from one local population to another from the earliest days of human settlement of the earth. For more on the specific "race" categories in United States law and how they are applied to specific situations (especially college and university admission), see
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/12282...
for FAQ links to many official websites with governmental regulations and definitions and statistics.
These categories are hardly arbitrary, they are political. We separate people into republicans and democrats, too, but just because this separation is not based on genetics or geography does not make it arbitrary or even bad.
Don't confuse genetic/geographic science with science as a whole. Anywhere you can do experiments you can do science, and politics is no exception (although everything is much noisier). Certainly, the groups of people described by the census are meaningful in a scientifically confirm-able way: they identify with each other, forming clearly discernible self-selecting cliques, neighborhoods, etc.
If he wants to say "the races as defined by the census are only weakly correlated with genetic distance or geographic ancestry", then fine. But that's a far cry from "the 'race' categories that are used in the United States are arbitrary...and do not correspond to any scientific view of geographical populations."
We never let science interfere with our prejudices; see for example the Supreme Court's reasoning in [1], in which they rejected a scientific definition of race for the purposes of interpreting a statute. However, we always did and still do assume that our beliefs about race (whatever they are) are grounded in biological reality and will be vindicated by science. In the Supreme Court case I linked, after the justices set aside science in favor of "the understanding of the common man," they still felt compelled to discuss scientific theories and imply that a sufficient examination of the scientific evidence would support the same ruling.
[1] http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/asian_voices/voices_display...
> The hominin line of descent that branched into H. sapiens had to develop skin that began dark and persisted as dark as humans lost body hair and began living in savannah environments with less shade than forests, according to the currently accepted hypothesis. As population bottlenecks in Africa formed the species H. sapiens, presumptively the typical skin color of all modern humans was dark (within a pattern of continued variation among individuals and a continued capacity for individual skin color to vary over the course of seasons).
These two comments, separated in your text by references, seem opposites (ancestral condition was pale...began dark), and the linked texts do not support both of these opposites. But I think you meant humans began pale, became universally dark, then some became pale again.
In any case, all the references you provide support the original post's hypothesis: skin color was affected by both diet and interaction with the sun, each round of research adding a new mechanism to the previously suspected mechanisms (not refuting the previous).
The original post here adds to the collective info you supplied, and neatly explains an otherwise startling variance between their hypothetical charts and the actual charts, that would seem at first blush to invalidate the prior theories but in fact confirms them.
You wrote a lot in your reply, and HN appreciates and votes up for effort. With the mix of personal anecdote (lived everywhere, I'm nordic and my wife's Asian), the gist is that you're adding insight.
However, with your two major paragraphs proposing at least one view that's opposite to your linked research (skin that began dark vs chimps pale skin), and with none of your comments or links addressing or negating the original article's added insight about grain and the loss of vitamin D, I can't tell what you're intending to convey.
It seems your exec summary might have been, "Without addressing the original article which I call 'just a hypothesis', I'd like to say I've seen skin shade variations everywhere including seasonality in my own kids; I am linking research that the linked article builds on; and populations' genes are getting more mixed though even people with pale skin have it for different genetic reasons."
Ok. But not one word of that refutes (or ever directly comments on) the thesis of the original article linked here.
To summarize your reply while tying in the original article, we could say (in a sort of TL;DR):
"The original article explains historically sharply defined regional skin color bands in terms of UV exposure and diet, adding grains and the gulf stream to prior theories involving UV and fish and meat. This explains regions that were problematic for earlier theories. But in today's highly mobile world, people like my own family are becoming more mixed than ever and these regional bands are becoming less sharply distinct. We should be cautious of the increasingly arbitrary politics of race."
I think it is sad the more I watch these genetic documentaries the more I see the mixing of gene pools the more you know humans are very much the same but we also have a massive innate disposition to see people with different physical traits or culture as different from ourselves.
This is why I wish more scientists would speak up because of debates like this where the evidence is out there but no scientist to presents it, instead just random blog posts faking the science behind it.
Isn't the opposite also true in Western cultures? In Europe, where I live, people want to look darker, and go sunbathing. And in the US there's also this "fake tan" thing.
It's all about socio-economic status signals.
My understanding is that in British English "Asian" can include Indians and others from around there. I don't know if Russians are included, though.
And do you know anyone from japan who is not albino and virtually could not get a tan. I myself and loads of Finnish people I know are really sensitive to sunlight.
On the contrary this explains nicely how Sami people can be darker than Germans. They lived of reindeer, bird trapping and fishing, even like hundred years ago. It explains why Finnish are somewhat darker than swedes, we relied on hunting and fishing far longer than Swedes did.
He did not say that at all.
He said that there was the well-documented introduction of a new (convenient and scalable) source of sustainable food, grains. But now the people there are no longer surviving on a Vitamin D-rich source. Thus, their skin adapts to accept the only other source of vitamin D, UV from sunlight.
Also, it is important to note the scale of the changes. He is talking purely about change relative to other Europeans at the time, not Equatorial or even North African skin tone direct to blonde and blue-eyed...
In my opinion, a little bit more historical evidence from Scandinvian food scientists and census data, especially in the last XX years of globalisation should indicate whether this hypothesis is consistent with food changes and other trends.
There is substantial evidence that america was populated from the south first, though researchers can't mount the puzzle yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedra_Furada_sites
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3eUP4-BlXI#t=08m24s
It addresses other competing theories, in particular sexual selection and genetic drift.
well into the processes, would people know that dark skinned atavisms would have nutritional problems?
But then again... who knows?!
http://rautu.fi/Tallenne/EntinenRautu/Maanviljely/Jurtin-har...
This should already be well known, by the mutation speed of the relevant genes?
What about an alternative hypothesis, like sexual evolution?
Edit: From the wikipedia page, this theory seems to be quite recent. Interesting. (Sigh, I liked the idea of blonde neanderthals. :-) )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Evolution_of_s...
"This theory is supported by a study into the SLC24A5 gene which found that the allelle associated with light skin in Europe may have originated as recently as 6,000–10,000 years ago[23] which is in line with the earliest evidence of farming.[47]"
It's evolving keeping the light skin by neoteny
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-europeans-wh...
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/04/puzzle-of-european-h...
So if european whiteness is a product of sexual selection of rare blondes, why didn't it swing the other way when the majority of the population were blonde? In some parts of Sweden and Finland, 85% of the adults are blonde, how could it ever go way above 50%? If the hypothesis was true, then people in those areas would have strongly selected brunettes and reversed it?
> if european whiteness is a product of sexual selection of rare blondes
It isn't. European whiteness (of skin) is a product of women being more heavily selected than men, since paleness of skin is a sex characteristic of females. (For example, african boys are born light, and darken over time. African girls are born light, darken until puberty, and then lighten.)
European variation in hair and eye color (but not skin color) is a color polymorphism typical of sexual selection. On this theory, 85% of adults sharing the identical hair color is unexpected.
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Here are some of my own thoughts on your question (I claim no qualification at all to pontificate here):
- What size are these "some parts of Sweden and Finland"? The smaller they are, the less interesting it is that they might appear uniform.
- Do 85% of adults share the identical hair color, or is variation being binned into the category "blonde"? Compare the internal variation of african or chinese hair color.
Wikipedia says that the gene mutation for human red hair could be from 20,000 to 100,000 years old.
http://www.livescience.com/9578-common-ancestor-blue-eyes.ht...
Also white people look white as they reflect that light so there skin is the opposite, same for people who are black in that there skin is obsorbing the other light frequencies and so reflecting back not alot and as such appearing black.
Now if you got all the populations and used transport like planes and mixed them all about over the World then stopped having any movement, would the people in the northern and southern climates away from the equator become paler skinned and would those in the equator become darker skinned! Its like that eggs/drugs analogy - this your skin and this is your skin on sun :-).
Still, I would like to know what is the average shade of green per country and how much effect does its lattitude have upon that shade of green. Plants tended not to move as much and as humans have.
So to answear to original question:
Why are Europeans White? Because none of them are Wong :-) and there not actualy white.
Also: >Why are Europeans White? Because none of them are Wong :-) and there not actualy white.
This is not the kind of serious scientific discussion expected here - you're supposed to be making some kind of point. You're not explaining anything by saying "they're not actually white".
Also, sadly, I think people downvoted you because of your grammar - you don't seem to be a native speaker, you're making some odd/un-intellectual mistakes.
you have ared object it will obsorbe the red light reflect the rest.
This is why grass which looks green isn't actualy green. How can people not understand light refraction!!!
My spelling and grammer isn;t great, - thanks for highighting exactly what was wrong - not. I have aspergers, so may explain why I was born in the UK.
Sorry if my joke as highlighted by the smiley was not deemed a joke.
but above all thank you for feedback, more helpful than others.
I think you were just trying to be a smartass with this reversed light thing, so you were downvoted. :\
Anyways, just try to have a more serious intellectual discussion. Also, don't be a jerk. Saying "NOT!" after something is pretty immature and aggressive.
As far as spelling/grammar errors, here's one: "bounceds of" instead of "bounces off". Also, you used "there" instead of "they're".