Neandertal origin of MC1R haplotypes related to skin color

[Angela]

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.

 

[Fire Haired14]

I dont get it;

p.37 (Dec.2013/Lazaridis et al) http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/suppl/2013/12/23/001552.DC1/001552-3.pdf
p.47 (Apr.2014/Lazaridis et al) http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/suppl/2014/04/05/001552.DC4/001552-3.pdf

Why did they change C/C alleles to T/T alleles?

 

[Fire Haired14]

Okay, we get it - you're the kind of guy who "doesn't like girls". But some of your comments about skin colour seem to me to be ill-informed and driven by a rather peculiar agenda that I haven't quite figured out.

Ill-informed? I have the same information as the other posters, but I realized known light skin mutations can't explain European light skin because middle easterns and south Asians also have them, and also because a minority of Upper Palaeolithic-Mesolithic north Eurasians had them(it is unlikely skin color varied significantly between members of small tribes). We should all agree that we can't determine the skin color of stone age hunter gatherers and farmers, we can only make guesses.

 

[Greying Wanderer]

1) From spending a lot of time in the remoter parts of Britain and Ireland it always seemed to me like there were three layers:
a) a darker layer mostly (edit: now mostly) restricted to the remotest mountainous places like north wales
b) a paper-white, red haired layer weighted more to the north and west but less restricted than (a)
c) a standard euro layer

Which to me would fit the Lazaridis components if
a) a coastal WHG population that remained dark-skinned cos fish
b) an inland population (ANE?) that lost pigmentation through a loss of function gene
c) a composite population of (a) and (b) plus the farmer component with their improved tanning version of depigmentation

The combination of those three (plus maybe some extra east asian depigmentation genes in the East) could create the Euro distribution we see today imo

2) As mentioned the derived version (actually versions plural IIRC) of MC1R may not be the cause of the phenotype in itself but act in conjunction with others. For example maybe in Cheyenne derived MC1R acts in conjunction with something else to effect the redness of the skin (somehow effecting UV) whereas in Europeans it works in conjunction with something like OCA2 to create the paper-white, red haired phenotype. Dunno.

3) As to the distribution map shown above, personally - if the cause is UV - then i think the initial distribution may have been much more inland and much wider i.e. most of the inland region, with two big changes since.

a) migrated west or pushed west by the steppe dudes
b) red hair is partial depigmentation while blond is extra depigmentation beyond that so i think more blond hair in the east is maybe caused by the addition of extra depigmentation genes (possibly from east asia) onto a previously red haired population. if correct that island of red hair in Russia would be a remnant of the original phenotype centred on a swamp or mountain that wasn't suitable for steppe herders allowing the original population to remain unchanged.

4) fun stuff

 

[Drax]

Rs2228479 is found throughout Eurasia. It has been associated with red beard hair. The red pigmentation is only visible in individuals with fair hair (i.e. those who also carry mutations for blond hair), which explains why red hair is not normally observed in East and South Asians.

Since pure Neanderthals disappeared in Central Asia over 30,000 years ago, this gene would have been picked up by Y-haplogroup NOP, which is also ancestral to haplogroups Q and R. That explains why the gene is so widely distributed today, and why predominantly N1c1 Uralic people like the Udmurts and the Mordvins have high frequencies of red hair.

So far there is no evidence that the Mesolithic or Neolithic Europeans possessed MC1R mutations for red hair. On the other hand it is possible that the original N, O, P, Q and R people who possessed the mutations didn't have red hair, but pitch black hair like modern East and South Asians. It is only when haplogroup R moved into eastern Europe and mixed with blond hair people that the reddish tinge would have become visible in their hybrid descendants.

It's harder to explain why red hair became so much more frequency in R1b than in R1a populations, as if natural selection in cloudy north-west Europe favoured red hair, while it favoured blond hair in sunnier but colder north-east Europe.

I'm sorry to ask that...but who are these "blond hair people" ? I'm curious because I don't remember to have seen, before the IE invasions (or migration), the presence of blond hairs in Europe; if I remember correctly, Mesolithic and Neolithic europeans were dark haired and brown skinned.

The Udmurts, according the article of Eupedia, have also the R1b haplogroup; that could explain also their redhead.

edit: For blond hair peoples, I suppose you talk about R1a peoples in the eastern Europe, in contrast with r1b supposed to be more redhead.

 

[Greying Wanderer]

a topical reference, Saddam's general rumored to be connected to the current trouble in Iraq illustrates what i mean when i say paper-white

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vMOVlkax4.../s1600/554690_450406981707382_962621097_n.jpg

 

[joeyc]

Inbefore Drac II says that such kind of studies are utter crap and only Sandra Beleza knows everything.

Hell she has even said that Portuguese people are lighter skinned than Poles. Which is perfectly normal.

 

[Theodorik]

Neanderthal DNA Underestimated? " [h=1]PHOTO IN THE NEWS: DNA-Based Neanderthal Face Unveiled"[/h] Difficulties in accurately reconstructing Neanderthal DNA is likely to cause the amount of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans to be underestimated. It may as high as 25%. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1634942/ "Many excavated archaeological remains appear to contain DNA from multiple individuals (Gilbert et al. 2003a,b), raising the issue of how to authenticate ancient human DNA when ‘unique’ sequences, such as the Neanderthal (Krings et al. 1997) or distinct modern human groups like the Andaman Islanders (Endicott et al. 2003), are not reproducibly obtained. A good example is the analysis of Italian Cro-Magnon specimens (Caramelli et al. 2003), where comprehensive protocols of authentication (Cooper & Poinar 2001; Hofreiter et al. 2001b) were followed. However, because the resulting sequences were indistinguishable from modern Europeans, sample contamination must remain the null hypothesis. By contrast, Serre et al. (2004a) assume that it is impossible to authenticate any modern human sequence obtained from archaeological specimens and instead confirm the absence of Neanderthal-specific mtDNA sequences from five European early modern human (EMH) specimens. Since coalescence theory indicates that the (inferred) modern human mtDNA sequences of the five EMH specimens are unlikely to exactly match the 5–7 ancestral lineages of modern populations, this effectively doubles the number of modern human mtDNA lineages known to exist in the Late Pleistocene. This value was used with population genetic models to calculate that the maximum Neanderthal genetic contribution to EMH is likely to have been less than 25% (Serre et al. 2004a). Although not independently replicated, this study demonstrates how aDNA can dramatically increase the resolving power of population genetics studies (Cooper et al. 2004)." Linking Neanderthal DNA with known traits such as hair color and facial features, and adding knowledge of Neanderthal skull shapes, it is possible to reconstruct what a Neanderthal looked like. Modern Europeans look more like Neanderthals than they look like Africans. And, the technology and behavior of the last Neanderthals was virtually identical to that of Cro-Magnons, the "early modern humans" from whom Europeans are descended. Neanderthals made flutes, had art, and used the same weapons and tools. "September 17, 2008—Meet Wilma—named for the redheaded Flintstones character—the first model of a Neanderthal based in part on ancient DNA evidence. Artists and scientists created Wilma (shown in a photo released yesterday) using analysis of DNA from 43,000-year-old bones that had been cannibalized. Announced in October 2007, the findings had suggested that at least some Neanderthals would have had red hair, pale skin, and possibly freckles. Created for an October 2008 National Geographicmagazine article, Wilma..." http://forums.delphiforums.com/paleogenetics1 http://forums.delphiforums.com/chromosome http://forums.delphiforums.com/neanderthal http://forums.delphiforums.com/racism13 http://forums.delphiforums.com/nordichistory4 http://forums.delphiforums.com/truthseekers23