"Cheddar Man: DNA shows early Briton had dark skin" Topic

The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had "dark to black" skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain's oldest complete skeleton has revealed.

The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough's Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man's origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.

It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.

The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today. […]

[edit]Sorry for the goof on the title. [/edit]

Cheers,
Martin from Canada

Wow, that's milk chocolaty! Lol.

Since when did DNA get that specific about skin color? It's usually been challenged when skin color estimates get that specific.

Among some of my nephews, kids from the same pair of parents can range fairly wide when it comes to skin and even hair color. Theyre like looking at a miniature rainbow from light to dark.

Dan

So once again the evil white man dispossessed the dark skinned original peoples…

Or perhaps, high levels of melanin may not be conducive to producing adequate amounts of vitamin D from sunlight at higher latitudes leading to a bleaching of future generations.

After all, every reconstruction I see of early hominid appearance shows dark complexions and lighter complexsions had to develop for a reason.

Goragrad

You had it right the first time. Or at least that's how the new guesstimate will be used.

Dan
PS. Is it me or does Cheddar Man look more like Cheddar Woman? Perhaps another "artistic" liberty taken there?

Doesn't look like an apple with the Chedar – you have a point, CC.

P.S. Just had a discussion on Fanaticus on orc coloration – per Tolkien sallow, brown, grey, or black. So were the earliest inhabitants of the British Isles orcs???

P.P.S. – As to your initial observation, was doing some research on Nubians and one of the 'references' I ran across was Joesph Campbell's book claiming that the Egyptians and anybody else who mattered was Black. I have seen that quoted on other forums and definitely agree that anybody believing Campbell's theories will jump on this as further proof…

Ha! Good point. Maybe Robert E Howard was on to something too. He described the early inhabitants (pre-Picts?) in similar terms.

Then again, in the deep Amazon forest where mud and pigments are regularly used by some tribes as protection against mosquitoes (and for camouflage), neighboring tribes often have stories of about evil spirits wearing something like black war paint.

Perhaps there used to be hunters and warriors in the British Isles who used similar stealth techniques, with solid black body paint. Or perhaps they wanted to look like their even more distant Cheddar Head ancestors! :)

As to the fella in the reconstruction … I don't know how many messages are being pushed with that one.

Dan
PS. Long Live Doggerland!
TMP link

Goragrad

You had it right the first time.

No he didn't. He had it right with the latter comment.

Since when did DNA get that specific about skin color?

Well it's again done by proxy (that type of science that gives Mithmee fits)

First, skin colour is a polygenic trait, meaning that hundreds of different genes act to produce the melanin pigmentation variability. Another reason why there is no biological basis for the concept of race. There is one gene however, called SLC24A5 that regulates calcium metabolism in melanocytes (the cells that make the melanin pigment). Basically, if you have this gene, you produce more melanin and have darker skin. I assume they found this gene in the genetic material of Cheddar Man.

Eventually a mutation of SLC24A5 occurred which decreased the calcium available to the melanocytes. The skin got paler. The fitness of the lighter skin is supposed to aid in Vit D synthesis, thermo-regulation and even frostbite sensitivity. In Europe this was a great advantage and was selected for. Now, most white Europeans (99.9%) carry this mutant variation of SLC24A5. Hence the proxy science. In lieu of ancient skin samples, we only have a correlation between the gene and modern human skin pigmentation.

link

So no evil white men supplanting the dark skinned men. The Europeans just slowly lost their pigmentation. What is interesting is that dark skinned individuals were still around at 10,000 years ago. Current consensus is that modern humans emigrated to Europe 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Therefore the spread of the SLC24A5 mutant gene took quite a while. One would expect the mutation to take hold in the northern climes first and that the Mediterranean H. Sapiens would retain their darker colour the longest. Cheddar Man seems to say no. What we also don't really know is if the European population all got paler at the same time, at the same rate and in the same geographic areas. We also don't know how mobile these populations were.

I ran across was Joesph Campbell's book claiming that the Egyptians and anybody else who mattered was Black. I have seen that quoted on other forums and definitely agree that anybody believing Campbell's theories will jump on this as further proof…

Wiki has a good article on the Black Egyptian hypothesis.

link

I think the Egyptians were very well aware of the diversity of their people. In some murals they go to the added trouble to distinguish between different skin tones. All three figures below look different to me.

Ya know…..
Not EVERYTHING in Science is agenda driven.

And not everything in a facial reconstruction is strictly science.

Dan

I think you are both right.

I wonder if this is where we get the Black Irish from?

I don't know where to start.

First off, I've been reading Howard's BMM stories recently, so would these be the folks that turned into the serpent people, or would these be the people *before* them?

History is nothing but a successive wave of migrations and displacements. What else have you got? You have your religiously motivated ones, your megalomaniac ones, your environmental change ones, and probably another flavor or two. But as far as I know all the "dark skinned" people displaced (to put it mildly) by lighter skinned people had displaced other people before that. No one is innocent, not even the people who say that now that we don't do that anymore the last people to do it are the evil ones.

And if you get your science news from a non-science journal, well, you take your chances. They tend to dress stuff up.

If the message is that skin color changes quickly, evolutionarily speaking, that is interesting.

I'm tempted to quibble. With "first", "Briton", several other points and especially "People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population." – There have been a lot of genocidal invasions over the years: 1066, the Celts, the vikings. Napoleon was probably the first guy *not* to succeed. Britain is the most invaded island in the world. In the nineteenth century so many people left Ireland *after* the great famine that the population to this day has not recovered to the post-famine numbers. ( link ) And most of those people went to Britain. It seems a lot to claim that all the "white" British of today are descended from this population. I guess they must have realized that half way through the article because later on they say "Today, about 10% of white British ancestry can be linked to this ancient population."

If the take away is that skin color is transient and we shouldn't link it so tightly to origin and identity, I'm 100% on board with that, but we need to be really careful when trying to advance and disseminate history and science that is going to make people mad.

Not everything in science is agenda driven, but it seems like anyone links to a science article from The Guardian that it contributes to an agenda.

And if you get your science news from a non-science journal, well, you take your chances. They tend to dress stuff up.

Well to be fair, the skeletal remains were discovered 115 years ago and has been studied intensively. His DNA was sequenced starting in the late 1990's. This new research was done by University College and the Natural History Museum just recently. I don't think it is published yet.

I'm tempted to quibble…….

Nice story on England being the most invaded island ever. That's immaterial as, at the time Cheddar Man existed, England wasn't an island. Viva Doggerland! *

If the message is that skin color changes quickly, evolutionarily speaking, that is interesting.

Actually, I think it shows quite the opposite. Homo Sapiens seem to have been in Europe for over a hundred thousand years ago. Cheddar Man seems to be only 10,000 years old. What's interesting is that, at least for some, the skin colour changes did not occur quickly.

* That's for you, Dan.

Would it be fair to say that over the last couple hundred thousand years while human skin color is generally pretty dark and probably pretty stable, when it does change to light it does so pretty quickly? Quickly meaning 5-10 thousand years. I don't have any data, that's just my impression.

No idea, to be honest. A mutation happened in one key gene needed for melanin fabrication. Living in a northern, less sunbaked climate, such as Europe, seemed to select for this gene. This means the gene begins increasing itself within the population. It is now at 99.9% of modern Caucasian Europeans. So it went from nothing to ubiquitous somewhere over 130,000 years or so. At 10,000 years ago we still have (at least) one individual that has retained the original SLC24A5 gene.

So what we don't know is:

1) When did the climate begin selecting for the SLC24A5 mutation?

2) Did this happen uniformly throughout different regions of Europe?

3) Did this happen uniformly throughout different time periods?

4) How much mobility did these populations have over this 100,000 year period?

5) Was there social selection for the lighter or darker skin tones? In other words, what, if anything, did skin colour have to do with mate selection?

6) How did this one gene interact with all the other genes responsible for pigmentation?

There are probably many more questions.

He looks like he's laughing at us…

Andrew Walters: "History is nothing but a successive wave of migrations and displacements. What else have you got? You have your religiously motivated ones, your megalomaniac ones, your environmental change ones, and probably another flavor or two."

Bowman

Do you think Andrew might have missed this other possible cause for migration … fertility rites.

Maybe the megalithic temples in Malta and elsewhere (including some that might have gotten submerged* after the Ice Age) instituted ritual brother-sister marriages and had temple prostitutes – male and female – and this could have somehow created unintentional genetic funnels. Maybe they were trying to come up with an exotic "Targaryen" breed. Exotic at the time, that is. They were, after all, dedicated mostly to fertility rites, were they not?

TMP link
TMP link

Some say that even that the outline of the temples matched the shape of their rotund goddesses/priestesses, with the doorway itself being the womb:

And all this time some have been blaming poor Mount Toba for the bottleneck 70,000 years ago, when perhaps it happened much later and was largely intentional. :)

Dan
* Perhaps the now-submerged Doggerland was one of those orgy meccas. :)
TMP link

No idea, Dan.

But I do know that it saddens me every time an orgy mecca gets flooded.

Cheddar Man is still at least 4,000 years before the oldest of these megaliths.

But here is something really old, the Willendorf Venus:

Well, older than the surviving megalithic sites.

Maybe as global warming melted the ice sheets, their temples were moved later to higher ground, to mountain peaks for them, and those are the only temples we can still see today. But the original temples may be much older and are now very much submerged.

Who knows, maybe all the marathon fertility rites asking for rain are what melted the ice sheets and flooded their world. :)

Dan
PS. Maybe back during the time of the Willendorf Venus (and many other similar ones) there were seasonal religious gatherings of clans, to exchange items and even exchange mates. That would accelerate the spread of those mutations, instead of natural chance encounters, wouldn't it?

Wasn't Doggerland a collection of far flung, low lying, peat bogs? Not a good source for the liths in your megaliths. The Mediterranean would be different.

Well, I'm just stuck on Doggerland. As far as I know they haven't come up with official names* for the now flooded areas of the Mediterranean. Or have they?

Wouldn't it be amazing if some future technology made it possible to detect paint residue (dark or light, whichever) on those early Venus statues?

Dan
* Apart From Robert E Howard, that is: :)

Actually Bowman I had read that wiki when it came up in my websearching.

I actually hit this article by Frank Yurco (posted at COJS after being originally published in the Biblical Archeological Review magazine) before that -

link

Essentially, while noting that race is a modern concept (and pre-occupation) Yurco writes that the Ancient Egyptians were of essentially the same genetics as the current North African populations. That while there was intermarriage and migration from the South, that Egyptians were not 'Black.'

I agree, with the following caveat:

There were black pharaohs. The 25th Dynasty was due to the Nubian invasion.

But……there is a big difference between a Nubian Dynasty and saying the Egyptian Empire was "black".

And I was only having fun with your "evil white men" comment.

I can't remember who was the author, but years ago I read a riveting account of Taharka's campaigns from Kush and the from Egypt itself.

I need to look in my boxes, to make sure I still have it.

Dan

I'll go with Aliens every time …

Still awaiting my DNA test. All my grand parents being from Italy, AFAIK, I could have a varied DNA mix. Maybe even Moor, Greek, Arab, etc., etc., … So hey it's all good to me !

Yes, Bowman, had to add that note in a conversation on this with a friend – what ever the actual genetic mix on any of the other Pharoahs the Kushite 25th was 'Black.'

And the 'evil white men' was somewhat tongue in cheek (when looking into Black Egyptians one can easily step in the Black Greeks and Romans myths and learn that until the Germans and Slavs invaded the Europe was Black)…

Missed this part:

Well, I'm just stuck on Doggerland.

Really? Hadn't noticed.

As far as I know they haven't come up with official names* for the now flooded areas of the Mediterranean. Or have they?

I doubt it, as it would still be the Mediterranean, albeit a bit smaller. Now during the last Ice Age there was a small archipelago of islands between Sicily and Tunisia. I'm not even sure if Sicily was an island at that time. They have found carved megaliths there.

link

I don't see why we can't name some of the islands after ourselves. Cacique Cay and Bowman Bay would sound nice.

There were black pharaohs. The 25th Dynasty was due to the Nubian invasion.

Yes there were but they were overthrown within a 100 or so years.

Sure, but there were 5 or 6 Nubian Pharoahs (depending on how they include Kashta or not). And they lasted longer than the two preceding dynasties. There probably would have been more if they didn't look eastward and poke the Assyrian bear.

After the 25th dynasty, Egypt was never again ruled independently by the Egyptians.

And just as an aside, Anwar Sadat was an ethnic Nubian.

And, if one used the old 'one drop' rule there would be a fair number of Ancient and Modern Egyptians that would be 'black.'