Europeans acquired their current appearance long after their ancestors entered Europe. The changes occurred relatively fast, and went further in women than in men.
Among the many things that the white race doesn't get nearly enough credit for, is that we are actually, the most diverse race on the planet. Between the various eye colors, hair colors, skin tone, and size, shape, and overall abilities.
We're like the German Shepherds of the human race- For everything that a dog can be trained to do, German Shepherds can be trained to do it. No other breed can say the same.
Whites have been successful at every athletic endeavor, sprinting, distance running, swimming, power lifting, Decathlon, figure skating, skiing, mountain climbing, deep depth diving... there is nothing that can be named that we haven't achieved greatness at.
The same can be said, for scientific research, great art, building civilizations, writing, math, music...
Everything that has ever been in the human lexicon, we have excelled at it!
Africa has the most non-functional diversity. In other words, it has the most variability in genes of little or no adaptive value — what is commonly called "junk DNA." This is what happens when a population stays put in one place; it tends to accumulate more and more genetic variability that has little or no real-world impact.
Do you have a citation for that? Or you just hate Black people?
"Non-functional DNA" refers to what was previously thought to be DNA that was not activated. Now we know that it has an effect on other DNA and guides how it is expressed. Africans have no more or less of this than other people. And the proof that these genes have "adaptive value" is the fact that they are still here.
You're also an ignoramus. Africans have not "stayed in one place" any more than other people have, unless you count staying in Africa. But by that standard, every group has "stayed in one place."
You know who has the greatest genetic diversity? Interracial people.
Africans have indeed stayed in one place, i.e., in Africa. Eurasians are descended from small founder groups that spread out of Africa (with some admixture from archaic humans).
Citation:
"The migration of modern humans out of Africa resulted in a population bottleneck and a concomitant loss of genetic diversity. Numerous studies have shown higher levels of nucleotide and haplotype diversity in Africans compared to non-Africans in both nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. Non-African populations appear to have a subset of the genetic diversity present in sub-Saharan Africa and more private alleles and haplotypes are observed in Africa relative to other regions as expected under an OOA model. For example, a resequencing study of 3873 genes in 154 chromosomes from European, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, and African American populations observed that African Americans had the highest percentage of rare single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (64%) and the lowest percentage of common SNPs (36%). Additionally, 44% of all SNPs in this population were private. The high level of genetic diversity in African populations is also consistent with a larger long-term effective population size (Ne) compared to non-Africans"
Campbell, M. C., & Tishkoff, S. A. (2008). African genetic diversity: implications for human demographic history, modern human origins, and complex disease mapping. Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet., 9, 403-433. https://doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev.genom.9.081307.164258
Campbell and Tishkoff attribute the greater genetic diversity of Africans to accumulation of low-frequency deleterious mutations over a long period of time. I would say that these low-frequency variants are not necessarily deleterious. They could also be alleles of low or zero adaptive value.
"... given enough time, new mutations and recombination will occur, leading to an excess of rare variants and a decrease in the extent of LD. Weak purifying selection is also expected to result in an increase of low frequency variants. Under this scheme of selection, deleterious mutations entering the population generally remain at low frequencies because their adverse effect on fitness makes it unlikely that they will reach high frequencies."
I don't hate anyone. There is little point in getting angry at people, because anger doesn't change people's minds. If anything, it has the opposite effect.
This is very funny to me. A Hunter Biden supporting cop repeating the same old pop-sci tropes about genetics, then accusing an actual scientist of “hating black people” when nothing racist has been said.
Do you have a black grand-daughter or something? Why would someone take this personal?
Did you mean to respond to me? I'm not a cop and I don't support Hunter Biden. Did you assume I do because you think Trump's conviction is blasphemy? Just because you people worship the orange turd doesn't mean we worship the current president's family.
As for racism, if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. You people are obsessed with judging others based on their skin color. So what if there are general trends among different groups. That has nothing to do with individuals.
Reason I mention Hunter Biden is because of your repost of someone spewing vulgarities against the people who submitted the illegal content on HB’s laptop to the authorities. I’m guessing you’re not a fan of Snowden either.
Sir, this is a genetic researcher’s Substack. He has published research on the topic at hand, unlike you. I cannot find a single racist statement in this article, yet here you are crying wolf. Can you point out what made you so upset?
I never said a word about Trump, whom I’ve never voted for.
Make up your mind. You said white people are "actually, the most diverse race on the planet," followed by a bunch of achievements of other white people that you personally had nothing to do with. So is diversity good or bad? I guess it depends on whether it's the "right kind" of diversity.
By the way, is Europe a "paradise?" I thought most of Western Europe is a socialist hellhole.
"Europeans acquired their current appearance long after their ancestors entered Europe."
There are at least three assumptions there. First, how do we know what 'Europeans' looked like when they entered Europe (if, in fact, they did enter Europe)? Second, how do we know that 'Europeans' didn't evolve from a transition of hominids to hominins that occurred in Europe? And third, if 'Europeans' did enter Europe, how do we know when?
Yes, I know that, but that does not prove the out-of-Africa theory. And if one believes the out-of-Africa theory, DNA does not tell us when it occurred.
It depends on what you mean by the word "proof." If you mean "absolute certainty," you will always be disappointed.
We have reconstructed the Neandertal genome, and we now have a wide range of modern human genomes from different places and different times. The balance of the evidence suggests a modified Out-of-Africa model. In other words, we are largely descended from a small population that began to expand in eastern Africa perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 years ago and which eventually spread into Eurasia around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. We can argue about the details, but that seems to be the generally accepted model.
"It depends on what you mean by the word "proof." If you mean "absolute certainty," you will always be disappointed."
I am well aware of this; I had a career in science. But I am not the one making declarative statements.
"The balance of the evidence suggests a modified Out-of-Africa model."
Which is moving in the direction of independent transitions of hominids to hominins in other areas of the planet, not exclusively out of Africa.
"We can argue about the details, but that seems to be the generally accepted model."
Famous last words in science. Science is not a democracy. History is replete with consensus theories, about almost everything, that were wrong. One current area is cosmology...check it out.
Let's assume that the multiregional model is correct. How does that materially affect discussion about human evolution over the past 40,000 years and, particularly, the past 20,000 years?
I encounter this same false problem when I talk with creationists. Let's assume that humans were created by a divine event at some point in the past. How does that exclude the possibility of natural selection and evolution since then?
"Let's assume that the multiregional model is correct. How does that materially affect discussion about human evolution over the past 40,000 years and, particularly, the past 20,000 years?"
The point of departure, in this case, the hominins that existed before 40,000 years ago, will significantly influence our understanding of their subsequent evolution.
"I encounter this same false problem when I talk with creationists."
I am not a creationist. Why would you bring that up?
"Let's assume that humans were created by a divine event at some point in the past. How does that exclude the possibility of natural selection and evolution since then?"
In the Canadian Arctic, infanticide was common only at very high latitudes (the high arctic) where hunting bands were spaced far apart. Parents didn't want to have daughters because a daughter would inevitably marry into a distant band and her husband would thus never provide her parents with food and other forms of support.
Female infanticide was rare in the low arctic. In fact, most of the Inuit had female-biased sex ratios due to high male mortality. This is discussed in my first paper on the subject:
The Eurasian steppe-tundra was characterized by unusually high bioproductivity and a relatively large human population. It was quite unlike the barrens of Canada's high arctic, especially in Europe -- where it had been pushed far to the south by the Scandinavian icecap. Long intense sunlight favored the growth of mosses, lichens, grasses, and low shrubs, with grazing herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison, and horses. So "son-in-law payback" wouldn't have been a reason for female infanticide.
"Were brown eyes associated with a different facial shape in this study because some of the brown-eyed men were partly Jewish or Roma and had a more Mediterranean appearance? In that case, facial shape would have been more variable in the brown-eyed men. It was not. This explanation also fails to explain the effect of gender: why were blue eyes associated with facial feminization in men but not in women?"
That's a good question. And yet, in studies re sexual dimorphism/attractiveness in East Asian and European faces, "Asian faces are perceived as more feminine than White (Europen) faces", even though East Asians have darker hair, eyes & skin than (most) Europeans. There seem to be some other factors at play when a study group includes non-European participants.
I detect a semantic shift from "East Asian" to "Asian" and finally to "Jews and Roma." Testosterone levels are lower in East Asians, and this may be why their faces are less robust and seemingly more feminine.
That could be. But, IMO what's more interesting re East Asian vs European facial dimorphism, is that EA females overwhelming rate higher on the feminine side scale (as rated by both Europeans & East Asians), even though (many) European women have the "bling" (blue/light eyes, blond(e)/red hair, lighter skin). Also - question: Is the assumption that "fairer" European men will have lower testosterone levels, in general? Are there studies that have shown this? Thanks!
Could you please cite some of those studies? I've seen that claim made on the Internet, but it doesn't seem to be based on a controlled study, i.e., an East Asian female face vs. a European female face -- with none of the cultural baggage ("White women are too obese, too mean, too high-maintenance, etc.").
I've seen an unpublished digit ratio study that indicates that blonde men are exposed to a lower ratio of testosterone to estrogen during fetal development. It wasn't published because the reviewers criticized the lack of controls for artificial hair coloring. A lot of researchers seem interested in that study, and a few wanted to redo it with better controls, but they all backed out after initially expressing their interest.
East Asians are less sexually dimorphic, so East Asian men are perceived as being more feminine. Also, "dateability" is a function of the local dating market. Within the white American population (and almost all Western populations), single men outnumber single women in the 20 to 40 age bracket. For many single white American men, East Asian women are really the only alternative to marrying a single mother.
re: pigmentation. some of the predictions that ancient europeans are 'black' are probably training set issues because we don't have light alleles from these ancient populations (we don't have them to study!). but i think overall extreme depigmentation is probably pretty recent...i bet mesolithic europeans were colored like inuit
Yes, the indigenous peoples of the Americas are probably close to what Europeans used to look like. White skin seems to have long been confined to the north and east of Europe. Western and southern Europeans remained brown until very late in prehistory.
Truly black skin may also be relatively recent. There are many traditions in West Africa that the land was once inhabited by "little red men."
- We find similar traditions about a reddish pygmy people in different West African populations (Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali)
- Ancient DNA from Cameroon points to the former existence of a “ghost population” that split from the modern human lineage at about the same time as the Neanderthals and which was still present at least 3,000 years ago.
- The DNA of present-day West African populations shows admixture from an unknown archaic population.
Roman frescos showed a strong sexual dismorfism in skin colors (red men, white women) that suggest (1) historical memory or (2) actual, persisten dismorfism.
<i>European skin became white through new alleles at SLC45A2, SLC24A5, and TYRP1; hair color diversified mainly through new alleles at MC1R; and eye color diversified mainly through new alleles in the HERC2–OCA2 region.</i>
the hair color is confusing. MC1R was early detected for red hair. but KITLG has been fingered for blonde hair. but the issues is europeans are fixed for some alleles on SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 so those don't get picked up...but in admixed populations they show up as associated with blonde hair. IOW, the hair color architecture is way less clear than eye color (partly because funding for hair color research has zero medical rationale)
<i> A site in south-central Siberia, dated to the fourth century AD, has yielded the remains of individuals who, according to genetic analysis, had blue or green eyes, blond, red, or light brown hair, and fair skin (Bouakaze et al., 2009). Indeed, old Chinese records describe south Siberian peoples with “green eyes” and “red hair” (Keane, 1886, p. 703).</i>
these are not primal. they're part of the andronovo expansion out of the sintashta culture, which has roots to the corded ware of poland/belarus. the "red haired" people mentioned by the chinese are all steppe iranian and descended from the andronovo expansion.
also, depigmentation didn't just happen on the eve of history. there is a fair amount of circumstantial genetic evidence it continued into historical times and may still be happening (genomics has minimal power to detected selection in the last few hundred years). some signatures of depigmentation drag into the medieval period for england.
Most researchers have focused on MC1R. Clearly, other gene loci are involved, and I don't see why hair color variation should be confined to one gene. Natural selection acts on whatever variation is available.
You're probably right about that Siberian population. They could be a later expansion from areas farther west. Unfortunately, genomic data from northern Asia is still pretty sparse for early periods. It looks like there was severe depopulation of northern Asia at the height of the last ice age, with some refugia at the periphery.
I often get asked: "Well, why don't people in northern Asia have different hair and eye colors?" A big reason seems to be that the human population just wasn't large enough to sustain hair/eye color variability across depopulation events.
Cool to hear you read in your voice 😊. Fascinating indeed, now I want to nose dive into this subject. My brain trying to sporadically imagine intense selection pressures on dating for an age so heavily on women that their genes mutated - my brain trying to map all the concepts involved in living at the time... intense.
Super interesting. The link between female red hair and high estrogen levels is wild. It is often said that red-heads are fiery, wonder if there is link with measured hormone levels?
On the health survey, red-haired women had more lifetime sexual partners than women with other hair colors. This finding was confirmed by a Czech study of 110 women (34% redheads), which found that being a redhead correlated positively with sexual activity and negatively with age at first sexual intercourse. The higher rate of sexual activity did not seem to be explained by a higher level of sexual desire, and the authors concluded that it was a “consequence of frequent attempts of potential mates to have sex with redheaded women.”
Sykorová, K., V. Fiala, J. Hlaváčová, S. Kanková, and J. Flegr. (2021). Redheaded women are more sexually active than other women, but it is probably due to their suitors. OSF preprints, October 13. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/8frq7
According to a study of the American porn industry, 5.3% of the female performers had red hair, either naturally or by choice, although redheads are only 1 or 2% of the U.S. population.
O Regan, K. (2014). Red hair in popular culture and the relationship with anxiety and depression. B.A. (Honours) thesis, Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland.
It's a pleasure to see you publish on Aporia Peter; especially, to hear your voice in the podcast format articulate your evidence and arguments. May your research and viewpoints multiply onto many multimedia formats!
I still don't fully understand why this didn't happen amongst the Neo-Mongoloids. Ecological conditions as described in the last section were similar AFAIK.
Sakhalyars (Russian/Yakut pairings) produce some of the most beautiful women on the planet, real anime hours. Hard to see how such types could have been uncompetitive on the mating market.
The same intense sexual selection of women probably occurred in northern Asia during the last ice age. But the human population was smaller because of the drier and colder climate, particularly at the height of the ice age – when there was widespread depopulation followed by recolonization from the south and from refugia on the Pacific coast.
The evolution of the "European" phenotype required the uninterrupted existence of a fairly large population, within which the physical creations of sexual selection could be preserved and further developed. This evolutionary process would be periodically reset to zero in areas that had periodic extinction followed by recolonization.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, not shy.
Love the article!
Among the many things that the white race doesn't get nearly enough credit for, is that we are actually, the most diverse race on the planet. Between the various eye colors, hair colors, skin tone, and size, shape, and overall abilities.
We're like the German Shepherds of the human race- For everything that a dog can be trained to do, German Shepherds can be trained to do it. No other breed can say the same.
Whites have been successful at every athletic endeavor, sprinting, distance running, swimming, power lifting, Decathlon, figure skating, skiing, mountain climbing, deep depth diving... there is nothing that can be named that we haven't achieved greatness at.
The same can be said, for scientific research, great art, building civilizations, writing, math, music...
Everything that has ever been in the human lexicon, we have excelled at it!
No other race can say the same!
Actually, the continent with the greatest genetic diversity is Africa.
Africa has the most non-functional diversity. In other words, it has the most variability in genes of little or no adaptive value — what is commonly called "junk DNA." This is what happens when a population stays put in one place; it tends to accumulate more and more genetic variability that has little or no real-world impact.
Do you have a citation for that? Or you just hate Black people?
"Non-functional DNA" refers to what was previously thought to be DNA that was not activated. Now we know that it has an effect on other DNA and guides how it is expressed. Africans have no more or less of this than other people. And the proof that these genes have "adaptive value" is the fact that they are still here.
You're also an ignoramus. Africans have not "stayed in one place" any more than other people have, unless you count staying in Africa. But by that standard, every group has "stayed in one place."
You know who has the greatest genetic diversity? Interracial people.
Africans have indeed stayed in one place, i.e., in Africa. Eurasians are descended from small founder groups that spread out of Africa (with some admixture from archaic humans).
Citation:
"The migration of modern humans out of Africa resulted in a population bottleneck and a concomitant loss of genetic diversity. Numerous studies have shown higher levels of nucleotide and haplotype diversity in Africans compared to non-Africans in both nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. Non-African populations appear to have a subset of the genetic diversity present in sub-Saharan Africa and more private alleles and haplotypes are observed in Africa relative to other regions as expected under an OOA model. For example, a resequencing study of 3873 genes in 154 chromosomes from European, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, and African American populations observed that African Americans had the highest percentage of rare single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (64%) and the lowest percentage of common SNPs (36%). Additionally, 44% of all SNPs in this population were private. The high level of genetic diversity in African populations is also consistent with a larger long-term effective population size (Ne) compared to non-Africans"
Campbell, M. C., & Tishkoff, S. A. (2008). African genetic diversity: implications for human demographic history, modern human origins, and complex disease mapping. Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet., 9, 403-433. https://doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev.genom.9.081307.164258
Campbell and Tishkoff attribute the greater genetic diversity of Africans to accumulation of low-frequency deleterious mutations over a long period of time. I would say that these low-frequency variants are not necessarily deleterious. They could also be alleles of low or zero adaptive value.
"... given enough time, new mutations and recombination will occur, leading to an excess of rare variants and a decrease in the extent of LD. Weak purifying selection is also expected to result in an increase of low frequency variants. Under this scheme of selection, deleterious mutations entering the population generally remain at low frequencies because their adverse effect on fitness makes it unlikely that they will reach high frequencies."
I don't hate anyone. There is little point in getting angry at people, because anger doesn't change people's minds. If anything, it has the opposite effect.
This is very funny to me. A Hunter Biden supporting cop repeating the same old pop-sci tropes about genetics, then accusing an actual scientist of “hating black people” when nothing racist has been said.
Do you have a black grand-daughter or something? Why would someone take this personal?
Did you mean to respond to me? I'm not a cop and I don't support Hunter Biden. Did you assume I do because you think Trump's conviction is blasphemy? Just because you people worship the orange turd doesn't mean we worship the current president's family.
As for racism, if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. You people are obsessed with judging others based on their skin color. So what if there are general trends among different groups. That has nothing to do with individuals.
Reason I mention Hunter Biden is because of your repost of someone spewing vulgarities against the people who submitted the illegal content on HB’s laptop to the authorities. I’m guessing you’re not a fan of Snowden either.
Sir, this is a genetic researcher’s Substack. He has published research on the topic at hand, unlike you. I cannot find a single racist statement in this article, yet here you are crying wolf. Can you point out what made you so upset?
I never said a word about Trump, whom I’ve never voted for.
Ha Ha! What a paradise! I guess you just proved my point, in spades!
Make up your mind. You said white people are "actually, the most diverse race on the planet," followed by a bunch of achievements of other white people that you personally had nothing to do with. So is diversity good or bad? I guess it depends on whether it's the "right kind" of diversity.
By the way, is Europe a "paradise?" I thought most of Western Europe is a socialist hellhole.
There aren’t any socialist countries in Western Europe, silly billy. We pay almost the same tax rate in the USA at this point, depending on the state
A sign of intelligence is the ability to detect sarcasm. I was mocking the views of many conservative Americans.
The social welfare system is, however, much more robust in most Western European countries than it is in the U.S.
Since you support a neo-con president (Biden) it’s really hard to tell that you are being Sarcastic
Fascinating article, especially as a blond-haired, blue-eyed man who was quite shy as a child.
"Europeans acquired their current appearance long after their ancestors entered Europe."
There are at least three assumptions there. First, how do we know what 'Europeans' looked like when they entered Europe (if, in fact, they did enter Europe)? Second, how do we know that 'Europeans' didn't evolve from a transition of hominids to hominins that occurred in Europe? And third, if 'Europeans' did enter Europe, how do we know when?
we have ancient DNA
"we have ancient DNA"
Yes, I know that, but that does not prove the out-of-Africa theory. And if one believes the out-of-Africa theory, DNA does not tell us when it occurred.
It depends on what you mean by the word "proof." If you mean "absolute certainty," you will always be disappointed.
We have reconstructed the Neandertal genome, and we now have a wide range of modern human genomes from different places and different times. The balance of the evidence suggests a modified Out-of-Africa model. In other words, we are largely descended from a small population that began to expand in eastern Africa perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 years ago and which eventually spread into Eurasia around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. We can argue about the details, but that seems to be the generally accepted model.
"It depends on what you mean by the word "proof." If you mean "absolute certainty," you will always be disappointed."
I am well aware of this; I had a career in science. But I am not the one making declarative statements.
"The balance of the evidence suggests a modified Out-of-Africa model."
Which is moving in the direction of independent transitions of hominids to hominins in other areas of the planet, not exclusively out of Africa.
"We can argue about the details, but that seems to be the generally accepted model."
Famous last words in science. Science is not a democracy. History is replete with consensus theories, about almost everything, that were wrong. One current area is cosmology...check it out.
Let's assume that the multiregional model is correct. How does that materially affect discussion about human evolution over the past 40,000 years and, particularly, the past 20,000 years?
I encounter this same false problem when I talk with creationists. Let's assume that humans were created by a divine event at some point in the past. How does that exclude the possibility of natural selection and evolution since then?
"Let's assume that the multiregional model is correct. How does that materially affect discussion about human evolution over the past 40,000 years and, particularly, the past 20,000 years?"
The point of departure, in this case, the hominins that existed before 40,000 years ago, will significantly influence our understanding of their subsequent evolution.
"I encounter this same false problem when I talk with creationists."
I am not a creationist. Why would you bring that up?
"Let's assume that humans were created by a divine event at some point in the past. How does that exclude the possibility of natural selection and evolution since then?"
Where did I say it does?
You failed to address my other comments.
Very interesting and informative.
Great article! Interesting fact about men with blue eyes and being shy.. I do fit the stereotype.
Wouldn’t the ice agers use infanticide to even out the operational sex ratio?
Seems like this has been common among populations dependent on male hunters.
In the Canadian Arctic, infanticide was common only at very high latitudes (the high arctic) where hunting bands were spaced far apart. Parents didn't want to have daughters because a daughter would inevitably marry into a distant band and her husband would thus never provide her parents with food and other forms of support.
Female infanticide was rare in the low arctic. In fact, most of the Inuit had female-biased sex ratios due to high male mortality. This is discussed in my first paper on the subject:
Frost, P. (2006). European hair and eye color - A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution and Human Behavior 27(2): 85-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2005.07.002
The Eurasian steppe-tundra was characterized by unusually high bioproductivity and a relatively large human population. It was quite unlike the barrens of Canada's high arctic, especially in Europe -- where it had been pushed far to the south by the Scandinavian icecap. Long intense sunlight favored the growth of mosses, lichens, grasses, and low shrubs, with grazing herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison, and horses. So "son-in-law payback" wouldn't have been a reason for female infanticide.
Thanks for a great answer!
Interesting article.
"Were brown eyes associated with a different facial shape in this study because some of the brown-eyed men were partly Jewish or Roma and had a more Mediterranean appearance? In that case, facial shape would have been more variable in the brown-eyed men. It was not. This explanation also fails to explain the effect of gender: why were blue eyes associated with facial feminization in men but not in women?"
That's a good question. And yet, in studies re sexual dimorphism/attractiveness in East Asian and European faces, "Asian faces are perceived as more feminine than White (Europen) faces", even though East Asians have darker hair, eyes & skin than (most) Europeans. There seem to be some other factors at play when a study group includes non-European participants.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13506285.2018.1475437
I detect a semantic shift from "East Asian" to "Asian" and finally to "Jews and Roma." Testosterone levels are lower in East Asians, and this may be why their faces are less robust and seemingly more feminine.
That could be. But, IMO what's more interesting re East Asian vs European facial dimorphism, is that EA females overwhelming rate higher on the feminine side scale (as rated by both Europeans & East Asians), even though (many) European women have the "bling" (blue/light eyes, blond(e)/red hair, lighter skin). Also - question: Is the assumption that "fairer" European men will have lower testosterone levels, in general? Are there studies that have shown this? Thanks!
Could you please cite some of those studies? I've seen that claim made on the Internet, but it doesn't seem to be based on a controlled study, i.e., an East Asian female face vs. a European female face -- with none of the cultural baggage ("White women are too obese, too mean, too high-maintenance, etc.").
I've seen an unpublished digit ratio study that indicates that blonde men are exposed to a lower ratio of testosterone to estrogen during fetal development. It wasn't published because the reviewers criticized the lack of controls for artificial hair coloring. A lot of researchers seem interested in that study, and a few wanted to redo it with better controls, but they all backed out after initially expressing their interest.
Here's the study I cited in my first post above:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13506285.2018.1475437
Another:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51708359_Racial_Stereotypes_and_Interracial_Attraction_Phenotypic_Prototypicality_and_Perceived_Attractiveness_of_Asians
Also interesting:
https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/research/news_and_pubs/caravel/archive/2022/2022_dateability.php
East Asians are less sexually dimorphic, so East Asian men are perceived as being more feminine. Also, "dateability" is a function of the local dating market. Within the white American population (and almost all Western populations), single men outnumber single women in the 20 to 40 age bracket. For many single white American men, East Asian women are really the only alternative to marrying a single mother.
https://jonathansoma.com/singles/
Fascinating and informative! I learned a few things, and other things were clarified. More please!
re: pigmentation. some of the predictions that ancient europeans are 'black' are probably training set issues because we don't have light alleles from these ancient populations (we don't have them to study!). but i think overall extreme depigmentation is probably pretty recent...i bet mesolithic europeans were colored like inuit
Yes, the indigenous peoples of the Americas are probably close to what Europeans used to look like. White skin seems to have long been confined to the north and east of Europe. Western and southern Europeans remained brown until very late in prehistory.
Truly black skin may also be relatively recent. There are many traditions in West Africa that the land was once inhabited by "little red men."
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-ghosts-of-africa
"There are many traditions in West Africa that the land was once inhabited by "little red men."
Why would anyone place credence in a West African tradition?
"Truly black skin may also be relatively recent."
It's fun to speculate.
- We find similar traditions about a reddish pygmy people in different West African populations (Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali)
- Ancient DNA from Cameroon points to the former existence of a “ghost population” that split from the modern human lineage at about the same time as the Neanderthals and which was still present at least 3,000 years ago.
- The DNA of present-day West African populations shows admixture from an unknown archaic population.
there is strong evidence that selection for very dark skin in nilotic people is recent
Roman frescos showed a strong sexual dismorfism in skin colors (red men, white women) that suggest (1) historical memory or (2) actual, persisten dismorfism.
This sexual dimorphism exists in all artistic traditions, not only Greco-Roman but also Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Aztec.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-original-meaning-of-skin-color
<i>European skin became white through new alleles at SLC45A2, SLC24A5, and TYRP1; hair color diversified mainly through new alleles at MC1R; and eye color diversified mainly through new alleles in the HERC2–OCA2 region.</i>
the hair color is confusing. MC1R was early detected for red hair. but KITLG has been fingered for blonde hair. but the issues is europeans are fixed for some alleles on SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 so those don't get picked up...but in admixed populations they show up as associated with blonde hair. IOW, the hair color architecture is way less clear than eye color (partly because funding for hair color research has zero medical rationale)
<i> A site in south-central Siberia, dated to the fourth century AD, has yielded the remains of individuals who, according to genetic analysis, had blue or green eyes, blond, red, or light brown hair, and fair skin (Bouakaze et al., 2009). Indeed, old Chinese records describe south Siberian peoples with “green eyes” and “red hair” (Keane, 1886, p. 703).</i>
these are not primal. they're part of the andronovo expansion out of the sintashta culture, which has roots to the corded ware of poland/belarus. the "red haired" people mentioned by the chinese are all steppe iranian and descended from the andronovo expansion.
also, depigmentation didn't just happen on the eve of history. there is a fair amount of circumstantial genetic evidence it continued into historical times and may still be happening (genomics has minimal power to detected selection in the last few hundred years). some signatures of depigmentation drag into the medieval period for england.
Most researchers have focused on MC1R. Clearly, other gene loci are involved, and I don't see why hair color variation should be confined to one gene. Natural selection acts on whatever variation is available.
You're probably right about that Siberian population. They could be a later expansion from areas farther west. Unfortunately, genomic data from northern Asia is still pretty sparse for early periods. It looks like there was severe depopulation of northern Asia at the height of the last ice age, with some refugia at the periphery.
I often get asked: "Well, why don't people in northern Asia have different hair and eye colors?" A big reason seems to be that the human population just wasn't large enough to sustain hair/eye color variability across depopulation events.
Cool to hear you read in your voice 😊. Fascinating indeed, now I want to nose dive into this subject. My brain trying to sporadically imagine intense selection pressures on dating for an age so heavily on women that their genes mutated - my brain trying to map all the concepts involved in living at the time... intense.
Super interesting. The link between female red hair and high estrogen levels is wild. It is often said that red-heads are fiery, wonder if there is link with measured hormone levels?
On the health survey, red-haired women had more lifetime sexual partners than women with other hair colors. This finding was confirmed by a Czech study of 110 women (34% redheads), which found that being a redhead correlated positively with sexual activity and negatively with age at first sexual intercourse. The higher rate of sexual activity did not seem to be explained by a higher level of sexual desire, and the authors concluded that it was a “consequence of frequent attempts of potential mates to have sex with redheaded women.”
Sykorová, K., V. Fiala, J. Hlaváčová, S. Kanková, and J. Flegr. (2021). Redheaded women are more sexually active than other women, but it is probably due to their suitors. OSF preprints, October 13. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/8frq7
According to a study of the American porn industry, 5.3% of the female performers had red hair, either naturally or by choice, although redheads are only 1 or 2% of the U.S. population.
O Regan, K. (2014). Red hair in popular culture and the relationship with anxiety and depression. B.A. (Honours) thesis, Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland.
Interesting thanks. It was also interesting that they are many more female redheads than male redheads.
It's a pleasure to see you publish on Aporia Peter; especially, to hear your voice in the podcast format articulate your evidence and arguments. May your research and viewpoints multiply onto many multimedia formats!
I hope to "graduate" to doing YouTube videos. Right now, I'm familiarizing myself with the mechanics of doing this sort of thing.
Informative review!
I still don't fully understand why this didn't happen amongst the Neo-Mongoloids. Ecological conditions as described in the last section were similar AFAIK.
Sakhalyars (Russian/Yakut pairings) produce some of the most beautiful women on the planet, real anime hours. Hard to see how such types could have been uncompetitive on the mating market.
The same intense sexual selection of women probably occurred in northern Asia during the last ice age. But the human population was smaller because of the drier and colder climate, particularly at the height of the ice age – when there was widespread depopulation followed by recolonization from the south and from refugia on the Pacific coast.
The evolution of the "European" phenotype required the uninterrupted existence of a fairly large population, within which the physical creations of sexual selection could be preserved and further developed. This evolutionary process would be periodically reset to zero in areas that had periodic extinction followed by recolonization.