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dipsydoodle

(42,239 posts)
Sun Jan 26, 2014, 02:50 PM Jan 2014

Swarthy, blue-eyed caveman revealed using DNA from ancient tooth



DNA taken from the wisdom tooth of a European hunter-gatherer has given scientists an unprecedented glimpse of modern humans before the rise of farming. The Mesolithic man, who lived in Spain around 7,000 years ago, had an unusual mix of blue eyes, black or brown hair, and dark skin, according to analyses of his genetic make-up.

He was probably lactose intolerant and had more difficulty digesting starchy foods than the farmers who transformed diets and lifestyles when they took up tools in the first agricultural revolution.

The invention of farming brought humans and animals into much closer contact, and humans likely evolved more robust immune systems to fend off infections that the animals passed on. But scientists may have over-estimated the impact farming had in shaping the human immune system, because tests on the hunter-gatherer's DNA found that he already carried mutations that boost the immune system to tackle various nasty bugs. Some live on in modern Europeans today.

"Before we started this work, I had some ideas of what we were going to find," said Carles Lalueza-Fox, who led the study at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. "Most of those ideas turned out to be completely wrong."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/26/swarthy-blue-eyed-caveman-dna-tooth
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Swarthy, blue-eyed caveman revealed using DNA from ancient tooth (Original Post) dipsydoodle Jan 2014 OP
Seems that blue eyes are a fairly recent mutation in human evolution. Cleita Jan 2014 #1
Duck Dynasty? NT donco Jan 2014 #2
DNA closest to Finns & Swedes LiberalEsto Jan 2014 #3
Probably too anachronistic a viewpoint. Igel Jan 2014 #5
it's U, isn't it? it's ALWAYS U (for Europe) MisterP Jan 2014 #9
Du rec. Nt xchrom Jan 2014 #4
Dark hair and blue eyes: ancestor of the Celts. kestrel91316 Jan 2014 #6
The picture doesn't look "darker than any modern European" to me muriel_volestrangler Jan 2014 #7
Looks like my husband JustAnotherGen Jan 2014 #8

Cleita

(75,480 posts)
1. Seems that blue eyes are a fairly recent mutation in human evolution.
Sun Jan 26, 2014, 03:01 PM
Jan 2014

There must have been some kind of evolutionary advantage for hunter/gatherers in Europe which we haven't figured out yet.

 

LiberalEsto

(22,845 posts)
3. DNA closest to Finns & Swedes
Sun Jan 26, 2014, 03:23 PM
Jan 2014

"They found that the ancient DNA most closely matched the genetic makeup of people living in northern Europe, in particular Sweden and Finland."

This seems to bolster a theory that much of northern Europe may have been inhabited by Finnic peoples, who were then squeezed into smaller and smaller territories due to the entrance of Indo-Europeans.

Other theories claim the Indo-Europeans came first and the Finnic peoples came into northern Europe later.

This interests me because I'm of Estonian (Finnic) ancestry.

Igel

(35,320 posts)
5. Probably too anachronistic a viewpoint.
Sun Jan 26, 2014, 04:45 PM
Jan 2014

There were probably several waves of populations that moved into Europe. An early one went through Turkey and the Balkans. A bit later, another ricocheted out of Asia, moving SW to squash the peoples living there but also W and NW. You have to go to the Andamans to find ethnic isolates that weren't swamped by the NE Asian backwash.

We're all out of Africa. But most of European DNA is out of Asia. Most major differences between Europeans and Asians are later.

After that you have another out-of-Anatolia wave because of agriculture, c. 10k BCE. Not the spread of PIE, whatever Ivanov and Gamkrelidze might say. (I have to be careful there; I know Ivanov. Then again he's a teddy bear and would argue but not take offense.)

And then you have another wave of out-of-Asia, with whatever Indo-Europeans were. At this point it's really important to distinguish between language, culture, and genetics. It's recent enough that we have information on all three and know they don't match up. So this guy from Iberia clearly wasn't an IE speaker. Probably didn't speak anything Finnic, either. Finnic would have arrived there later. Proto-Uralic is 4-6k BCE, and this guy's older than that.

http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust258/sust258_janhunen.pdf seems to handle the arguments and data fairly, if cursorily.

Some argue in favor of a greater time depth for Uralic or Finnic in currently Finnic areas. This is nationalism bleeding into archeology and linguistics. It happens with Slavic and Indo-European, too, with Indian linguists arguing that PIE had to have originated in S. Asia and Polish researchers arguing that, no, really, SE Poland is the home--and not only the home of PIE, but also the home of Common Slavic, millennia later. Russians argue that the PIE and Slavic homelands are there. Don't want to know what the Iranians argue. Bleah. I've seen older arguments that PIE had to start in the Germanic language territory, but those died with Nazi "Aryan" ideology that the IE speakers were "Aryans." (It's a common kind of thing. The English wanted to ground their new-found common law in olden times and a pre-Germanic Arthur popped up--alternating for a few centuries with Anglo-Israelism. Read one goofy medieval manuscript in the _Monumenta graeca_ minor series that talked about Abraham having wandered through Bavaria, so that the Bavarians are actually children of Abraham instead of a mix of older tribes with Roman soldiers and more recent Germanic invaders. The current Palestinians want to date their "ethnicity" to pre-Israelite times in order to establish their greater right to the land and their historical importance. Time depth apparently means "right to exist" for some people, in a really silly way.)

But that ties in with a nice point. Western Baltic Finnic speakers tend towards being blond. Blondism is centered around Sweden, leading to the Nazi (and prior to that, German) viewpoints about the spread of PIE. But this mutation is likely to be much older than the PIE or Uralic breakup. PIE couldn't haven't started in N. Europe any more than Finnic in N. Europe. Too many problems with that, whatever the nationalists want.

The counter-problem to this is to question whether or not blondism *originated* in Sweden. It's certainly where it's concentrated; there are nice trends resulting in less and less blond hair as you go in pretty much any direction from there, with due allowance for things like the Volkswanderung of the 5th and 6th centuries. But given how genetic drift works, we need more deep time DNA studies to actually establish relative percentages of blond hair in the area. We could make the same kind of claim about lactose tolerance, which is more concentrated in N. Europe than elsewhere, but it certainly didn't originate in N. Europe. It's just that dietary practices encouraged its predominance there. The same with blondism, if it's linked with lower melanin levels: Less light means less vitamin D formation which means lower fertility rates. That would only matter at high latitudes, where very low melanin levels in skin and presumably hair (if there's any correlation) would produce more kids; at very low latitudes the opposite happens, where too much vitamin D formation suppresses fertility and darker skin drives evolutionary pressure. (But if you get enough of the vitamin from your food--as the Saami did--then this kind of genetic pressure would be suppressed, if not flipped.)

Sorry. Sort of an oddball hobby at this point.

 

kestrel91316

(51,666 posts)
6. Dark hair and blue eyes: ancestor of the Celts.
Sun Jan 26, 2014, 04:47 PM
Jan 2014

Lots of Irish folk have that same dark hair and blue eyes.

JustAnotherGen

(31,828 posts)
8. Looks like my husband
Sun Jan 26, 2014, 05:32 PM
Jan 2014

Only husband has green eyes . . . He's ethnic Calabrese - immigrant - can trace his family in Acri to the 8th century. Creepy resemblance. . .

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