Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
The alleles for fair skin are in blue and green. Mesolithic Europeans had dark skin. Neolithic farmers brought one of the two alleles (SLC24A5), while Steppe people brought both alleles.
Blue eyes were very common among Mesolithic Europeans, but not Neolithic farmers. Yamna people had mixed eye colours.
Don't mean to come off as arrogant Maciamo. I just want to let you know that Geneticker tested the Haak genomes for many pigmentation SNPs, which revealed alot of new info. Here's a link to his analysis and below are two threads I made about them. The most surprising result to me is that Mesolithic Swedes and Russians had markers for light skin along with every hair color, which didn't seem possible because of results from Mesolithic west Europe.
Red hair existed in pre-historic Europe
Mesolithic source of Pale pigmentation in modern Europe?
Most Mesolithic Swedes and the two Mesolithic Russians had a derived alleles in rs1426654 and Rs16891982. The vast majority but not all Neolithic farmers have two derived alleles in rs1426654, and very few have 1 or 2 derived alleles in rs16891982. All Yamna samples have two derived alleles in rs1426654, and only a few have a derived allele in rs16891982(consistent with Wilde. 2014).
Most Bronze age samples from central Europe and Siberia(Andronovo, etc.) have a derived allele in rs16891982. Although not at modern frequencies.
12/13 Mesolithic Europeans have GG in Rs12913832. The only one that doesn't is Karelia_HG who had AA. 50% of LBK_EN have GG in rs12913832, a good amount of Neolithic Hungarians did, and Gok2 a Neolithic Swede did. Alot of EEF would have had blue eyes, except maybe in Spain were almost all samples have AA. Yamna was much darker eyed(~90%) than Neolithic central Europeans.
All Bell beaker and Corded ware individuals tested have at least one A allele in that SNP. I'm pretty sure all the Late Neolithic Germans actually had an A allele. Most Unetice samples have GG and the Urnfield guy had GG.
Thanks for short explanation. I can't find enough time these days to read whole papers.HERC2 (rs12913832 - eye color)
SLC24A5 (rs1426654 - skin pigmentation)
SLC45A2 (rs16891982 - skin pigmentation)
LCT (rs4988235 - lactase peristence)
NADSYN1 (rs7940244 - vitamin D levels)
FADS1 (rs174546 - LDL cholesterol levels)
EDAR (rs3827760 - hair thickness)
TLR6 (rs7661887 - immune system)
This could be tricky to explain. Lipids are involved in many mechanisms in our body from cell membrane, anti inflammatory function, to energy production. LDL by itself is not that bad and obviously plays a positive role in our bodies. The important is ratio between LDL and HDL to keep people healthy. The imbalance between these 2 causes maladies.Lipid levels constantly increased over time, as if food became progressively scarcer as the population grew.
European population got lighter with time, so perhaps NADSYN1 is not that important now and evolution doesn't care to select it anymore.The gene for vitamin D production has oscillated over time, but it looks like the recent selection has been against increased vitamin D production, probably because people got their vit. D from milk and drank more milk as they became lactose tolerant.
The results for the depigmentation snps mirror those found in Genetiker's analysis.
Not to belabor the point, but Yamnaya Indo-Europeans were not significantly derived for SLC42A5, and did not possess significant levels of the "blue-eyed" gene. So, it's highly unlikely that this particular group, the Samara Indo-Europeans, brought depigmentation genes to Europe. We'll have to see what surprises the results of other groups in the Horizon might hold for us.
Lactase persistence shows the strongest markers of selection, and it wasn't present in the Yamnaya or the EHG or the SHG or the WHG or the EEF. It first appears in a Bell Beaker sample. I wonder, given the "western" cast of Bell Beaker, if it has something to do with Atlantic Europe? Surprising that despite the fact that they practiced pastoralism, the Yamnaya Indo-Europeans didn't have it, and neither did the EHG. Maybe it might show up in other Indo-European groups? I tend to doubt it, on balance, because this group has lots of samples from the Yamnaya horizon, and I don't think they would have worded this paper in the way they did if it is present on the steppe, but who knows?
Also very interesting that the derived FADSI snp for decreased trigliceride levels was under selection in the Neolithic...very important if you're eating a high starch diet. Likewise, that in central European LN/Early Bronze there begins to be some selection for higher BMI levels, a selection present in CEU, which could stand for British Isles/North Sea, I think. (A Mormon who used to post on 23andm enlightened all of us about the conversions in Denmark etc and how that impacted Mormon genetics.)
Any ideas from anybody why higher body fat percentages compared to lean muscle mass would suddenly be more advantageous at that time and in that environment? Or am I misunderstanding something?
The mutations involved with circulating Vitamin D are the ones who have the most up and down movement. Any ideas? I don't think it could have been that they didn't need them because they were drinking more milk, because there isn't much Vitamin D in milk, is there? That's why it has to be fortified?
Another interesting selection pattern is the de-selection for blue eyes that the authors maintain has been going on in southern Europe. (and other places no doubt) It must have something to do with annual UV radiation levels or something, yes? I have no idea what makes blue eyes so particularly disadvantageous in more southerly climates. Certainly, a lot of southern Europeans are homozygous for both skin depigmentation alleles. Does anyone know of any good research on this?
What we can say with certainty is that today lactase persistence is present mostly among western Europeans and Scandinavians (all R1b countries), with the highest percentages observed in the British Isles, the Netherlands, Denmark and southern Sweden. The fact that the Irish and the Scots have similarly high percentages as Scandinavians, and higher than the Germans, suggests that the lactase persistence allele really was spread by R1b people, and not by the Neolithic population of Germany or Scandinavia.
It is possible that the mutation arose somewhere in Central Europe and was "picked up" by R1b tribes on their way to the British Isles. It did not necessarily enter the R1b population in the western steppe.Looking at the distribution map of the 13910*T allele (figure (b) below) associated with LP in Europeans, it is amazing to see just how closely it mirrors the distribution of R1b lineages, and not just R1b-M269, but even R1b-V88 in Africa (Maghreb, northern Cameroon). Note especially the distrbution of the 13910*T allele in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and India, which, just like R1b, is present but at low frequency. West Africans, East Africans, Arabs and Mongols all have different mutations conferring LP. If the 13910*T allele had arisen in Mesolithic or Neolithic Europeans, it wouldn't be found in northern Cameroon or India today. If it had originated in the Near East, it would still be found there. The only light blue dot on the map is in northern Mesopotamia, close to where I think cattle were domesticated by R1b people.
If lactose persistence arose in R1b we would find it in Spain, and the R1b V88 distribution in Africa doesn't match the lactose persistence distribution in Africa.
The best explanation is lactose persistence spreading with Germanic migrations and their milk drinking culture around 500 BC. Milk consumption is highest in Sweden. This seems really rather obvious.
According to this website, Sardinians are the Europeans with the lowest level of lactose persistence.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mace-lab/resources/glad
They also have the lowest level of Indo-European autosomal DNA (virtually no Gedrosian or East European). That makes perfect sense if the LP allele was spread by teh Indo-Europeans.
Well, R1b-V88 in Africa matches properly when looking at different maps of lactose persistence. So we may just need better maps. Fairly obvious that the trait must have been rare among early Celts.Not necessarily. R1b-V88 in Spain travelled a very long way through Africa. It is Middle Neolithic. As the autosomal data shows the Spanish R1b-V88 sample has been thoroughly admixed with other Neolithic populations, so that hardly any of the original autosomal DNA remained. Therefore it's not surprising that this single mutation was lost along the way. In fact it would be utterly surprising if it was still there at all.
Well, R1b-V88 in Africa matches properly when looking at different maps of lactose persistence. So we may just need better maps. Fairly obvious that the trait must have been rare among early Celts.
Looking at different maps I see a solid connection with R1a assuming LP in India finds its origin there.
Scandinavia is definitely the location where selection for the trait was the strongest.
Granted, the LP allele had a low frequency during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, which is why most Yamna samples are negative (all those tested to date, but I surely expect others will be derived for LP), and also why African R1b populations have very low LP frequencies. The strong positive selected for the LP allele must have taken place progressively in the last 4000 years in Europe. The fact that Iberians have considerably lower LP frequencies than northern Europeans suggests that the LP selection was not yet half way in the first millennium BCE (Hallstatt period) when Celts migrated in large number to Iberia. I don't expect that frequencies above 80% were achieved in northern Europe before the late Middle Ages.
It's more likely that R1b-DF27 arrived in Iberia from Italy, rather than from Central Europe.
The highest diversity of R1b-P312 is in Italy.
Didn't they find Tuscan like farmers in Iberia lately?
It looks like modern Iberians are mostly a mix of Sardinian/Tuscan like neolitich/copper age farmers and local Mesolitich hunther gatherers, who had already elevated levels of ANE admixture.
This thread has been viewed 21184 times.