Fiach

One of the fascinating pieces of evidence from genetics is the discovery that all modern Europeans descended from a rather small band of migrating Sub-Saharan Africans. We have no trace of Neanderthal genes.

Africa has much genetic diversity. But about 25,000 years ago some African Black people from the Nigeria/Cameroons area migrated north crossing into Europe. They were a small group of perhaps a few hundred or fewer people. But they passed on that Nigerian genetics to every European and White American today.
In the 25,000 years they were still a small group but then they expanded and took over Europe. There were surprisingly only a few genetic changes needed to make White skinned, Blue Eyed, short, stocky men/women, with long narrow noses, from taller, long limbed, black skinned, broad nosed people.

The "Cro-Magnon" people were mostly 6 feet or taller. Today the average European is 5 foot 9 inches. When our Black African ancestors crossed into colder, less sunny Europe with another Ice Age soon to come they had to adapt.

They developed whiter skin since melanin was unnecessary to protect against the northern sunlight. Those who developed long narrow noses were better able to warm the cold tundra air they breathed. To conserve body heat, they developed shorter legs and squat compact bodies. Large everted lips easily developed frostbite, being mucosal lining not tough dry skin. So they developed narrower mouths with very thin lips or no lips at all.

The Blue eye was proposed to be a protective reflector for the eyes in bright snowy landscapes. So more Blue eyed types were found in the Northern European areas, where long snowy winters were common. Fewer were needed in warmer Mediterranean basin areas.

This will come as a shock to white racists here in America, as well as the UK and Germany. We are "Negroes" who lost our pigmentation and developed cold adaptive features in very recent times.

We, White People, are so genetically close to Nigerians to not qualify as separate races. We are much more distantly related to Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, and Aboriginal Australians.

My message to groups like Aryan Nations is this. Don't disparage African Americans because you are African Americans as well.

Fiach

RufusAtticus

Source please.

cricket

No crows please; it's "Cro-Magnon" and I don't believe they were "mostly 6 feet or taller."

Show me.

Fiach

I fixed the Crow to Cro typo. Thanks for letting me know. I got the idea of the height from a telly special about the displacement of the Neandertals by the Cro-Magnons. It did say that they were tall people, like their near cousins in Africa. I saw skeletons last time I was in Paris, but I really didn't notice anything unusual about their height. They appeared roughly as tall as I am (5' 11"). But all I can say is that they were taller than the Neandertals by as much as 8 inches to a foot. Many apparently developed shorter stockier body forms adapting to the colder northern climate. So that the original Homo sapiens Europeans were taller than todays people is in keeping with the migration to a colder climate.

Fiach

cricket

Some Cro-Magnon skeletons are over six feet tall, but my understanding is that the average male was less than 5'10". Sorry to nitpick; trying to distract myself from death and destruction in Iraq.

Fiach

My main source or initial source was at the week long seminar in Edinburgh, UK a year and a half ago. It was presented that the genetic evidence showed that 7 genetic groups crossed to Europe 25,000 years ago, with my gene markers for the Tara group confined to the British Isles (no surprise). There is a great book called the "Seven Daughters of Eve" (forgot the author) that goes into this well for non-chemists.

You could try these sites:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scien...ers000420.html

http://www.cyndislist.com/dna.htm

http://www.ramsdale.org/adam.htm

Fiach
PS: It wasn't my work which was mainly to do with Neurological disease genes and markers.

theyeti

We don't know this. All we know is that we don't currently have any Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. But mitochondrial DNA is only passed on through the direct female line, so it's still possible that one or more male Neanderthals was our ancestor. It's also possible that a female Neanderthal was our ancestor, but did not pass on any mitchondrial DNA (for example, if she only gave birth to sons, or if any daughters she had only gave birth to sons, and so on). It's very possible that we have nuclear DNA that came from Neanderthals. It's quite a controversy.

theyeti

ps418

I'd be careful not to generalize from a small bit of data. What genetic data are you referring to? mtDNA, Y-DNA, autosomal DNA, protein polymorphisms, neutral elements like microsattellites? This matters a great deal. And, what measure of genetic distance are you referring to? An Fst value? If so, what threshold value for "seperate race" that you are assuming? Whatever value you choose is arbitrary, but you should specify it anyway.


At any rate, the claim does not appear to be correct, as a generalization, especially the strong claim that "white people" (northern Europeans) are "much more" closely related to Nigerians than to Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and Aboriginal Australian populations. Most of the papers I've read have Europeans more closely related to East Asians than to sub-Saharan Africans.

You probably have Calliva-Sforza's dataset in mind, which is based only on the population genetic data available before 1986, and yielded the following genetic distances (from European English):

Here the east African sample does show less genetic distance from Europeans than does the Chinese, Japanese, or Australian Aborigine sample, while all other African populations show greater distance. (from Sforza, 1994, p. 76).

However, by 1989, the data already showed that the east African values reported by Sforza were not terribly robust. Nei and Livshits (1989) used far more loci - 186- and showed that Europeans (a british sample) were more closely related to Asians (Japanese sample) than to sub-Saharans Africans (Nigerian and Cameroonian sample). This pattern has since been confirmed repeatedly, using various methods and much larger datasets. Europeans are in general much more genetically similar to east Asians than to any African population. If anyone is aware of contrary evidence, please let me know. For instance, consider genetic distances computed from Alu insertion frequencies and restriction site polymorphisms (data from Watkins, et al., 2001):

Distance from Averaged European to:

Distance from North European to various Asian groups:

Distance from Northern European to various African groups:



Nei, M., and Livshits, G., 1989. Genetic relationships of European, Asians, and Africans and the origin of modern Homo sapiens. Human Heriditary, 39, pp. 276-281.

Sforza, L., 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton University Press.

Watkins, et al., 2001. Patterns of Ancestral Human Diversity: An Analysis of Alu-Insertion and Restriction-Site Polymorphisms. American Journal Human Genetics, 68, pp. pp. 738-752

Patrick

Fiach

All we know on the mitochondrial DNA studies is that essentially all modern europeans are descened from one of 7 women who lived in Western asia/Middle East having gotten there by way of Africa to Arabia. We have no evidence of Neanderthal inheritance.

That doesn't rule out Neanderthal or Erectus interbreeding but offers no evidence either. Genetic comparison studies show the strong relationship to certain Black Africans that originated way down south on the southwestern coast of South Africa. So in my analysis of the data, we are definitly descended from African immigrants moving out of Africa approximately 25 years ago and there were 7 women who passed on Maternal DNA to separate groups. Mine is from Tara and Tara's descendents were the first to cross Europe. They were then pushed by new comers to the far fringes of Europe, since nearly all of us of Tara lineage are from the British Isles.

I don't have an opinion one way or another on Neanderthal relationship. We are definitely related to Neanderthals, but the debate is whether that common kinship is 250,000 or 25,000 years ago. The genetic information from Oxford suggests that they are more distant from us.

Fiach

theyeti

The opperative word here is "women". We do get about half of our DNA from men too.

And I think you're taking the "mitochondrial Eve" thing way too literally. It does not mean that seven women, and only seven women, contributed to the gene pool of modern Europeans. It just means that if you follow direct female-female lineages backwards, they will all converge on no more than seven starting points. But those seven women had to have mates, and their female children and grandchildren also had to have mates. It is almost certain that more than seven females contributed to the gene pools of modern Europeans. For example, let's say "Tara" (the guy who named them should be killed IMO) had a husband. The husband obviously had a mother. That mother, even though she might only be distantly related to Tara, contributed 1/4 of the nuclear DNA to Tara's offspring, including of course the females who themselves are our ancestors. A good portion of that nuclear DNA could still persist down to the present day, and it wouldn't have come from Tara, it would have come from her mother-in-law to whom she is not related. We'd have no idea by looking at the mitochondrial DNA.

I know that there really isn't any evidence that Neanderthals (or erectus) have contributed to our gene pool, but my point is simply that there isn't conclusive evidence against either. We just have insufficient data at this point. The only thing we can say for sure is that our current mitochondrial DNA does not come from Neanderthals (or at least from the ones we've sequenced, but we can assume that there is relatively little diversity there). The nuclear genome on the other hand, which is far more phenotypically important, may very well contain sequences that came from Neanderthals. I don't know if we do, but I'm just pointing out that this is still a hotly debated subject among human geneticists.

theyeti