Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
You seemed to be excited about ancient pigmentation to. How is discovering what people 1,000's of years ago looked like in person not interesting? I am tired of you(Angela) assuming everyone who shows any interest in pigmentation is raciest. You're previous angry responses to me questioning the assumed skin color of Mesolithic Europeans and accuracy of skin color predictions revealed your own racism. You're a fool if you believe you're more clean than the people you ridicule.
I think it's best if people don't assume that general comments are directed at them personally. I can be over sensitive at times too, but it can lead to wrong conclusions. Hard as it may be for you to credit, I wasn't thinking specifically of you at all. You, on the other hand make it a regular habit to address me personally and accuse me personally of various nefarious behaviors, and I would appreciate it if you would desist. I particularly resent any attribution to me personally of racism in any form; you will never find any indication of it in any post I have ever made anywhere about any group. The same cannot be said of other posters on this forum. Kindly do not accuse me of it again; it is a reportable offense, and I am getting tired of "turning the other cheek", even when the offender is perhaps just very young.
For the record, once again, I'm very much a person who by nature is interested in what ancient people looked like and acted like, in addition to my academic interest in the subject. Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that.
What I found odd, and continue to find odd, is that from the first, when virtually all of the papers and data indicated not only a late spread, but a late occurrence in Europe and northern Eurasia of the mutations responsible for depigmentation, the very thought seemed to be anathema to certain people. I don't think that is an unfair categorization. I don't think it necessarily had a basis in racism, although that's undoubtedly an element, unless you're going to deny the absolutely blatant racist comments made on the internet by some of these people? For some, I do think it sprang from difficulty in accepting that human phenotypes may have changed much more recently than we had imagined, although it's obvious from the situation with lactase persistence, for example, that this is indeed possible.
In terms of the subject of this thread, it indicates to me, at least at the present time, that as the scientists keep on insisting, but as some people seem to have difficulty absorbing, pigmentation is a polygenic trait.
That's why, in forensics situations, situations where I have personal, first hand experience, much use is made of HirsPlex tests where the best outcomes, i.e. the greatest correlation with actual "expressed" phenotype comes from the presence of multiple depigmentation mutations.
So, for example, now that we have more data from more ancient samples which show a more complicated picture than was apparent at first, I think that it would be a very good exercise for people with the time and the interest to input the data from various ancient genomes into the latest calculators and let us know the results. I think that would be very interesting, although I realize it might not be conclusive, as the coverage of these ancient genomes varies on a case by case basis.
I assure you that I have no problem with whatever the results might ultimately show today, tomorrow, or ten years from now with better technology. I don't "value" one phenotype above any other. Whatever my ancestors looked like nine thousand years ago, all of them, I happily claim them all.
Last edited: