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?

@sonicstars, that's so interesting about species!

I personally remind myself all the time that a child who is well loved takes the parent doing that for granted. That's how I rationalise all the extra attention for the other parent who was out at work all day!

I remember seeing a documentry on TV, some of may have seen it called first human. Humans originally started in Africa and migrated.. Some mixed with neandrothls. The further they went from Africa the lighter they got.

It explain why Europeans look slightly different from Africans in terms of facial features, hair texture, I'm sure bone density was another thing ect as its shown its Europeans who have a small percent of neandrothol dna not Africans so all that would contribute to how whites started

Real question is, how did humans start, if we have different dna yet similar in a tiny way due to mating with neandrothols and Africans have no dna of neandrothols then where and how did we get started? That's the real question

Placemarking to read this fascinating thread later.

@coldemortreturns

Similar to the smiling - I'm sure I read once that nearly every language in the world, even those that have developed independently to each other, the word for mother begins with a 'm' sound.

That's an easy one to understand though, M is the easiest sound to make - literally just requires you to open your mouth

Smiling and other body language makes sense - body language is (AFAIK) pretty universal across other species too. If you stick a Shire Horse and a Shetland pony in a field together, they’re generally more thank capable of communicating with one another very well, as equine body language is pretty much universal. Same with a Chihuahua and a Great Dane - assuming both dogs were socialised as puppies, they’ll be able to communicate. Body language must have developed before spoken language, and so to me it seems to make sense for it to be pretty innate - cultural differences notwithstanding. But to take the example posted about of Russians seeing smiling at strangers as being rude - the smile itself surely has the same meaning though, the cultural difference is in when you use it. Are there cultures where a smile has completely the opposite meaning? Would be interesting if so.

@Savethewhales

Real question is, how did humans start, if we have different dna yet similar in a tiny way due to mating with neandrothols and Africans have no dna of neandrothols then where and how did we get started? That's the real question

Humans started from a hominid ancestor that was shared with other "Homo" species. So there was once others on earth that were quite like us i.e. walked erect, but we're significantly different enough to be a different species. Humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) hybridised (mated across different species) at a later point only in places where their range (where they lived) overlapped.

We got started in east Africa by evolution through descent. There was variation in a population of hominids, some genes were selected for, there was reproductive isolation maybe geographically or through mate choice and over a very long time that group of hominids are significantly different from other groups, enough to be considered a separate species.

Before you had the Homo genus (a way of grouping animal that is wider than species but narrower than family) you had others. An important group was Australopithicus as they had features that were recognisably man like along with others that were a lot more like other primates.

Human evolution isn't like a line, it's like the branches of a tree. We didn't evolve from other life that's on earth at the moment, both us and them evolved from common ancestors. All mammals evolved from a screw like creature if you go back far enough.

Shrew like, not screw. Sorry

I've just found my way back after a longer sleep (not long enough but still) and now digesting everything posters are writing.

Love how this thread has gone from one area to another, then back again and on and on. Feels like a nice lounge where I'm in the background listening to the grownups talk about interesting concepts - I know very little about this subject so I'm staying silent and reading what people have to say.

This is one of the reasons I love MN, I can go from aibu to being seriously educated in the comfort of my bed/office chair.

I've read about anus and vagina juice now - sorry, I laughed at the way @kendodd kept mentioning "taking a good dose of anus juice on the way out..." even though I know it's a serious adult conversation.😅

Thanks @SonicStars, I was just going to ask about animals as I was reading your post but you touched on that. Could you please expand more on animals if possible? How did they start and evolve? I'm not totally ignorant on these issues but some things I know are quite vague to me till I relearn them.

Does the vitamin D theory really hold though? What about Inuits who live very far north and are exposed to little sun like the Scandinavians but aren't light skinned?

I could be wrong, and if someone knows better please correct me, but I think the amount of snow and the reflections from it act in the same way as direct sunlight.

I can recommend "The Ancestors Tale" by Richard Dawkins which takes us back to the common ancestor of all life on earth (and also rubbishes racism).

When we saw Professor Alice Roberts giving a talk to promote "Tamed", she made a point of drinking a glass of milk which should be impossible for humans. The fact it isn't for some is quite telling.

Thanks to whomever recommended Homo Brittanicus, i just got it on Amazon for £4

So scientists have done experiments that recreate chemical conditions before life on earth to see whether things like proteins can form. These are the building blocks of life.

These chains of proteins etc would gather together until the first bacteria appeared. A lot of interesting things happened with bacteria before you got anywhere near animals. They changed the whole atmosphere. But anyway bacteria evolved, RNA changed to DNA in some places, then at some point 3 billion years ago one bacteria engulfed another one creating a single celled organism with the bacteria inside becoming organelles (parts of the cell) like the nucleus or mitochondria (so useful in tracing evolution as stated by previous posters). The single celled organisms lived in water for a very long time and eventually started to bunch up in a simple way, then a more complicated way. There's a group called platozoa that were flat and only 3 cells thick. They may be the ancestor to all modern animals. Things that are very different to us like starfish headed out along their branches and vertebrates started to evolve. The first step were animals that had a chord along their back at only one stage of their life, like tadpoles which then turned into an adult blob. Later you have proper backbones in a fish that is ancestor to all vertebrates.

Around 500 million years ago some fish started crawling into land (you can still see the side to side swimming motion of the backbone of lower vertebrates), the very first ones had to go back into the water to breed but others got better at not drying out and at breathing air with lungs. They diversified and filled the huge number of different new niches in different ways. Scales changed, later feathers evolved, fur. Some dinosaurs turned into birds whilst mammals were following their own route, both from a common small primitive four legged ancestor. Those of you with Dino crazy kids might know demitredons? Not actually true dinosaurs but the type of reptile that turned into mammals. Though they themselves didn't actually, it was a dead end and their cousins overtook them about 300 million years ago.

Mammals were small and nocturnal for millions of years and then they evolved warm bloodedness 200 million years ago (Dino's/birds evolved it separately). After the most recent mass extinction 65 million years ago (meteor) mammals spread and evolved to fill all of the now empty niches on land. Some even went back into the sea. You can see hand bones in whale "flippers."

This is not just found out through fossils, they look at skull shape and other features in animals alive now as well as looking at how offspring develop before birth.

At the time of writing, we only have one example of life arising in the Universe. Here on earth. Which rather limits the science, and makes it impossible to know if life is an emergent property of chemistry.

Personally, I'd bet it is. Although we may never find the evidence. But recent Mars rovers, and discoveries of liquid water in our own solar system may well change that.

The question after that is whether intelligence is an emergent property of life ...

All of which rather arrogantly presupposes we could actually recognise extra terrestrial life. Another mind blending possibility is that we've managed to miss lifeforms on earth anyway.

Best thread in ages! Wanted to second/third reading Sapiens OP, it’s fascinating. Thanks also to the PP who linked the podcasts, saved those for later.

@LouiseBelchersBunnyEars

I didn’t think the ‘out of Africa’ theory was true, at least insofar as how people describe it.... that humans originated in Africa only and spread from there worldwide.

I thought it was that there were several ‘humanoid’ races worldwide, and the humanoids that came from Africa were the ‘successful’ species, in that they successfully mated with all the other ‘races’ (don’t think this is the right word? Humanoid types anyway).
I think the Neanderthals were another ‘type’ of humanoid, which is why Europeans have Neanderthal blood, and Africans do not - because the original OG African humanoid mates with the Neanderthals, and all the others, so we all have the OG humanoid blood, but don’t all have the Neanderthal and other types of blood.

I hope that makes sense, that’s how I’ve always understood it, happy to be corrected if that’s wrong.

Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa, there’s current speculation that they may have evolved separately in different parts of Africa. There was then movement out if Africa, probably on many occasions. Neanderthals and Denisovans were already in Europe and Eurasia. They had evolved separately from Homo Sapiens from a common ancestor. At various times and places they interbred with Homo Sapiens. We can see this in DNA extracted from fossils and in our own DNA which may have Neanderthal or Denisovan traces. We can also see it in fossils where the morphology indicates admixture.

African do have Neanderthal DNA but in smaller amounts than Europeans. The current explanation is that some Homo Sapiens who left Africa and mixed with Neanderthals then returned to Africa. Personally I’m not sure that this is the whole picture.

@SleepingStandingUp

Thanks to whomever recommended Homo Brittanicus, i just got it on Amazon for £4

Its a great book, well worth a read.

Thinking about the way we look, I had a friend when I was young who was First Nation American (well Canadian) he told me his people walked across from China during an ice age. That makes sense and I can see how they look alike and also how they would spread down through the Americas to become the Mayan and Aztecs. Based on how they look, I could see that from there they could populate the Pacific islands and eventually reach New Zealand to become Morioris (?) Would this theory make sense? Aboriginal people in Australia look quite different so maybe they arrived by a route?

@SonicStars

One thing I am a little disappointed none of you lovely people really went into is the contribution of genetic drift and the founder effect. As mentioned diversity is great in Africa but a relatively small group would have left and interbred as an isolated population. If just one or two of those founders have uncommon genes or mutations then they would become disproportionately overrepresented in the new population.

Genes do not have to confer an evolutionary advantage to persist, they just have to be not too detrimental to avoid being strongly selected out. A gene or allele might be linked to another gene that is actively selected for, it might be recessive and so not expressed often, it might be detrimental in a way that doesn't affect fitness (ability to reproduce) or a mutation might be reoccurring in a particularly glitchy sequence of DNA.

This is what I was trying to convey upthread when I said it may not be that light skin proliferated because of genetic advantage, but merely that light skin genes were common in the migrating group, and so they proliferated due to isolation, and dark skinned offspring became fewer over time.

Someone then used the example of sickle cell as a genetic advantage. However, I don't think that entirely works because although there is a greater proportion of people with sickle cell trait in malaria areas, they are still a minority and the rest of the population hasn't died out. Furthermore, the more sickle cell trait carriers you have the greater the risk of offspring being born with sickle cell disease, which would be more fatal in the case of an attack of malaria than someone with the trait or someone without. As more people spread around the world and inter breed, sickle cell trait will likely be found the world over, without advantage or disadvantage. It just exists.

Someone then used the example of sickle cell as a genetic advantage.

Not just sickle cell, but other genetic blood diseases like some thalassaemias. Close to my heart, as having non-English blood, it turns out my DB has picked up a trait that caused a 15 year misdiagnosis of anaemia and potential iron poisoning. It was only a chance encounter at a genetics seminar that led to a correct diagnosis.

@Kendodd

Thinking about the way we look, I had a friend when I was young who was First Nation American (well Canadian) he told me his people walked across from China during an ice age. That makes sense and I can see how they look alike and also how they would spread down through the Americas to become the Mayan and Aztecs. Based on how they look, I could see that from there they could populate the Pacific islands and eventually reach New Zealand to become Morioris (?) Would this theory make sense? Aboriginal people in Australia look quite different so maybe they arrived by a route?

The Maori have lived in NZ for less than 1000 years. Aboriginal people have been I Australia for at least 50,000 years; their roots in the continent are ancient. Some aboriginal Dreamtime stories, passed down verbally through the tribes describe true events that happened millenia ago such as this story about a volcanic eruption that scientists figured out occurred 37,000 years ago.

There was a section in Bill Bryson's Down Under book where he wrote about how nobody can explain how the original proto-Aboriginal people got to the continent of Australia. There were no land crossings like with the Bering Strait joining Asia and the Americas, and the boat technology needed to get people across wouldn't be invented for tens of thousands of years. But they did get there. It's so interesting.

@Kendodd

Thinking about the way we look, I had a friend when I was young who was First Nation American (well Canadian) he told me his people walked across from China during an ice age. That makes sense and I can see how they look alike and also how they would spread down through the Americas to become the Mayan and Aztecs. Based on how they look, I could see that from there they could populate the Pacific islands and eventually reach New Zealand to become Morioris (?) Would this theory make sense? Aboriginal people in Australia look quite different so maybe they arrived by a route?

Pacific and first peoples of America have denisovan genes, as indigenous Australians.

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!