First modern Britons had 'dark to black' skin, Cheddar Man DNA analysis reveals

I guess that would be how he'd look after adding some "cheddar" around the waistline ;)
 
In this 2011 article, BBC says that previous reconstruction was created at the National History Museum.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/somerset/hi/people_and_places/newsid_9392000/9392086.stm

They made them all fair skinned and often blue-eyed as well. Otzi too. They gave him blue eyes when we now know his were brown. He did have all the modern European de-pigmentation snps, so that part they inadvertently got right. Unweathered and tanned perpetually, he would have had fair skin. Face shape is wrong, though, and nose. With Otzi we can be more sure of a lot of things, because the body was so well preserved.

I think we can safely say this probably isn't what a "Sardinian like" Neolithic farmer looked like...
6a00d8341bffd953ef014e5fa668cc970c-800wi


otzi-the-Iceman_0.jpg
 
I think there is a bit of wishful thinking or sensationalist claims in the way they're reporting this reconstruction and the findings of this research. The reports were telling of a "black man with curly hair", but this reconstruction to me shows no curly hair at all, but just a "dried out" long wavy hair as was expected.

As for his skin color, as Razib Khan said in his post about this matter, we really need to make it totally clear if we do understand the architecture of skin pigmentation of these ancient populations like WHG, instead of just assuming that if they don't have the derived alleles now present to the point of fixation among Europeans then they were totally dark, the exact opposite of the pale European skin.

I mean that because the recent study on African skin color variation clearly demonstrated that, as a polygenic trait, the skin pigmentation can also be significantly altered by other variants of genes (not to the point that the "famous" derived alleles lightened Europeans and West Asians, of course). They demonstrated clearly that there was selection for lighter or darker skin within Africa, giving a scientific explanation to what we already can see with our own eyes, which is that Khoisan Africans are evidently much lighter than Nilotic Sudanese, for example. And all that significant variation came with other genes.

Heck, even East Asians managed to become light-skinned without those alleles that are always invariably analyzed - in some cases veeeeeery light skinned (some Northern Chinese and Koreans aren't any less pale than an average European).

If I had to guess, considering that the WHG plausibly came from the Northern Near East, which is at an even higher latitude than South African Khoisans historically lived, I'd say that they probably had adapted to the environment by lightening their skin color at least to the same ammount of pigmentation of the lighter samples of Khoisans that we can see, that is, a mid-brown, "milk chocolate" color. The WHG were probably "dark-skinned" in this way, not like the reconstruction:
khoisan.jpg

slider05.jpg


IMO the WHG were certainly not as black as that reconstruction, whose black skin looks much more adapted to tropical regions, like the Melanesians and West Africans. Even in subtropical Africa you can find lighter-skinned black people than that reconstruction, especially the notorious case of the Igbo in tropical Nigeria. I really doubt the WHG would've managed to live for thousands of years around Turkey and later Europe and be darker than some tropical Africans.

Igbo-bride.jpg


Igbo women
 
I think there is a bit of wishful thinking or sensationalist claims in the way they're reporting this reconstruction and the findings of this research. The reports were telling of a "black man with curly hair", but this reconstruction to me shows no curly hair at all, but just a "dried out" long wavy hair as was expected.

As for his skin color, as Razib Khan said in his post about this matter, we really need to make it totally clear if we do understand the architecture of skin pigmentation of these ancient populations like WHG, instead of just assuming that if they don't have the derived alleles now present to the point of fixation among Europeans then they were totally dark, the exact opposite of the pale European skin.

I mean that because the recent study on African skin color variation clearly demonstrated that, as a polygenic trait, the skin pigmentation can also be significantly altered by other variants of genes (not to the point that the "famous" derived alleles lightened Europeans and West Asians, of course). They demonstrated clearly that there was selection for lighter or darker skin within Africa, giving a scientific explanation to what we already can see with our own eyes, which is that Khoisan Africans are evidently much lighter than Nilotic Sudanese, for example. And all that significant variation came with other genes.

Heck, even East Asians managed to become light-skinned without those alleles that are always invariably analyzed - in some cases veeeeeery light skinned (some Northern Chinese and Koreans aren't any less pale than an average European).

If I had to guess, considering that the WHG plausibly came from the Northern Near East, which is at an even higher latitude than South African Khoisans historically lived, I'd say that they probably had adapted to the environment by lightening their skin color at least to the same ammount of pigmentation of the lighter samples of Khoisans that we can see, that is, a mid-brown, "milk chocolate" color. The WHG were probably "dark-skinned" in this way, not like the reconstruction:
khoisan.jpg

slider05.jpg


IMO the WHG were certainly not as black as that reconstruction, whose black skin looks much more adapted to tropical regions, like the Melanesians and West Africans. Even in subtropical Africa you can find lighter-skinned black people than that reconstruction, especially the notorious case of the Igbo in tropical Nigeria. I really doubt the WHG would've managed to live for thousands of years around Turkey and later Europe and be darker than some tropical Africans.

Igbo-bride.jpg


Igbo women

The Igbo woman in the center actually looks a bit like the reconstruction to me.
 
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I assume that Cheddar Man was a close genetic relative of La Brana 1, a 7,000-year-old individual from the La Brana-Arintero site in Valdelugueros (Leon, Spain). Bryan Sykes' DNA analysis previously concluded that Cheddar Man had mtDNA haplogroup U5. La Brana 1 carried Y-DNA haplogroup C6-V20, a low-frequency European clade of haplogroup C found in less than 0.1% of Europeans today, and mtDNA haplogroup U5b2c1 (Olalde et al. 2014). Cheddar Man may also have carried Y-DNA haplogroup C6, which explains his darker skin pigmentation compared to modern Europeans. But given his maternal DNA ancestry typical in northern Europe, his skin color may have been light brown rather than black.


La_Brana_face2_small.png



The mean coverage obtained for the Y chromosome (1.4x) prevented us from recovering phylogenetically relevant SNPs at high coverage. However, using unfiltered data, we were able to narrow down the paternal lineage affiliation of La Braña 1 individual (Table S9). The presence of the derived allele in many different mutations defining haplogroups A1, A1b, BT, CT and CF suggests La Braña 1 sample belongs to either haplogroup C or F. When mutations defining those haplogroups were checked, only ancestral alleles were found in the haplogroup F-defining mutations, whereas four C-defining mutations (M130, M216, P255 and P260) showed only derived alleles. Thus, La Braña 1 most likely belonged to haplogroup C.

The actual distribution of haplogroupC is thought to be a consequence of a single out of Africa migration through Southern Asia, followed by a northward migration that eventually reached Siberia and the Americas 32. The fact that we found ancestral alleles in mutations defining C1, C2, C3 and C4 (Table S9), together with their actual phylogeographic distribution restricted to Asia, Oceania and the Americas suggests that our individual does not belong to any of these branches. Rather, a new branch within haplogroup C (C6, originally named C7) has recently been identified in several men from Southern Europe, suggesting this could be an ancient European clade33. Importantly, mutation V20 showed one read with the derived allele (A), which points to C6 as the most probable sub-clade for La Braña 1 sample. It could also be possible that this G to A mutation is a result of DNA damage. Other less likely haplogroup affiliations are C* and C5 (no read covered SNP M356), both found mainly in present-day India.

Besides the V20 mutation, four other positions could have potentially been assigned wrongly due to the presence of DNA damage. However, their allele state is phylogenetically coherent with the rest of the SNPs studied. The precise affiliation of La Braña 1 in the Y-chromosome phylogeny could be better determined in the future with more data and increased genomic coverage.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4269527/
 
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Got that from Eupedia:
The Cheddar Man (subclade U5a): the remains of a Mesolithic man found in Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England. It is Britain's oldest complete human skeleton.
I don’t know about the Y.
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_U5_mtDNA.shtml

the U5 mtDNA is not sure

http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/mesolithicdna.shtml

England, UK Gough's Cave, Cheddar [Cheddar Man] M 8000 BC Unreliable; U5 16192T, 16270T, reported as U5a. Never properly published. Contamination likely. Due to be re-tested. ISOGG; personal communication Chris Stringer re contamination

'To perform the DNA analysis, museum scientists drilled a 2mm-diameter hole into the ancient skull to obtain a few milligrams of bone powder. From this, they were able to extract a full genome, which held clues about this ancient relative’s appearance and lifestyle.'

I hope they did a better job now, and that the results will be published soon.
 
The reconstruction looks a lot like this Neanderthal reconstruction in the face shapes. View attachment 9721
 
That's just typical for modern PoC culture. Same with "Black Britons" of Roman Era and "Black Anglo-Saxons" that BBC was eager to show everyone.
 
Everything is not a PC conspiracy, and I say that as someone who is very anti-PC thinking generally speaking, at least in an American context. I believe in strictly going by the facts, and letting the chips fall where they may. Even if there were one, I highly doubt Chris Stringer would be part of it.

The facts are that these WHG generally do not have the de-pigmentation snps of West Eurasians. The SHG do, and so do the few EHG samples, and so do the Early Farmers.

Now, there's an outside chance they had some convergent evolution de-pigmentation snp, but we have a lot of WHG samples now, and nothing has shown up. If and until one is discovered, they would seem to be darker than modern West Eurasians, and darker than the other ancient people listed above.

That said, I don't know why they made the bust so "black".

This is apparently just one sample in a group that's being analyzed, and it seems as if they got a lot of dna, so maybe the paper will clarify things.
 
Good news, even though the claims may be inaccurate. How can one tell the color of the skin from bones and DNA??? Anyway, while doing some etymological work, I saw some parallels between the language of the Britons and the language of some Osci in southern Italy, namely the Bruzi or Bruttii [Bryts] of Calabria who co-exist with the colonizing Greeks. So, I called for a continued investigation of those two peoples and their languages. Now I can only call for selective DNA studies of the Italic Bruzi (rather than southern Italians collectively). Knowing them personally, I can say that they have no shades of brown or negroid color;they are Mediterranids, grayish with wavy black hair. Like some Greek derivatives, they may have blue or green eyes from hybridation with either Longobard or Norman (Norse) people during the Middle Ages. Some living Bruzi and living Britons look alike to me.
 
Years ago, I had a conversation with Kristina, where I said I thought the WHG might have looked something like Mait Metspalu of the Estonian Research Center. That was after the Loschbour reconstruction came out.

I think it's even more true with this reconstruction. It makes sense we'd find people who still carry some of those "appearance" genes in the far northeast of Europe, since there is so much WHG there, the most in Europe.

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10-1500-800x533.jpg


I can't believe people on some of these forums are trying to distance themselves from poor Cheddar Man, i.e. he's not really an ancestor of modern people of the British Isles.

Where have they been? We know that WHG people didn't look like modern Europeans. Cheddar man is just WHG, which should have been expected, and Britain has a good slice of WHG, picked up in the passage across Europe if not in a direct line from the Neolithic people who might have mated with people like Cheddar Man.

Gosh, it used to be all the rage with certain people to want to have lots of WHG, but that all goes away when there's a lot of publicity about the fact that they were probably darker skinned than modern West Eurasians?

I guess some people don't like the irony of the fact that the ancestry which is a part of plotting "north" (and west) on PCAs is actually from quite dark-skinned people.
 
Years ago, I had a conversation with Kristina, where I said I thought the WHG might have looked something like Mait Metspalu of the Estonian Research Center. That was after the Loschbour reconstruction came out.

I think it's even more true with this reconstruction. It makes sense we'd find people who still carry some of those "appearance" genes in the far northeast of Europe, since there is so much WHG there, the most in Europe.

hqdefault.jpg


10-1500-800x533.jpg


I can't believe people on some of these forums are trying to distance themselves from poor Cheddar Man, i.e. he's not really an ancestor of modern people of the British Isles.

Where have they been? We know that WHG people didn't look like modern Europeans. Cheddar man is just WHG, which should have been expected, and Britain has a good slice of WHG, picked up in the passage across Europe if not in a direct line from the Neolithic people who might have mated with people like Cheddar Man.

Gosh, it used to be all the rage with certain people to want to have lots of WHG, but that all goes away when there's a lot of publicity about the fact that they were probably darker skinned than modern West Eurasians?

I guess some people don't like the irony of the fact that the ancestry which is a part of plotting "north" (and west) on PCAs is actually from quite dark-skinned people.

I agree but isn't there speculation about the introduction of "light/fair skinned" allele into Europe? May it have been Neolithic farmers?
 
Good news, even though the claims may be inaccurate. How can one tell the color of the skin from bones and DNA??? Anyway, while doing some etymological work, I saw some parallels between the language of the Britons and the language of some Osci in southern Italy, namely the Bruzi or Bruttii [Bryts] of Calabria who co-exist with the colonizing Greeks. So, I called for a continued investigation of those two peoples and their languages. Now I can only call for selective DNA studies of the Italic Bruzi (rather than southern Italians collectively). Knowing them personally, I can say that they have no shades of brown or negroid color;they are Mediterranids, grayish with wavy black hair. Like some Greek derivatives, they may have blue or green eyes from hybridation with either Longobard or Norman (Norse) people during the Middle Ages. Some living Bruzi and living Britons look alike to me.

What on earth are you talking about?

Please read all the papers on this thread. Southern Italians have very little WHG. The people in Europe with the most WHG are Finns, Estonians, and other northeast Europeans. Take a look at Mait Metspalu in the thread above. Then go to the search engine and put in pigmentation and read the threads to find out how Dna influences pigmentation. What did you think influenced it if not DNA? A magic wand?

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/34850-Important-papers-for-newbies-to-Population-Genetics

If this is not ignorance and is in effect a lame attempt at t-rolling, be aware you got a pass because I'm not sure. If it happens again, you're out of here.
 
I agree but isn't there speculation about the introduction of "light/fair skinned" allele into Europe? May it have been Neolithic farmers?

There's still a lot to learn. We do know that the Anatolian farmers, and then the EEF, their descendants, by and large, who migrated to Europe, were virtually all derived for SLC24A5, while the WHG were ancestral. A lot of the farmers were also derived for SLC42A5, which is another of the major skin lightening snps in its derived state, while again the WHG were ancestral. The SHG who lived in Scandinavia, a mixture, perhaps, of WHG and EHG, had high proportions of the skin lightening snps, perhaps from the EHG of the eastern periphery of Europe, and blue eyes, from the WHG. The few EHG samples we have so far have the skin lightening genes but were predicted to have mostly been brown haired and brown eyed, like most of the farmers.

We know some of this is probably tied to selection based on latitude and the availability of Vitamin D from sunshine. World wide, the further you get from the equator the less "dark" your skin, generally speaking, although there are exceptions. The thinking is that perhaps at higher latitudes selection favors lighter skin so you can get more Vitamin D. One of the latest papers shows that the SHG over time had more of the skin lightening snps than the EHG from whom they draw part of their ancestry, and they live very far north indeed, and so the researchers posit that selection was going on.

Other researchers in the past had also posited that perhaps the Mesolithic WHG who tended to live mostly sedentary lives around bodies of water and got a lot of their calories from fish high in Vitamin D might have been less subject to pressure to "lighten up". The EHG may have had a different diet being so far from the sea. Farmers, who didn't consume very much fish at all, and mostly grains with no Vitamin D, might have been targeted strongly by selection for fair skin.

Where the derived mutations first took place, in which group, I don't know, but there was a suggestion in one of the papers that it might have been on a hunter-gatherer background. Perhaps it happened in the Middle East among the UHG in Anatolia and spread outward from there. I don't know. I don't know that it's so important. I also don't know exactly how and why the selection works for fair skin in more northern latitudes. There may be selection going on with regard to those snps which is tied to something besides pigmentation. There's still a lot to learn.

We're also pretty sure that skin pigmentation is a polygenic trait, and these two major snps don't account for all of the variation. If the Cheddar Man sample is really good, someone should run all the snps through Hirisplex, the forensic science predictor for pigmentation. Two snps aren't enough to make a determination.

It's clear however, that selection has been going on, and that it's relatively recent as these things go. Look at this WHG. It's not all that long ago in the history of mankind. Indeed, some of the studies show that it has changed even in the last millennium.

That's certainly the case with lactase persistence or the ability to digest lactose as an adult.

I think people just have to accept, even if it's a little disorienting at first, the fact that this image they had in their minds that we're exactly like our ancestors from ten, fifteen thousand years ago in terms of appearance and even in terms of other body functions may not be not true.

We have survived because we have adapted and adaptation means change.

Sandra Wilde et al is a good paper to read about pigmentation, because she lists a lot of the previous research and authors, and you can take it from there.

Sandra Wilde et al:

"Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in the last 5000 years."

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/4832

See also:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin

Iain Mathiesen et al
"8000 years of natural selection in Europe"

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/03/13/016477.full.pdf


 
Yes, absolutely possible. Moreover, these findings seem not based on a peer-reviewed paper but on a Channel 4 documentary.

Cheddar man may have been no different from other WHG found and analyzed.

I'm still looking for any paper out, but so far I have not found anything.


I agree with Angela but I'll go farther: in France, newspapers and TV as a rule don't understand the matter they are talking about (in human sciences), without any specific intention for the most. In Britain and anglo-saxon world, I fear they had the habits to exaggerate, making "scoops" of every human science new, even the BBC: kind of electroshock everytime it's possible. And some scientists, as Sykes by instance, are specialists of the "scoop". Maybe I go too far, do I?
I rather think this man had a veddoid-like skin at the most and was close physically to his time HG's of West Europe. Concerning the supposed Near-Eastern origin, I'm without clue: N-E origin, yes, but when exactly?
 
Concerning skin pigmentation, I recall some new mutated SNP's have been discovered in SSAfrica which seem responsible for darkening of the skin, what changes the perspective; before the mainstream ones thought the basic modern human skin colour was a very blackish one, now it's no more sure. The farthest in past, the least need to have a determined colour of skin, because of the body hair (look at Champs: they had everykind of it: white with freckles or blackish, but a solid hair protection against sunbeams.
 
I find it fascinating and cool that he had black skin. Im not ashamed to be related to him through my 1/4 Irish ancestry.

BTW I'm sure a lot (but not all) of those who are upset over this are upset bc they're racist and don't like black people.
 
the article does mention the cheddar man 'had “ancestral” versions of all these genes' concerning pigmentation, yet since labrana and loschbour were homozygous derived at rs6119471 thus maybe also the cheddar man; other than that a typical WHG profile, old news; just last year gonzales-fortes et al published several more from iberia and danube/carpathian yet that obv did not reach the broad news; maybe the media will invite experts to explain it all as when ballynahatty/rathlin was published a few years ago;
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-30/dna-solves-mysteries-ancient-ireland
 
There's still a lot to learn. We do know that the Anatolian farmers, and then the EEF, their descendants, by and large, who migrated to Europe, were virtually all derived for SLC24A5, while the WHG were ancestral. A lot of the farmers were also derived for SLC42A5, which is another of the major skin lightening snps in its derived state, while again the WHG were ancestral. The SHG who lived in Scandinavia, a mixture, perhaps, of WHG and EHG, had high proportions of the skin lightening snps, perhaps from the EHG of the eastern periphery of Europe, and blue eyes, from the WHG. The few EHG samples we have so far have the skin lightening genes but were predicted to have mostly been brown haired and brown eyed, like most of the farmers.
We know some of this is probably tied to selection based on latitude and the availability of Vitamin D from sunshine. World wide, the further you get from the equator the less "dark" your skin, generally speaking, although there are exceptions. The thinking is that perhaps at higher latitudes selection favors lighter skin so you can get more Vitamin D. One of the latest papers shows that the SHG over time had more of the skin lightening snps than the EHG from whom they draw part of their ancestry, and they live very far north indeed, and so the researchers posit that selection was going on.
Other researchers in the past had also posited that perhaps the Mesolithic WHG who tended to live mostly sedentary lives around bodies of water and got a lot of their calories from fish high in Vitamin D might have been less subject to pressure to "lighten up". The EHG may have had a different diet being so far from the sea. Farmers, who didn't consume very much fish at all, and mostly grains with no Vitamin D, might have been targeted strongly by selection for fair skin.
Where the derived mutations first took place, in which group, I don't know, but there was a suggestion in one of the papers that it might have been on a hunter-gatherer background. Perhaps it happened in the Middle East among the UHG in Anatolia and spread outward from there. I don't know. I don't know that it's so important. I also don't know exactly how and why the selection works for fair skin in more northern latitudes. There may be selection going on with regard to those snps which is tied to something besides pigmentation. There's still a lot to learn.
We're also pretty sure that skin pigmentation is a polygenic trait, and these two major snps don't account for all of the variation. If the Cheddar Man sample is really good, someone should run all the snps through Hirisplex, the forensic science predictor for pigmentation. Two snps aren't enough to make a determination.
It's clear however, that selection has been going on, and that it's relatively recent as these things go. Look at this WHG. It's not all that long ago in the history of mankind. Indeed, some of the studies show that it has changed even in the last millennium.
That's certainly the case with lactase persistence or the ability to digest lactose as an adult.
I think people just have to accept, even if it's a little disorienting at first, the fact that this image they had in their minds that we're exactly like our ancestors from ten, fifteen thousand years ago in terms of appearance and even in terms of other body functions may not be not true.
We have survived because we have adapted and adaptation means change.
Sandra Wilde et al is a good paper to read about pigmentation, because she lists a lot of the previous research and authors, and you can take it from there.
Sandra Wilde et al:
"Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in the last 5000 years."
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/4832
See also:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin
Iain Mathiesen et al
"8000 years of natural selection in Europe"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/03/13/016477.full.pdf
Thanks so much Angela for your insights!
 
An insightful remark from Razib Khan https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/02/06/the-genome-of-cheddar-man-is-about-to-be-published/

East Asians, for example, lack both the derived variants of SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 common in Europeans but are often quite light-skinned. A deeper analysis of the pigmentation architecture of WHG might lead us to conclude that they were an olive or light brown-skinned people. This is my suspicion because modern Arctic peoples are neither pale white nor dark brown, but of various shades of olive.
 

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