[Jihsan]

Light skin in Europeans stems from ONE 10,000-year-old ancestor who lived between India and the Middle East, claims study

Study focused on DNA differences across globe with the A111T mutation
Those who had mutation also shared traces of an ancestral genetic code
This indicates that all instances of mutation originate from same person
The mutated segment of DNA was itself created from a combination of two other mutations commonly found in East Asians

By Ellie Zolfagharifard

PUBLISHED: 17:36, 7 January 2014 | UPDATED: 17:39, 7 January 2014

Light skin in Europeans stems from a gene mutation from a single person who lived 10,000 years ago.

This is according to a new U.S. study that claims the colour is due to an ancient ancestor who lived somewhere between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

Scientists made the discovery after identifying a key gene that contributes to lighter skin colour in Europeans.

In earlier research, Keith Cheng from Penn State College of Medicine reported that one amino acid difference in the gene SLC24A5 is a key contributor to the skin colour difference between Europeans and West Africans.

‘The mutation in SLC24A5 changes just one building block in the protein, and contributes about a third of the visually striking differences in skin tone between peoples of African and European ancestry,’ he said.

He added the lighter skin colour may have provided an advantage due to the better creation of vitamin D from sunlight in the dark northern latitudes.

Building on this research, Professor Victor Canfield worked with Professor Cheng to study DNA sequence differences across the globe



They studied segments of genetic code that have a mutation and are located closely on the same chromosome and are often inherited together.

The a mutation, called A111T, is found in virtually every one of European ancestry.

A111T is also found in populations in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, but not in high numbers in Africans.
Penn State College of Medicine's Keith Cheng identified a key gene that contributes to lighter skin colour in Europeans and differs from West Africans

They discovered that all individuals from the Middle East, North Africa, East Africa and South India who carry the A111T mutation share traces of the ancestral genetic code.

According to the researchers, this indicates that all existing instances of this mutation originate from the same person.

The pattern of people with this lighter skin colour mutation suggests that the A111T mutation occurred somewhere between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

‘This means that Middle Easterners and South Indians, which includes most inhabitants of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, share significant ancestry,’ Professor Cheng said.

This mutated segment of DNA was itself created from a combination of two other mutated segments commonly found in Eastern Asians - traditionally defined as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

‘The coincidence of this interesting form of evidence of shared ancestry of East Asians with Europeans, within this tiny chromosomal region, is exciting,’ said Professor Cheng.

‘The combining of segments occurred after the ancestors of East Asians and Europeans split geographically more than 50,000 years ago; the A111T mutation occurred afterward.’

Professor Cheng now plans to look at more genetic samples to better understand what genes play the most important role in East Asian skin colour.

ANCIENT EUROPE WAS A 'MELTING POT' WITH A JUMBLED ANCESTORY

Newly released genomes from around a dozen early inhabitants of Europe suggest that the continent was once a melting pot in which brown-eyed farmers encountered blue-eyed hunter-gatherers.

A report in Nature claims that present-day Europeans have ancestry from three groups in various combinations:

Hunter-gatherers, some of them blue-eyed, who came from Africa more than 40,000 years ago
Middle Eastern farmers who migrated west much more recently
A mysterious population whose range may have spanned northern Europe and Siberia

These three groups were identified from the genomes of 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers - one man from Luxembourg and seven individuals from Sweden - as well as the genome of a 7,500-year-old woman from Germany. The study was led by the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The research suggests that the individuals from Luxembourg and Spain probably had dark-skin and blue eyes. The German woman, meanwhile, had brown eyes and lighter skin, and was related to Middle Eastern groups.

Both the Luxembourg hunter-gatherer and the German farmer had a gene that breaks down saliva - and a feature that may have came about due to agricultural life.

However, neither of them had the ability to digest the sugar lactose, found in milk. The trait originally emerged in the Middle East after the domestication of cattle and later spread to Europe.

Previous studies suggested that Europeans today largely descended from Middle Eastern farmers.

http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-euro ... ry-1.14456

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... s-ago.html

--------------

This theory makes a lot of sense to me. I once came a cross a YouTube video, similar to one I found again, posted below, I'm not sure if it was meant to be serious but it seemed very interesting. It showed that the features of Albinos that originated from the Middle East and India were identical to that of Europeans. The only people that have very similar features are people from India/south Asia and the Middle East. Africans, Chinese/Japanese or other Albino do not have features which reflect white Europeans, however, it would be difficult to distinguish the features of an Indian or Middles Eastern Albino due to it's diversity from a white European. Also the talk about the "Aryans" of India, Iran and Middle East adds some weight to this theory... Now I know the video below is only good for fun but it's an eye opener.

[youtube]OjBlZl8RON8[/youtube]

Similarities = Same Proto-Indo-European Language Group, Same Spinal & Facial Structure, Skull Structure, Social and Linguistic Similiraties between (south Asian, i.e. Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) and Northern Europeans...

South Europeans from Spain, Italy, and France, are not strictly Aryans, Because are mixed between The Albino Desi's and Semetics... whilst DESI's are seperate from Arab and are a pure genetic group.

East Asians geographically have a harder place to mix genetics,..

[mikema63]

This isn't news, human's originated in Africa and our migration patterns would take us through the middle east.

[Jihsan]

This isn't news, human's originated in Africa and our migration patterns would take us through the middle east.

This thread is not about the "origins of humans" but at what stage did the change of skin colour of white Europeans occur, and the roots and regions of where it all started. The article explains that white Europeans may have originated from Middle East - India region and I supported this by explaining how the features of Middle Easter/India Albino matches with that of white Europeans.. I don't think that one day black Africans decided to magically turn white.

[mikema63]

Hardly, the migration process took thousands of years.

It would come as no surprise that the ancestry of Europeans should eventually trace back to a place their ancestors would have, by necessity, migrated from.

[Jihsan]

Hardly, the migration process took thousands of years.

Light skin in Europeans stems from ONE 10,000-year-old ancestor who lived between India and the Middle East[...] A111T is also found in populations in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, but not in high numbers in Africans.

It was more like pot luck, a fluke or nature gone wrong.

[mikema63]

Genetic mutations are like that.

[ThirdTerm]

Canfield et al. (2013) also found that the mutated segment of DNA was derived from two other mutated segments commonly found in East Asian populations and modern Europeans' genetic ancestry could be traced back to East Asians. Another paper (Ding et al. 2013) argues that Neanderthal introgression into European populations resulted from East Asian gene flow. It's known that the frequency of introgressive Neanaderthal haplotypes is higher in East Asians (4%) than in Europeans (2.5%) and the authors concluded that archaic introgression first occurred in the ancestral population of modern East Asians, while the introgressive haplotypes in Europeans could be the result of recent gene flow from East Asia to Europe. To test this hypothesis, the team divided the Eurasian haplotypes into four groups: (1) European non-introgressive haplotypes (EUR-N); (2) European introgressive haplotypes (EUR-I); (3) East Asian non-introgressive haplotypes (ASN-N); and (4) East Asian introgressive haplotypes (ASN-I). EUR-I shows significantly higher sequence similarity with ASN-N (0.9611) and ASN-I (0.9683) than with EUR-N (0.9538), which may prove that the introgressive haplotypes in Europe resulted from recent East Asian gene flow. East Asians are genetically more archaic than Europeans and Neanderthal/H. sapience interbreeding may have taken place only among the ancestors of East Asians, who were better positioned to admix with the Neanderthals as they came out of Africa earlier than Europeans. Neanderthal DNA was subsequently passed on to Europeans and European-specific genetic mutations such as the A111T mutation occurred afterwards to cope with the wintry weather in Northern Europe. Alternatively, the Altai region may have served as the launching point for Neanderthal genes to spread among modern humans and Neanderthal/H. sapience interbreeding may have exclusively occurred in the region. Haplogroup NO of the Finno-Ugric peoples and their descendants spread from Northern China about 12,000–14,000 years ago and haplogroup N is a descendant of Haplogroup NO, which is the most common haplogroup among the Finns (60%) and can also be found at high frequencies in Russia. The presence of the introgressive Neanderthal haplotypes in Europeans can be explained by the spread of haplogroup NO accompanied by ancient Asian migrants to Europe, who left their genetic imprints on modern European populations.

In this study, Victor Canfield, assistant professor of pharmacology, together with Cheng, studied a specific mutation in SLC24A5, called A111T. The pattern of proportions of people with this lighter skin color mutation indicates that the A111T mutation occurred somewhere between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. This mutated segment of DNA was itself created from a combination of two other mutated segments commonly found in Eastern Asians – traditionally defined as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. "The coincidence of this interesting form of evidence of shared ancestry of East Asians with Europeans, within this tiny chromosomal region, is exciting,” said Cheng. “The combining of segments occurred after the ancestors of East Asians and Europeans split geographically more than 50,000 years ago; the A111T mutation occurred afterward.”
http://www.asianscientist.com/in-the-lab/gene-mutation-links-east-asian-european-ancestors-2013/

[foxdemon]

It was more like pot luck, a fluke or nature gone wrong.

White arsed honkytonk crackers are (and I quote) "nature gone wrong".


Actually, the article seems quite plausable to me. The lose of function mutations leading to the 'white' phenotype require a small, isolated population for those mutations to go to fixation in that population. Mountain valleys in what is now Afghanistan, during the neolithic, would have been a suitable enviroment for that isolation to happen.

Later, after fixation of the distiguishing alleles, the population expands, by pot luck lives around natural deposits of tin and cooper in the northern causasus mountains, yielding bronze by accident. Combine this with a pastrolist economy where horses can be domesticated and bingo, we have the chariot riding, bronze weopan bearing indo-european ancestor warrior culture conquoring vast stretches of the euroasian landmass 4000 years ago.


Is that all Dutch?

[quetzalcoatl]

Frances Cress Welsing

white people are the genetically defective descendants of albino mutants. She posits that because of this "defective" mutation, they may have been forcibly expelled from Africa, among other possibilities.[citation needed] Welsing proposes that, because it is so easy for pure whiteness to be genetically lost during interracial breeding, light-skinned peoples developed an aggressive colonial urge and their societies dominated others militarily in order to preserve this light-skinned purity. Welsing ascribes certain inherent and behavioral differences between black and white people to a "melanin deficiency" in white people

[ThirdTerm]

Actually, the article seems quite plausable to me. The lose of function mutations leading to the 'white' phenotype require a small, isolated population for those mutations to go to fixation in that population. Mountain valleys in what is now Afghanistan, during the neolithic, would have been a suitable enviroment for that isolation to happen.

A Kalash girl in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a good guess and the Kalash with blond hair or light eyes, who are residing in the Hindu Kush mountain range between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, were thought to have descended from the members of Alexander the Great's army but the Kalash could be the direct descendants of the proto-European population that had split from East Asians with the A111T mutation. It has also been found that 56 per cent of villagers in Liqian, on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in north-western China, were Caucasian in origin and the villagers may also be genetically related to the proto-European population who emerged in Asia, contrary to the speculation that he may be a descendant of Roman mercenaries who allegedly fought the Han Chinese 2,000 years ago. After the split, most of the proto-European population gradually left West Asia for Europe but some of them may have stayed behind as unique tribes.


A local man in Liqian, Cai Junnian.

[foxdemon]

^
Nice post Thirdterm.

I had previous thought those people to be decendants of stragglers the Indo-European expansion into India. But it now seems they are the original white population.

[Jihsan]

But it now seems they are the original white population.

Most of these white Europeans currently residing in North America, Canada, Australia, South Africa... etc are not only the "original white population" neither the country they live in is "originally" theirs, it belongs to the indigenous-native people.

[foxdemon]

Most of these white Europeans currently residing in North America, Canada, Australia, South Africa... etc are not only the "original white population" neither the country they live in is "originally" theirs, it belongs to the indigenous-native people.

Bear in mind that we are talking about Indo-Euroepans. So that includes the white people of the steppes (but not Turkic groups), upper caste Indians and Iranians. So, if we define 'white people' as those of Indo-European decent, then the term shouldn't be restricted to Europeans. Nor should all Europeans be included. Lapps are clearly not Indo-European. There are a few asiatic nomad groups in Europe and the Caucasus too: Magyars, Avars, Bulgars, Turks. The Turkic groups are the only ones that are easily distinguishable in this age.

[Alchemy]

Keep in mind that Pangea resembled this before.

[xizhimen]

Those people have been stuck in the Pamir Mountains for thousands of years, and anthropologists call them human living fossils.

http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=154906

[Hirdmann]

Everyone originally comes from Africa.
Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. What else is new?

[Dagoth Ur]

Duh guys. Who cares about anthropology or building a correct map of our ancestral emigrations? Nobody that's who.

[xizhimen]

Xinjiang ethnic groups,historically here is place where East meets the West.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

Actually, the article seems quite plausable to me. The lose of function mutations leading to the 'white' phenotype require a small, isolated population for those mutations to go to fixation in that population. Mountain valleys in what is now Afghanistan, during the neolithic, would have been a suitable enviroment for that isolation to happen.

Later, after fixation of the distiguishing alleles, the population expands, by pot luck lives around natural deposits of tin and cooper in the northern causasus mountains, yielding bronze by accident. Combine this with a pastrolist economy where horses can be domesticated and bingo, we have the chariot riding, bronze weopan bearing indo-european ancestor warrior culture conquoring vast stretches of the euroasian landmass 4000 years ago.


Is that all Dutch?

No, that's not what the authors think. This is a mutation that has proved beneficial in northern latitudes, to the extent of dominating western Eurasia and north Africa, and being fairly common in East Africa too. They think there was strong positive selection for it in Europe. It's not a 'loss of function' in northern latitudes, and wouldn't need an isolated population. The paper:

Divergent natural selection caused by differences in solar exposure has resulted in distinctive variations in skin color between human populations. The derived light skin color allele of the SLC24A5 gene, A111T, predominates in populations of Western Eurasian ancestry. To gain insight into when and where this mutation arose, we defined common haplotypes in the genomic region around SLC24A5 across diverse human populations and deduced phylogenetic relationships between them. Virtually all chromosomes carrying the A111T allele share a single 78-kb haplotype that we call C11, indicating that all instances of this mutation in human populations share a common origin. The C11 haplotype was most likely created by a crossover between two haplotypes, followed by the A111T mutation. The two parental precursor haplotypes are found from East Asia to the Americas but are nearly absent in Africa. The distributions of C11 and its parental haplotypes make it most likely that these two last steps occurred between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, with the A111T mutation occurring after the split between the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians.
...
Global distribution of the A111T mutation in SLC24A5

The geographical distribution of the A111T allele of SLC24A5 (Norton et al. 2007), updated with the use of additional population samples (Figure 1), shows that A111T is nearly fixed in all of Europe and most of the Middle East, extending east to some populations in present-day Pakistan and north India. A111T shows a latitudinal decline toward the Equator, with high frequencies in Northern Africa (>0.80), intermediate (0.4−0.6) in Ethiopia and Somalia, and lower (<0.35) in sub-Saharan Africa. This pattern is broadly consistent with strong positive selection for decreased skin pigmentation throughout Europe. There is a cline of decreasing frequency of A111T in indigenous populations east of approximately longitude 75° in Central Asia, with near-absence in East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The extent to which the spread of A111T to the east has been inhibited by the absence of substantial eastward population migrations postdating its origin or by the presence of other loci responsible for decreased skin pigmentation in East Asia is presently unclear.
...
Our adjusted dates overlap those previously reported (Beleza et al. 2012) and are also consistent with the lower limit for the origin of A111T set by the finding that the Alpine “iceman” dated to 5.3 kya was homozygous for this variant (Keller et al. 2012). This date range implies an origin clearly preceding the Neolithic transition in Europe. These dates are later than the initial colonization of Europe but are consistent with an A111T origin before or after post-glacial population expansions.
...
Although a non-African origin for C11 is clear, near fixation of this haplotype over a wide geographical region prevents strong inferences regarding a precise location of origin. Existing data are consistent with a model in which the C11 precursor did not extend outside the geographical region in which C11 is now nearly fixed, a conclusion subject to limited haplotype sampling in some neighboring regions, such as India. With sufficiently strong positive selection for C11, it is possible that this haplotype could have originated anywhere within its current range and spread via local migration. However, selection acting in concert with major population migrations would have facilitated a much more rapid dispersal. Archeological, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosomal data suggest involvement of multiple dispersals in shaping the current populations of Europe and the Middle East (Soares et al. 2010). Because A111T is far from fixation in most Indian samples (Table S1), the high diversity of B-region haplotypes associated with C11 in the GIH sample may be the result of prolonged recombination rather than early arrival of A111T. In fact, the decrease in frequency of A111T to the east of Pakistan suggests that C11 originated farther to the west and after the initial genetic split between western and eastern Eurasians. On this basis, we hold the view that an origin of C11 in the Middle East, broadly defined, is most likely.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3815065/

So they know it had spread widely through Europe before the Bronze Age, and it's most likely that the origin was west of Pakistan, not north.

[jessupjonesjnr87]

If it wasn't for genetic mutations we'd all still be bacteria