A wave from Europe sails across the Atlantic several thousand years before. They multiply and fill up the entire continent. Sorry about the frequent editing.
“European” Native Americans
- Thread starter Siberian Tiger
- Start date
It's my opinion that vessels from Notwestern Europe, trading vessels from the Med and ships from North Africa have gotten blown out into the Atlantic for centuries long before Chris got Lizzie to pawn the crown jewels. Most would of been sunk. But some would have to of been blown and been carried by the currents to make land fall. Of those would've been screwed by the dead. Or the mostly dead. And of the mostly dead some of course would of survived. To make no difference what so ever to the gene pool. To have significant people's of European descent is going to require a large enough population to start with. Which requires either a group that attempts to migrate enmass. And to do that they have to have some idea of where they are going. Which implies that people have at some point made a return voyage.
Deleted member 114175
This is more of a tangent, but what if we create a spinoff of Norse religion that encourages people to make a voyage of no return to the west -- be it a form of "death by trial" replacing death in battle and an ascension to Folksvangr; an optional and self-chosen form of senicide (which was apocryphal among the Norse but did exist rarely among the Inuit); or an honorable form of exile or suicide. Whether it's endless ocean or Vinland is irrelevant because either way it's seen as passage to another afterlife-like realm.
In the last few years, genetic analysis techniques have advanced to the point that we can now sequence some pretty old human remains. (We have a thread on it
And we know a lot about which genes influence skin colour, even if we don't know everything.And what we've found is that the phenotype we think of as "Caucasian" was non-existent that far back. Its pretty young. In general, phenotype is pretty plastic and change a lot. The lightening that led to white skin started in Siberia maybe 12 - 14 000 years back as far as we can tell (we are operating from a very small number of samples that far back though). It made its way to Europe by way of Scandinavia and what is now the steppes down towards the Black Sea. The present day European population appearance formed from the mixture of these people, the inventors of agriculture (who would have looked very, very similar to unmixed Sardinians, especially from the more mountainous areas) and the original hunter-gatherer population of Europe.
The hunter-gatherer population of western Europe, often abbreviated to WHG, were the ones that would have been in the west of Europe 17 000 years ago. They were basically black, but with blue eyes. Possibly they looked similar to Andamanese, or the "Negrito" (wish there was a better name) population of Southeast Asia that used to be far more widespread.
Why? Look at indigenous California where groups which clearly descended from different migration waves coexisted alongside each other, or in some cases even took on each other's phenotype.
The Athabaskan-speaking peoples of California and Oregon (i.e. the Tolowa), who blend with their neighbors (i.e. the Yurok), who in turn blend with them. I have seen in some accounts of various Californian Indians which follow Alfred Kroeber's descriptions that in California (and Baja California) there's several phenotypes of natives, one of which is associated with people who speak "Hokan" languages (which although not a valid linguistic grouping, all do seem to be very old and established), and another of which speak various other languages (Penutian, Athabaskan, etc.). The Pacific Coast Athabaskans are a very nice example, since they are very distinct linguistically yet seemlessly blended into the societies of various other groups, and the tradition of intermarriage between (relatively) distant villages working to eliminate any racial distinction in one way or the other. The Athabaskans arrived in that part of the country maybe 2-3,000 years ago at most.
Along with the Haida, Inuit/Aleuts, and Athabaskan people in general, they are decisive evidence that the migration route to the Americas continued to be used, and if in isolation with northeast Asia, likely still would have. Maybe if ASB isolated the Russian Far East from the rest of the world, in time, many local groups there would have migrated to the Americans in time. They certainly have a similar culture/spiritual beliefs. So yeah, "white" people would be just one of many groups there. If we're imagining a group speaking a language relative to Basque or Circassian or some other pre-Indo-European language, then they could easily end up looking like a more typical "Indian" in terms of appearance (and the depth of time would likely prevent any link to an Old World language from being established anyway).
Maybe we can make the Bering strait migration unsuccessful. Using this timeline, European hunter gathers sail across the Atlantic and find an uninhabited continent 7000-12000 years ago.In the last few years, genetic analysis techniques have advanced to the point that we can now sequence some pretty old human remains. (We have a thread on it
And what we've found is that the phenotype we think of as "Caucasian" was non-existent that far back. Its pretty young. In general, phenotype is pretty plastic and change a lot. The lightening that led to white skin started in Siberia maybe 12 - 14 000 years back as far as we can tell (we are operating from a very small number of samples that far back though). It made its way to Europe by way of Scandinavia and what is now the steppes down towards the Black Sea. The present day European population appearance formed from the mixture of these people, the inventors of agriculture (who would have looked very, very similar to unmixed Sardinians, especially from the more mountainous areas) and the original hunter-gatherer population of Europe.
The hunter-gatherer population of western Europe, often abbreviated to WHG, were the ones that would have been in the west of Europe 17 000 years ago. They were basically black, but with blue eyes. Possibly they looked similar to Andamanese, or the "Negrito" (wish there was a better name) population of Southeast Asia that used to be far more widespread.
trajen777
Banned
White Caucasian mummies from 4000 years ago could have been a tribe that could have moved across (their ancestors )
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristi...om-all-over-eurasia-dna-reveals/#1f478e6d3e2c
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristi...om-all-over-eurasia-dna-reveals/#1f478e6d3e2c
Like the aptly named metalinvader665 points out, there has been a number of migrations. We can also add the Inuit and whatever Australasian people echoes in the genes of Amazonian Indians (only). I suspect a migration finding an empty continent would have had a much easier time of it too.
As an alternative, if some of the Early European Farmers made it across, maybe 4000 BC from Spain, or 3500 BC from Britain, you'd get much of the same effect. They'd look much like todays Sardinians.
Farming at the time moved at a speed of 1 km/year approximately. The farmers much larger population densities displaced or overwhelmed the Europeans of the time, with some interbreeding. Probably go the same way in North America. The farmers would be putting California under the plow during the Bronze Age.
People on the Pacific coast would look more Indian that the Atlantic populations.
As a bonus, these were the Megalith builders of western Europe, so expect monuments.
Recent test reveal that the source peoples for these guys, the Andronovo and Afranasievo cultures were pretty much indistinguishable from the Irish at the time.
Last edited:
Optical_Illusion
Banned
On the ancient dna questions, my understanding is that no one really knows what skin colour the ancients in Europe would have had.
Tweet on the subject from a guy (Iain Mathieson) who studies ancient dna and basically wrote most of the ancient dna papers on the possibility of working out skin phenotype in ancient individuals - https://twitter.com/mathiesoniain/status/1098248819882577920. February 2019 so should be pretty cutting edge!
"I would say that basically it is impossible to predict skin pigmentation of these populations with any degree of confidence, partly because they likely had variants that are not common today, and partly because there is too much epistasis."
So, while the genetic variants today linked to light skin are not present, the actual ancient individuals could well have been fair or dark, we don't really know. The correlation between latitude and skin color suggests evolution towards the light side is favoured across North Eurasia (including Europe), but again, it may not have been like that.
It's easier to know what their face shape was like, since we actually have hard skeletons. The recent Cheddar Man reconstruction is probably a good reference, if you adjust for us not really knowing what the skin color is like.
Tweet on the subject from a guy (Iain Mathieson) who studies ancient dna and basically wrote most of the ancient dna papers on the possibility of working out skin phenotype in ancient individuals - https://twitter.com/mathiesoniain/status/1098248819882577920. February 2019 so should be pretty cutting edge!
"I would say that basically it is impossible to predict skin pigmentation of these populations with any degree of confidence, partly because they likely had variants that are not common today, and partly because there is too much epistasis."
So, while the genetic variants today linked to light skin are not present, the actual ancient individuals could well have been fair or dark, we don't really know. The correlation between latitude and skin color suggests evolution towards the light side is favoured across North Eurasia (including Europe), but again, it may not have been like that.
It's easier to know what their face shape was like, since we actually have hard skeletons. The recent Cheddar Man reconstruction is probably a good reference, if you adjust for us not really knowing what the skin color is like.
Paleolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe were not like modern Euros, but neither like Andamanese-their art suggests, that they had straight hair and their skintone rather was not 'Andanamese' so far north. Even in Sub-Saharan Africa, among people, whose ancestors never left the continent, skin tone vary greatly. Khoisan/San people (who live closer to equator than paleolithic Euros) for example had light brown skin, so likely 'Paleoeuros' looked similar to them. I imagine them to resemble Nivkh people of Sakhalin and Amur valley in skintone (they were traditionally hunter-gatherers, somethimes called 'fish people'-they even made clothes from fish skins)-brown skinned people living around 50 degrees north of Equator.In the last few years, genetic analysis techniques have advanced to the point that we can now sequence some pretty old human remains. (We have a thread on it
And what we've found is that the phenotype we think of as "Caucasian" was non-existent that far back. Its pretty young. In general, phenotype is pretty plastic and change a lot. The lightening that led to white skin started in Siberia maybe 12 - 14 000 years back as far as we can tell (we are operating from a very small number of samples that far back though). It made its way to Europe by way of Scandinavia and what is now the steppes down towards the Black Sea. The present day European population appearance formed from the mixture of these people, the inventors of agriculture (who would have looked very, very similar to unmixed Sardinians, especially from the more mountainous areas) and the original hunter-gatherer population of Europe.
The hunter-gatherer population of western Europe, often abbreviated to WHG, were the ones that would have been in the west of Europe 17 000 years ago. They were basically black, but with blue eyes. Possibly they looked similar to Andamanese, or the "Negrito" (wish there was a better name) population of Southeast Asia that used to be far more widespread.
Well, he is entitled to his opinion, but as his colleagues in that very thread do not agree this is a minority opinion. Possibly a minority of one. The fact is, we know quite a bit about which genes influence and shape skin color. (Its important in forensics for example). When we examine the remains of WHG individuals we find none of the genes driving light skin. We do find the varieties causing dark skin. Because DNA deteriorates and we can't always recover every gene, off the top of my head, I believe we haven't mapped every location that we know to strongly influence skin pigmentation in the WHG. But last I looked we had mapped about 7 out of 8. All for dark skin. It is possible that the last one would be a light skin one, but 7/8 is still well inside the range normally considered "Black".
That is highly, highly unlikely. Yes, the genes for light skin are not present. The variants for dark skin are. We find these varieties in a wide range of African peoples of great genetic diversity. They have a range of dark skin. We find them in Australian aborigines. Where they cause dark skin. We find them in a number of populations across Asia such as the Sentinelese. Where they cause dark skin. I am not aware of any epistasis that cause any of the people with these genes to not have dark skin. (Except albinism, vitiigo etc, which would be subject to incredibly strong negative selection if it was population-wide)
The evidence we have is that they were within the current African range for skin color. Possibly on the lighter side of the range, but possibly not. Unless we postulate some previously unknown genes that have since been lost and just happened to completely alter this. Occams razor strongly favors the notion that they were black, just like everyone else with those skin pigmentation genes.
True enough. It does, however seem to have been very fitful evolution. I have my own ideas about why, but that is speculation only. However, if you are going to spend months of each year wandering on snowfields at Mediterranean UV radiation there are very strong biological reasons for not dropping your UV protection.
They were not precisely like the Andamanese, no. Blue eyes and straight hair for one thing. Thing is, the group of peoples across South Asia with dark skin is very old, and they are not in fact related to each other to any great degree. But in terms of visual appearance, the WHG would cluster closer to the Andamanese, Aboriginal Australian than current Europeans I believe.
But I'd expect them to look different from the Nivkh, which would probably pull closer to a cluster of EHGs (Eastern Hunter-Gatherers). They did have genes for light skin. I am less sure about that though. There was a big paper on Siberian genetics recently but I've not properly read it.
Optical_Illusion
Banned
Well, Iain Mathieson is kind of a big deal in this area, I would be inclined to back his point of view; I wouldn't be too surprised if the field does switch to mostly backing his point of view in time. When we talk about how we find "none of the genes driving light skin" we mean that we find none of the genes driving light skin in recent West Eurasian people and of course East Asian people also lack these variants (but have light skin).
There are likely other solutions for light skin that we don't understand yet, and there's still quite a bit of missing unexplained heritability of skin phenotype even within West Eurasian populations - when Mathieson says that there are variants that are likely to have been lost, he's saying this from a point of view of being a Harvard geneticist at the cutting edge of ancient dna and phenotype prediction, and that probably carries a bit more weight than you or I. Note Lazaridis's objections are "But a Eur. Mesolithic ind. with present-day light-skin mutations from a high latit. would most likely also be light-skinned, no?" is not a dismissal of variants being present that we don't know about, rather that the variants we do know about should lead to the same outcome. Lazaridis also says "WHG may have had unknown skin-lightening alleles; but it'd be strange if light skin remained a stable phenotype with a switch of the underlying genes.", but of course, that's not particularly so as it would've been exactly the case if say present day Europeans replaced an unrelated East Asian related Siberian population with light skin.
(Also, note in defence of epistasis does matter as well - recent paper on the SLC24A5 variant last year that seems important in West Eurasians finds it is of much lower effect size in Khoi San.)
(Note, for another example of not being an opinion of 1, see retweet and comment https://twitter.com/pontus_skoglund/status/1098270558247104512, another big deal in ancient dna. Then another from Brenna Henn, author of the most massive genetic pigmentation study on African groups, by way of BBC science reporter Adam Rutherford - https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/932644868807118848 - "stop saying you can predict skin colour from ancient DNA. You can’t." ).
(Even within trying to naively apply existing models, there is significant variance implied on skin colour for different WHG individuals - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/267443v1 - "We also analysed two previously-published WHGs, and find potential temporal and/or geographical variation in pigmentation characteristics. Loschbour from Luxembourg is ~2000 years younger than Cheddar Man, and is predicted to have had intermediate skin pigmentation. Furthermore, the Loschbour individual most likely had blue/green eyes. In contrast, La Braña from northern Spain who is slightly later than Loschbour is predicted to have had dark to dark to black skin and hazel/green eye colour. Both La Braña and Loschbour were predicted to have had black, possibly dark brown hair. These results imply that quite different skin pigmentation levels coexisted in WHGs at least by around 6000 BC.")
Last edited:
If snow is the factor, blue eyes makes no sense-during snowy winter people generally are well covered, except for face (thus eyes also). Brown eyed Inuits still used googles to reduce amount of sunlight reflected by snow entering their eyes . So light eyes in such environment makes less sense than light skin.
Also, there are snowy places today with higher UV radiation levels than Mediterranean (similar lattitude but higher elevation above sea level) in mountains and plateaus of Central Asia, and these are not inhabited by people with Andanamese skin tone.
Last edited:
<Dashing this off at work, get to Optical_Illusion when I got a bit more of a breather>
You misunderstand. While we have pretty good indications that there is a strong selective pressure for blue eyes the further north you go, we don't know the nature of the pressure. We can just observe the effects. The blue eyes in my post refer to the fact that the WHGs had blue eyes and this was one of the traits that distinguished them from other peoples in this hypothetical appearance cluster.
What I meant was that snow reflects UV radiation. And the amount of UV you get on a snow field can be quite enough to burn. I live at 70 degrees north and its getting close to Easter, don't burn is on the radio quite a bit now. Even at these latitudes. If you have Mediterranean levels of infalling radiation getting reflected, keeping any biological protection you came with makes a lot of sense.
As regards the Himalayas, the current population split off from the Han Chinese about 6000 years ago, while the Himalayan plateau has had a human presence for about 30 000 years. Possibly intermittently I expect. But the point is, we came to Ice Age Europe tens of thousands of years ago, much closer to the Out-Of-Africa dispersal, and stayed there for tens of thousands of years. Tibetans are a people that arrived while the current phenotypes were developing. (It is quite possible that the previous inhabitants were dark-skinned like much of South Asia seems to have been. Equally well, it could have been settled from the north by lighter, EHG-related peoples. Or both, thirty thousand years is a lot of time for populations to flow back and forth.
But a people needs to have lived in todays snowy places for quite a few thousand years before you'd expect an evolutionary visible response. Or coming in with a potential coverage in place,
UV reflected by snow could damage eyes (snow blindness) and light eyes are more prone to damage than dark ones. So why blue eyes?
Also, Tibet is one thing, but Hokkaido, northern Honsiu, Korea are also snowy places located in Mediterranean lattitudes (Mediterranean Europe is not that far south, in places not affected by Golfstrom at the same lattitudes temperatures are much lower, especially in winter). Native Americans also are not Andamanese-like, but their ancestors crossed Asia during Ice Age.
That is one thing. Another is the fact, that Neanderthals (who occupied Europe for much o time than AMH and were cold adapted people) are known to have red/ blond hair.
We don't find the East Asian skin colour genes in WHGs either. What we find are varieties of the skin influencing genes that are associated with dark skin across todays population varieties.
Which actually is what I am saying. We do know that there were variants for dark skin present, we should not assume totally speculative evidence countering that. To me, Lazaridis is also pointing out the essential hypocrisy in immediately assuming that the presence of known skin-lightening variants means individuals were European-style white while the presence of known skin darkening variants means there must have been some unknown other factor present lightening the skin.
But its not a population replacement, it is a mixing. And a stable phenotype with a replacement of the dirving genes is the opposite of how we'd expect things to go.
Well that is precisely what we'd expect, isn't it? We have more light-skinned Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) and people from the Caucasus migrating in and mixing with the WHG, and we find that specimens further to the east and more recent in time end up lighter. And once again, we can't really argue that the presence of intermediate and lighter varieties mean they were intermediate or light while maintaining that the presence of darker varieties means we cannot predict their pigmentation.
And -appeal to authority fallacy. I do admit that Mathieson knows far more about the subject than me. My degree was decades in the past, and I did not do much relevant work in similar fields after graduation. I have started skipping the methods sections of papers, and the statistics programs they have available these days are beyond me. I am pretty much willing to swallow any adequate argument Mathieson makes as long as it is not totally unbelievable. Which is where the problem lies, as the argument is not adequate and the statement not really believable.
It is like you graduated from computing a few decades ago and read about a respected computer expert sating "We should not expect that we will be able to build a computer with a larger single-memory than 160 Terabytes because there may be issues we've never seen before and which we have no indication may exist, that will make it impossible" It would raise eyebrows.
The thing is, arguing that we cannot assume that people were black just because they have most of the gene varieties that lead to black skin in all the rest of the populations of the world, because there may have been genes affecting that that we've never seen and vanished before we could, and do not show up anywhere else -that argument is weak. It would be weak if God made it. And that is before we take into consideration that as Lazaridis points out, it is not advanced when we find light skin associated genes in a population. Now this is a very controversial area, and its drawn the ire of some very extroverted people with an emotional investment in their ancestral skin varieties. IfyouknowthesortImean. And to me this "Well we can't really know actually because, uh, reasons" feels far more like an attempt to calm the waters than anything else.
There are already tools developed to automate the process of determining pigmentation from samples, which were developed for forensics.
We don't know. We know that a strong north-south cline have persisted through thousands of years of population movement, indicating very heavy selection. But not why.
The blonde bit is new to me? I do know of the red hair one (MC1R ottomh) but it seems mostly associated with freckling in terms of pigmentation. As far as North Asians go, it would generally be biologically cheaper to retain a melanistic trait than to redevelop it.I think a better argument would be that Siberia towards the end of the Ice Age is where we see the first serious increases in the European type light pigmentation genes.
A European-settled New World? You probably would have to butterfly away the Asian migrations across the Bering Strait land bridge. The New World remains devoid of humans until the times of the Roman Empire.
Roman times. Christians were persecuted, "fed to the lions," so to speak. Suppose people are rounded up for exile. They are cast off the Iberian coast, with provisions that border on ASB, never to return. Storms and currents bring them to the West Indies where they establish settlements. Over centuries, the migrate to North and South America.
Viking times. Eleventh century expeditions by the Viking "island hoppers" encounter no hostile natives, so they migrate southward along the American Atlantic coast, establishing permanent settlements. Assume their migrations do not make it into the European knowledge base, as in OTL.
The two European groups eventually meet, and the populations along the Atlantic coast will be distinctly European.
Columbus and the wave of later explorers find a European New World. Will there be racial conflicts? Yes, just as Irish, Italian, Polish and Semitic people were picked on in OTL. Will there be religious conflicts? Yes, because the Christianity from Roman times, assuming it survives intact, will have different characteristics from that of the Spanish missionaries.
We must understand that before WW2 and the Holocaust, the term "race" was often applied to different ethnic groups within a given "racial stock" of people. So, there would be conflicts no matter where the inhabitants of the New World came from. One upside of my simplistic scenario is that Americans would be closer to Europeans in terms of technology. They may have advanced farther if the Dark Ages were butterflied away.
Roman times. Christians were persecuted, "fed to the lions," so to speak. Suppose people are rounded up for exile. They are cast off the Iberian coast, with provisions that border on ASB, never to return. Storms and currents bring them to the West Indies where they establish settlements. Over centuries, the migrate to North and South America.
Viking times. Eleventh century expeditions by the Viking "island hoppers" encounter no hostile natives, so they migrate southward along the American Atlantic coast, establishing permanent settlements. Assume their migrations do not make it into the European knowledge base, as in OTL.
The two European groups eventually meet, and the populations along the Atlantic coast will be distinctly European.
Columbus and the wave of later explorers find a European New World. Will there be racial conflicts? Yes, just as Irish, Italian, Polish and Semitic people were picked on in OTL. Will there be religious conflicts? Yes, because the Christianity from Roman times, assuming it survives intact, will have different characteristics from that of the Spanish missionaries.
We must understand that before WW2 and the Holocaust, the term "race" was often applied to different ethnic groups within a given "racial stock" of people. So, there would be conflicts no matter where the inhabitants of the New World came from. One upside of my simplistic scenario is that Americans would be closer to Europeans in terms of technology. They may have advanced farther if the Dark Ages were butterflied away.
You're right, white supremacy totally isn't a problem today. That murderous rampage in Christchurch where an alt-right incel livestreamed himself killing 50 people? Didn't happen, wasn't a problem. Dylann Roof's massacre, the synagogue shooting, illegal immigrant kids being put into concentration camps, the deadly riots in Charleston...you're right, none of these things are "issues in our time". Nothing to see there, racism doesn't exist anymore, we totally aren't seeing an upswing in incels and nazis committing more and more acts of mass violence.
And miss me with that nonsense about how the HBD people aren't actually racist, they just believe that "white people evolved differently". There's an enormous overlap between the HBD crowd and the vermin I described in my paragraph. HBD is an attempt to legitimize racism under the smokescreen of pseudoscience. You can't possibly believe that people like Jared Taylor or Richard Spencer aren't actually white supremacists, just that "they believe white people evolved differently."
No, race is more or less completely imaginary. Both of these people are technically "black":
But in terms of phenotype, religion, culture, etc they may so little in common that group labels like "Black" or even "East African" are essentially meaningless.
Same with these two people, who are both Indian:
They're both Tamil from the south of India, same city, same genetics, but they look completely different from each other. The woman could probably pass for a local in most of Southern Europe. Are her and the guy (her husband) "different races"?
There do exist relatively homogenous genetic groups, but the grey areas between different "races" are so enormous and populous that the entire concept becomes completely meaningless.