Where do 'White People' come from? MN Historians, Researchers, Anthropologists, please come in.

[CantStayAsleep]

Forgive me, this may be a simple question. It's 4am, can't sleep and a million things have already raced through my mind. I need an answer to this and Google is flooding me with tons of information/articles that aren't getting down to the bottom line. Atleast I can't find the bottom line myself. So over to you MNers. Help me when you're up and can be arsed. Thanks

If Black people = African descent (as many forms state and a lot of people have said), I take this to mean Black people have African ancestry, regardless if it's dating 1 generation or 400 generations ago. So what is white descent? Where have White people descended from?

If being white in northern climates gives you such a genetic advantage that darker skinned people literally died out to be replaced by lighter skinned people - how do black people survive to produce offspring in northern climates today?

An interesting fact about Multiple Sclerosis is that it's rarer the closer you get to the equator. However if someone is born around the equator and moves to live in a more northern climate (e.g. the UK) when an infant, then their chances of developing MS pretty much rise to the same as if you'd been born in the UK.

Just for the mix ...

Wow, missed completely the sickle cell bit. But yes that's a really nice example of recessive genes persisting. It is commonly thought that the higher incidence in malaria areas is because of the advantage it confers, and I've never heard someone put forward the theory that it was just chance and due to historic geographical isolation.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by your theory as it's evolved in multiple places, including arabian penninsula, the population of which which has traditionally been quite mobile. Also your justification in terms of levels of carriers in the population and the negative impact of SCA has been mathematically modelled and does add up for the current observed levels.

@Kendodd Aborigional Australians are still a bit of an amazing mystery, but thanks to the mitichondrial and y- chromosome analysis people have discussed earlier in the thread we're pretty confident of the route taken across polynesia in the more recent indigenous migrations. You're not alone in the South America theory though, it was such a heated debate in the 1940s that a guy called Thor Heyerdahl built a boat called the Kon Tiki using materials and skills from before european colonisation and sailed/drifted it to Easter Island to prove it could be done. People still broadly ignored him though because of linguistic, cultural and archaeological features pointing towards island colonisation coming from asia.

@Pbur it's not just about producing offspring it's about them surviving long enough to breed. So over time light skin is selected for as disease removes more people with vitamin d deficiency from the population (vit d plays an important role in the responsiveness of our immune system). Obviously you could boost your vitamin d levels by eating certain foods and today you can just take a supplement.

Vitamin D deficiency is a little bit of an issue in people of colour ( www.gov.uk/guidance/vitamin-d-deficiency-migrant-health-guide ) but the evolution of light skin was far more complex than that because of lifestyle changes, evolutionary time scales and what actually affects fitness. Plus of course the role of genetic drift.

Basically you can live where you want now because no one is going to die of vit d deficiency before they have babies nowadays. Broken bones don't equal no mammoth for tea any more and so skin colour wouldn't have a big impact on survival. It's like the sheer number of people who used to die from toothache. No longer a pressure driving selection.

My mum had MS. I read somewhere that they thought it might be due to mums vit d in early pregnancy. Being a late spring baby I immediately got even more paranoid every time I had pins and needles.

My mum had MS. I read somewhere that they thought it might be due to mums vit d in early pregnancy.

Sorry for your DM.

There are hints of a genetic involvement (there's a 2:1 female:male ratio of sufferers). Or a virus.

Just to jump in on a vit D tangent, is everyone taking it at the moment? Theres growing evidence that it helps protect against covid.

There is a theory (unproven I hasten to add) that one reason (and one of many contributory factors) as to why ethnic minorities have been so hard hit by COVID in the U.K. could be due to a Vit D deficiency.

A lot more research needs to be done on that one, but it is a known fact that no one living above a certain latitude will get sufficient Vit D from sunlight alone during the northern hemisphere winter so it is highly likely that there is a large percentage of U.K. the population, whatever their skin tone, will be deficient.

I am very pale skinned with red hair. I have had my DNA done and it showed I was 100% European.
I have lots of Celtic, welsh and Nordic DNA with 2% Italian.

Just to add something else to the mix that others might not have thought of. According to the most ancient texts human civilisation first travelled east from Africa (not north / west) - so the first ‘white people’ were probably middle eastern (eg Turkey / mesopotamia) or where modern day India/Pakistan/Afghanistan is. In ancient times much of this region was under a rainforest.

@Buttybach

I am very pale skinned with red hair. I have had my DNA done and it showed I was 100% European. I have lots of Celtic, welsh and Nordic DNA with 2% Italian.

My cousin is also very pale skinned with red hair and blue eyes. Her ancestry is 100% Afghanistan. She is of one of the ancient tribes who all developed red hair and blue eyes due to marrying only among their kin.

I also know someone of Indian royal descent whose entire caste is light skinned, blonde haired and blue eyed. They dye their hair to appear more Indian. He was the only one to marry out of caste and his kids still look the same because presumably his wife has recessive genes too.

Apols if all this was said, I find it interesting & maybe not yet said.

My vague understanding is that both modern 'white' skin & 'red' hair suddenly appeared in peoples in rough area of the Caucus Mountains, maybe 7000-10k years ago. The lighter skin gave a lot of advantages for vitamin D processing at higher latittudes so quickly was very successful - but is linked to more cancers in very sunny places so not suitable in those places. There are red hair people in China, too, and a federal area of Russia where 1/3 people have red hair.

Most very poleward living peoples eat a lot of animal liver which is full of Vit. D so their skin colour doesn't matter much to their Vit. D status.

Vit. D deficiency is horrendously high in modern Afghanistan afaik. Culture that demands everyone Cover up is a bad thing.

In the US, they have been fortifying milk with Vitamin D for years. Apparently Vit-d was a problem absorbing calcium

This is the most interesting thread I've read on Mumsnet. Thank you to all the knowledgeable women who have contributed. I clicked on it as I've got to plan a series of lessons on evolution for a year 6 class.

My knowledge is very basic compared to almost everyone on here. My understanding was that the "out of Africa" happened because the world was in an ice age. Would this have enabled ancient man to travel from Africa to Australia?

Not ancient man to Australia no, but later on an ice age lowered the water levels around Indonesian islands about 50m, which greatly aided the Maori and Polynesian migration.

Ice ages didn't always push people back to the equator (they happened after humans left Africa) but they did utterly change the landscape by sucking up water into ice and revealing land bridges. This made it easier to walk across doggerland to England or across biering strait to the Americas

@TotoAnnihiliation the podcast I linked to earlier about Neanderthals might be useful “homework” for your class. The You’re Dead To Me podcast is normally aimed at adults but they do a radio edit version for kids as the main presenter is the, self-described, History Nerd on Horrible Histories. Here’s the kid friendly version:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08ycyf8

He also does a dedicated kids history podcast too called Homeschool History but I don’t think they’ve touched on anything relevant to this discussion on that.

@Kendodd

Just to jump in on a vit D tangent, is everyone taking it at the moment? Theres growing evidence that it helps protect against covid.

Yes I’m taking a supplement, a friend went to the Dr a few years ago with horrendous fatigue and her blood results showed very low Vit D (she lives in Scotland). She started taking it and feels a million times better, her GP said that almost everyone should take a Vit D supplement in winter in the UK.

In the US, they have been fortifying milk with Vitamin D for years

The death rate from covid in the US looks quite low to me given infection numbers. Could this be a factor I wonder?

[quote CaveMum]@TotoAnnihiliation the podcast I linked to earlier about Neanderthals might be useful “homework” for your class. The You’re Dead To Me podcast is normally aimed at adults but they do a radio edit version for kids as the main presenter is the, self-described, History Nerd on Horrible Histories. Here’s the kid friendly version:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08ycyf8

He also does a dedicated kids history podcast too called Homeschool History but I don’t think they’ve touched on anything relevant to this discussion on that.[/quote]
Thank you!

@TotoAnnihiliation

Do you know about the peppered moth?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution#:~:text=The%20evolution%20of%20the%20peppered,an%20example%20of%20industrial%20melanism.

And the tamed foxes in Russia.

www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160912-a-soviet-scientist-created-the-only-tame-foxes-in-the-world

I know that 1,500 years ago my ancestors migrated from India. My DNA follows the route, previously identified by linguistics. The latter of which I know nothing about except that Sinti is in there somewhere.
I am a Romany Gypsy and proud

[quote Kendodd]**@TotoAnnihiliation

Do you know about the peppered moth?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution#:~:text=The%20evolution%20of%20the%20peppered,an%20example%20of%20industrial%20melanism.[/quote]
Thank you, a few more internet rabbit holes to fall down!

I highly recommend two books by Dr Adam Rutherford. "a history of every human that ever lived" and "how to argue with a racist". Both are about evolutionary biology.

@Pbur

If being white in northern climates gives you such a genetic advantage that darker skinned people literally died out to be replaced by lighter skinned people - how do black people survive to produce offspring in northern climates today? Do you have to be very careful about supplementing with vitamin D? I guess lighter skinned people are surviving in sunnier climes due to sunscreen so that explains that!

It takes thousands of years for the skin to obv lighten it didn't happen overnight, that was explained in the documentary plus mating with neadrothols would have determined skin colour... Africans that stayed have generations still living in Africa and didn't bump into a randy neadrthol a few hundred thousand years ago so would still retain their colour that has went down the line of offspring

@Devlesko

I know that 1,500 years ago my ancestors migrated from India. My DNA follows the route, previously identified by linguistics. The latter of which I know nothing about except that Sinti is in there somewhere. I am a Romany Gypsy and proud

Yes. I am descended from northwest Indian gypsies and a lot of the origin stories match up particularly around ppl of the sun and moon leaving ancestral lands. My grandmother spoke a hyper regional dead Indian language that was older than Gujarati and she could understand Sinti about as well as she could English - approx 60% of the time.