2017-12-13-The Time Has Come
Mezza Verde #233
Session 17 of 13 December 2017 – Original Dutch/English
Prologue Wivine:
Wivine: I put this on my website because it’s something I’ve been fighting for years. I grew up with this racial idea in a white European community. I was born in Belgium after World War II in 1952 and none of my parents or grandparents wanted to tell me about the horrors of war or the Nazi extermination camps. And you will find Nazis with all their ideas all over the world, even under other names or in other cultures. What I mean by that is that it is not a typical German invention: it is a “thought form” that was born elsewhere centuries ago and continues to live wherever it can find an ideal breeding ground. The German economic crisis after the First World War was an ideal breeding ground for that.
The people I met later who survived the camps would rather forget it and they were not just Jews. They still had nightmares. It was not Africans whom the Nazis gassed or killed in Europe, there were hardly any at that time. No, they started gasifying or murdering their own people in 1933: the mentally retarded, the mentally insane, the physically disabled, the vagrants, the gypsies, the homosexuals and of course the political opponents. The Jews came later in Western Europe, I think it started in 1942. Former Soviet Communist Russia had done something similar in the early 20th century with their own people. They also had a sort of classification that was mainly political and anti-religious. Same thing in China and Cambodia. The Japanese carried out the same kind of atrocities in China and Korea as the Nazis in Europe and about at the same time.
In my 20-30 years, I often went to the library. I loved the books of the time on parapsychology, metaphysics and studies on extra-sensorial abilities. There were also books on spiritualism. Then came the authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who had received truths from above, visionaries. All spoke of the terrestrial populations in terms of “races”. The races in the middle could vary, but there was always a constant: the white race was the most developed in all areas and the black race was the lowest in all areas.
I knew very little about our Catholic Bible, but all images of Adam and Eve – the so-called 1st humans – out of whom all were born – were white with red hair or hazelnut and Jesus-Incarnate Son of God – was white with a chestnut or red-brown hair color. A blond Jesus with blue eyes came later. In the meantime, I grew up, made a few trips and met other people, other cultures and religions. The more I met other people on other continents this idea that the white man was superior began to seriously weaken.
Especially when I started to dive into the history behind the history of Europe. The one nobody wants to tell you. Europe was once illiterate and barbarian, and they went to Africa, India and China to collect their first sciences. My eyes were even more open when I visited Egypt and the Cairo Museum. Later, the United States, Turkey and Morocco. It was only in Belize that I started living among a very diverse population. Here live Mayas, Chinese, Koreans, Mennonites (descendants of northern Europeans who do not mix with local populations), people of European-African descent, India and Hispanics from Central America. There are about 5 spoken languages here of which English (British colony) is the official language and the least spoken.
And what struck me first? That Mayas were considered here as retarded by the Afro-European population in power. Some even went so far as to say that I was lowering myself by dealing with Mayas. I had to sit down. Here too, there was a kind of racial social division, but not with the “white” as number 1. This meant that dividing people into higher or lower classes or races is a societal problem, whether or not based on external features.
It turns out to be inherent to man, regardless of how they look or their location. There is a strong and a weak. The one who governs and the one who serves and the one who has the power decides who serves. It is also a way of putting people against each other. There are many examples of this and the first thing I think of is Belgium (Flemish and Walloons) and Rwanda (Hutu and Tutsi). Divide and conquer: it always works. Religion is also a means to provoke wars and of that too there are enough examples.
The second thing I noticed in Belize is that people like Mayans, Creoles and Hispanics believe that having white or pale skin is important for their status. They even keep their little children out of the sun so they do not tan. I did not understand that. That a white man has a high opinion of himself, ha has been told for centuries. Moreover, he had the rifle in his hands wherever he went these last centuries. But that nonwhites with normal skin which contains melanin also believe that, was mind boggling.
It was in Belize that I received a hard copy of the Urantia Book and there again appeared this famous racial classification “received by Heavenly Messengers” with in addition the superior white race that had inherited the most percentage of Adamic genetic material – Incarnated Superhuman white-skinned Celestials. Wow, how blessed we are by the Heavens! We are not only biologically advantaged, but also spiritually! What a caress for our own esteem! Wow, pride, that nice feeling of superiority – the biggest booby trap for spiritual progress and we fell right into the trap.
Meanwhile, I had grown a little, and I began to strongly doubt these theories about races and even more of the existence of this tall blond Adam with his beautiful blue eyes: the ideal image of the white Nordic race. I also doubted the idea of this retarded red race that would have lived in seclusion on the American continents because there have never been redskins in these continents. This term came from the first whites who fought some local tribes there who stained their skin with a red substance. And that black and brown populations were inferior was also a popular myth and not a small one. I assure you.
I knew for years that this rhetoric and classification of human races based on facial features and skin color did not hold water. Whenever I met it in The Urantia Book it brought shivers to my spine. My nausea began to grow a few years ago, even going so far as not to want to read The Urantia Book anymore. But the Melchizedeks asked me to continue with the Book until I acquired the spiritual knowledge that was there and which I needed. They would deal with that other stuff later.
I was recently looking in The Urantia Book for what was said about a” world government” and these “racial theories” jumped up again. Until I read the following sentence: [UB 72:10.1] (818.4) The methods of this people in dealing with crime, insanity, and degeneracy, while in some ways pleasing, will, no doubt, in others prove shocking to most Urantians. Ordinary criminals and the defectives are placed, by sexes, in different agricultural colonies and are more than self-supporting.
The more serious habitual criminals and the incurably insane are sentenced to death in the lethal gas chambers by the courts. Numerous crimes aside from murder, including betrayal of governmental trust, also carry the death penalty, and the visitation of justice is sure and swift.
(Wiv: and they dare say this is happening on another planet.)
I had an electric shock – my light bulbs popped and the light turned off. It was too much. The time has come – I don’t keep my mouth shut anymore.
All this did not come from the higher spiritual world, nor from God. I knew it, I know it. It’s always the same with these sacred books: when Celestials reveal spiritual material and it falls into the hands of humans who publish it, they mess with it so that it matches their social and political ideas of the time. Maybe for the Celestials it is a necessary evil, that it is not possible otherwise? I do not know.
I then searched the web to land in anthropology, biology, genetics and even cosmetic genetics of hair. I chose two American articles that give a fairly complete picture of what has happened and refute secular “racial theory” based on some external characteristics. As well as the current genetic explanation of the origin of white skin. I present them for your information.
ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF RACE
by Audrey Smedley – Anthropology Newsletter, November 1997.
Contemporary scholars agree that “race” was a recent invention and that it was essentially a folk idea, not a product of scientific research and discovery. This is not new to anthropologists. Since the 1940s when Ashley Montagu argued against the use of the term “race” in science, a growing number of scholars in many disciplines have declared that the real meaning of race in American society has to do with social realities, quite distinct from physical variations in the human species. I argue that race was institutionalized beginning in the 18th century as a worldview, a set of culturally created attitudes and beliefs about human group differences.
Slavery and the Coming of Africans
Race and its ideology about human differences arose out of the context of African slavery. But many peoples throughout history have been enslaved without the imposition of racial ideology. When we look at 17th century colonial America before the enactment of laws legitimizing slavery only for Africans and their descendants (after 1660), several facts become clear.
- 1). The first people that the English tried to enslave and place on plantations were the Irish with whom they had had hostile relations since the 13th century.
- 2) Some Englishmen had proposed laws enslaving the poor in England and in the colonies to force them to work indefinitely.
- 3) Most of the slaves on English plantations in Barbados and Jamaica were Irish and Indians.
- 4) Many historians point out that African servants and bonded indentured white servants were treated much the same way. They often joined together, as in the case of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) to oppose the strict and oppressive laws of the colonial government.
In the latter part of the 17th century the demand for labor grew enormously. It had become clear that neither Irishmen nor Indians made good slaves. More than that, the real threats to social order were the poor freed whites who demanded lands and privileges that the upper class colonial governments refused. Some colonial leaders argued that turning to African labor provided a buffer against the masses of poor whites.
Until the 18th century the image of Africans was generally positive. They were farmers and cattle-breeders; they had industries, arts and crafts, governments and commerce. In addition, Africans had immunities to Old World diseases. They were better laborers and they had nowhere to escape to once transplanted to the New World. The colonists themselves came to believe that they could not survive without Africans.
When some Englishmen entered slave trading directly, it became clear that many of the English public had misgivings about slave-trading and re-creating slavery on English soil. It was an era when the ideals of equality, justice, democracy, and human rights were becoming dominant features of Western political philosophy. Those involved in the trade rationalized their actions by arguing that the Africans were heathens after all, and it was a Christian duty to save their souls. By the early part of the 18th century, the institution was fully established for Africans and their descendants. Large numbers of slaves flooded the southern colonies and even some northern ones. Sometimes they outnumbered whites, and the laws governing slavery became increasingly harsher.
A New Social Identity
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the image of Africans began to change dramatically. The major catalyst for this transformation was the rise of a powerful antislavery movement that expanded and strengthened during the Revolutionary Era both in Europe and in the United States. As a consequence pro-slavery forces found it necessary to develop new arguments for defending the institution. Focusing on physical differences, they turned to the notion of the natural inferiority of Africans and thus their God-given suitability for slavery. Such arguments became more frequent and strident from the end of the eighteenth century on, and the characterizations of Africans became more negative.
From here we see the structuring of the ideological components of “race.” The term “race,” which had been a classification term like “type,” or “kind,” but with ambiguous meaning, became more widely used in the eighteenth century, and crystallized into a distinct reference for Africans, Indians and Europeans. By focusing on the physical and status differences between the conquered and enslaved peoples, and Europeans, the emerging ideology linked the socio-political status and physical traits together and created a new form of social identity.
Pro-slavery leaders among the colonists formulated a new ideology that merged all Europeans together, rich and poor, and fashioned a social system of ranked physically distinct groups. The model for “race” and “races” was the Great Chain of Being or Scale of Nature (Scala Naturae), a semi-scientific theory of a natural hierarchy of all living things, derived from classical Greek writings. The physical features of different groups became markers or symbols of their status on this scale, and thus justified their positions within the social system. Race ideology proclaimed that the social, spiritual, moral, and intellectual inequality of different groups was, like their physical traits, natural, innate, inherited, and unalterable.
Thus was created the only slave system in the world that became exclusively “racial.” By limiting perpetual servitude to Africans and their descendants, colonists were proclaiming that blacks would forever be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. By keeping blacks, Indians and whites socially and spatially separated and enforcing endogamous mating, they were making sure that visible physical differences would be preserved as the premier insignia of unequal social statuses. From its inception separateness and inequality was what “race” was all about. The attributes of inferior race status came to be applied to free blacks as well as slaves. In this way, “race” was configured as an autonomous new mechanism of social differentiation that transcended the slave condition and persisted as a form of social identity long after slavery ended.
Humans as Property
American slavery was unique in another way; that is, how North American slave-owners resolved the age-old dilemma of all slave systems. Slaves are both persons and things—-human beings and property. How do you treat a human being as both person and property? And what should take precedence, the human rights of the slave or the property rights of the master? American laws made clear that property was more sacred than people, and the property rights of masters overshadowed the human rights of slaves. Said Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the famous Dred Scott case of 1857, “Negroes were seen only as property; they were never thought of or spoken of except as property” and “(thus) were not intended by the framers of the Constitution to be accorded citizenship rights.”
In order to transform people solely into property, you must minimize those qualities that make them human. Literature of the early nineteenth century began to portray “the negro” as a savage in even stronger terms than those that had been used for the Irish two centuries earlier. This was a major transformation in thought about who Africans were. Historian George Fredrickson states explicitly that “before 1830 open assertions of permanent black inferiority were exceedingly rare” (The Black Image in the White Mind, 1987). By mid-century, the ideology of “negro inferiority” dominated both popular and scholarly thought.
Science and the Justification for “Races”
What is so striking about the American experience in creating such an extreme conception of human differences was the role played by scientists and scholars in legitimizing the folk ideas. Scholarly writers began attempting to prove scientifically that “the Negro” was a different and lower kind of human being. The first published materials arguing from a scientific perspective that “negroes” were a separate species from white men appeared in the last decade of the eighteenth century. They argued that Negroes were either a product of degeneration from that first creation, or descendants of a separate creation altogether.
American intellectuals appropriated, and rigidified, the categories of human groups established by European scholars during the eighteenth century, but ignored Blumenbach’s caution that human groups blend insensibly into one another, so that it is impossible to place precise boundaries around them.
When Dr. Samuel Morton in the 1830s initiated the field of craniometry, the first school of American anthropology, proponents of race ideology received the most powerful scientific support yet. Measuring the insides of crania collected from many populations, he offered “evidence” that the Negro had a smaller brain than whites, with Indians in-between. Morton is also famous for his involvement in a major scientific controversy over creation.
The very existence of a scientific debate over whether blacks and whites were products of a single creation, or of multiple creations, especially in a society dominated by Biblical explanations, seems anomalous. It indicates that the differences between “races” had been so magnified and exaggerated that popular consciousness had already widely accepted the idea of blacks being a different and inferior species of humans. Justice Taney’s decision reflected this, declaring, “the negro is a different order of being.” Thus slave-owners’ rights to their “property” were upheld in law by appeal to the newly invented identity of peoples from Africa.
Scientists collaborated in confirming popular beliefs, and publications appeared on a regular basis providing the “proof” that comforted the white public. That some social leaders were conscious of their role in giving credibility to the invented myths is manifest in statements such as that found in the Charleston Medical Journal after Dr. Morton’s death. It states, “We can only say that we of the South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race” (emphasis added). George Gliddon, co-editor of a famous scientific book Types of Mankind, (1854) which argued that Negroes were closer to apes than to humans and ranked all other groups between whites and Negroes, sent a copy of the book to a famous southern politician, saying that he was sure the south would appreciate the powerful support that this book gave for its “peculiar institution” (slavery). Like another famous tome (The Bell Curve, 1995) this was an 800-page book whose first edition sold out immediately; it went through nine other editions before the end of the century. What it said about the inferiority of blacks became widely known, even by those who could not read it.
During discussions in the U.S. Senate on the future of “the negro” after slavery, James Henry Hammond proclaimed in 1858 “somebody has to be the mudsills of society, to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” Negroes were destined to be the mudsills. This was to be their place, one consciously created for them by a society whose cultural values now made it impossible to assimilate them. In the many decades since the Civil War, white society made giant strides to “keep the negro in his place.” Public policies and the customs and practices of millions of Americans expressed this racial worldview throughout the twentieth century.
These are some of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the racial worldview in North America. Race ideology was a mechanism justifying what had already been established as unequal social groups; it was from its inception, and is today, about who should have access to privilege, power, status, and wealth, and who should not. As a useful political ideology for conquerors, it spread into colonial situations around the world. It was promulgated in the latter half of the 19th century by some Europeans against other Europeans and reached its most extreme development in the twentieth century Nazi holocaust. All anthropologists should understand that “race” has no intrinsic relationship to human biological diversity, that such diversity is a natural product of primarily evolutionary forces while “race” is a social invention.
The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association on May 17, 1998, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of “race.” We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.
In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred.
The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species. Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.
Historical research has shown that the idea of “race” has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.
From its inception, this modern concept of “race” was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus “race” was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used “race” to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.
As they were constructing US society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each “race,” linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians. Numerous arbitrary and fictitious beliefs about the different peoples were institutionalized and deeply embedded in American thought.
Early in the 19th century the growing fields of science began to reflect the public consciousness about human differences. Differences among the “racial” categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes.
Ultimately “race” as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere. But it was not limited to the colonial situation. In the latter part of the 19th century it was employed by Europeans to rank one another and to justify social, economic, and political inequalities among their peoples. During World War II, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler enjoined the expanded ideology of “race” and “racial” differences and took them to a logical end: the extermination of 11 million people of “inferior races” (e.g., Jews, Gypsies, Africans, homosexuals, and so forth) and other unspeakable brutalities of the Holocaust.
“Race” thus evolved as a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into “racial” categories. The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.
At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call “culture.” Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.
It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different language and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American culture traits and behavior is the clearest evidence of this fact. Moreover, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world.
How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The “racial” worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called “racial” groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.
[Note: For further information on human biological variations, see the statement prepared and issued by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 1996 (AJPA 101:569-570).]
How Europeans evolved white skin
By Ann Gibbons – Apr. 2, 2015
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.
The origins of Europeans have come into sharp focus in the past year as researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient populations, rather than only a few individuals. By comparing key parts of the DNA across the genomes of 83 ancient individuals from archaeological sites throughout Europe, the international team of researchers reported earlier this year that Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations over the past 8000 years. The study revealed that a massive migration of Yamnaya herders from the steppes north of the Black Sea may have brought Indo-European languages to Europe about 4500 years ago.
Now, a new study from the same team drills down further into that remarkable data to search for genes that were under strong natural selection—including traits so favorable that they spread rapidly throughout Europe in the past 8000 years. By comparing the ancient European genomes with those of recent ones from the 1000 Genomes Project, population geneticist Iain Mathieson, a postdoc in the Harvard University lab of population geneticist David Reich, found five genes associated with changes in diet and skin pigmentation that underwent strong natural selection.
First, the scientists confirmed an earlier report that the hunter-gatherers in Europe could not digest the sugars in milk 8000 years ago, according to a poster. They also noted an interesting twist: The first farmers also couldn’t digest milk. The farmers who came from the Near East about 7800 years ago and the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes 4800 years ago lacked the version of the LCT gene that allows adults to digest sugars in milk. It wasn’t until about 4300 years ago that lactose tolerance swept through Europe.
When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to de-pigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.
But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin.
Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.
The team also tracked complex traits, such as height, which are the result of the interaction of many genes. They found that selection strongly favored several gene variants for tallness in northern and central Europeans, starting 8000 years ago, with a boost coming from the Yamnaya migration, starting 4800 years ago. The Yamnaya have the greatest genetic potential for being tall of any of the populations, which is consistent with measurements of their ancient skeletons. In contrast, selection favored shorter people in Italy and Spain starting 8000 years ago, according to the paper now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Spaniards, in particular, shrank in stature 6000 years ago, perhaps as a result of adapting to colder temperatures and a poor diet.
Surprisingly, the team found no immune genes under intense selection, which is counter to hypotheses that diseases would have increased after the development of agriculture. The paper doesn’t specify why these genes might have been under such strong selection. But the likely explanation for the pigmentation genes is to maximize vitamin D synthesis, said paleoanthropologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, as she looked at the poster’s results at the meeting. People living in northern latitudes often don’t get enough UV to synthesize vitamin D in their skin so natural selection has favored two genetic solutions to that problem—evolving pale skin that absorbs UV more efficiently or favoring lactose tolerance to be able to digest the sugars and vitamin D naturally found in milk.
“What we thought was a fairly simple picture of the emergence of depigmented skin in Europe is an exciting patchwork of selection as populations disperse into northern latitudes,” Jablonski says. “This data is fun because it shows how much recent evolution has taken place.”
Anthropological geneticist George Perry, also of Penn State, notes that the work reveals how an individual’s genetic potential is shaped by their diet and adaptation to their habitat. “We’re getting a much more detailed picture now of how selection works.”
Albinos–Origin of the Caucasian Race?
Research advocates people with white skin are a relatively recent addition to the human race arriving on the continent 8,000 years ago. A much darker-skinned population were the original migrants to Europe from Africa arriving around 40,000 years ago. Once humans moved north, they adapted to their new climate and environment. Adaptation is the evolutionary process whereby an organism becomes better able to live in its habitat or habitats. Adaptation is a phenotypic or adaptive trait maintained and evolved by natural selection. People reproduce in ISOLATION; thus, creating more of their own kind. If mankind originated in Africa, why wouldn’t that also be the origin of white, yellow, and brown people?
Albinism in humans is considered a disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. Albinism results from inheritance of recessive gene alleles and is known to affect all vertebrates, including humans. It is due to absence or defect of tyrosinase, a copper-containing enzyme involved in the production of melanin. The albinism syndrome shows parallels with sickle cell anemia. The carrier of the sickle cell mutation is at an advantage in regions where malaria is hyperendemic, which includes large areas of Africa.
The R haplogroup is common throughout Europe and western Asia and the Indian sub-continent, and in those whose ancestry is from within these regions. It also occurs in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The distribution is markedly different for the two major subclades R1a and R1b. In human genetics, Haplogroup R is a Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup, a subgroup of haplogroup P, defined by the M207 mutation. This haplogroup is believed to have arisen around 26,800 years ago, somewhere in Central Asia or South Asia, where its ancestor Haplogroup P is most often found at polymorphic frequencies.
Cambridge University geneticist Kivisild et al. (2003) suggests that southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup: Given the geographic spread and STR diversities of sister clades R1 and R2, the latter of which is restricted to India, Pakistan, Iran, and southern central Asia, it is possible that southern and western Asia were the source for R1 and R1a differentiation.
As new information comes down the pike, it is necessary to rethink theories that were once in place. The origin and labeling of the “so called” Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid Races by 19th Century scientists, started racial groupings based on skin color by naturalists and anthropologists like Johann F. Blumenbach, JA Gobineau and HS Chamberlain. These men also equated skin color to psychological value and importance to race. Blumenbach named whites after the Caucasus Mountains because he thought the purest white people originated there.
He didn’t seem to realize the following:
Russia, Chechens, Armenians, and other Southern Russians are considered to have Black Negro origins and Caucasus Mountains people were once classified as “black.” Black people have lived in Southern Russia since prehistoric times and have occupied the Black Sea Region since the time of Senwosret/Sesostris (2000 BC) when Africans dominated the region. (SEE ‘HERODOTUS’ ON THE COLCHIANS).
The American Anthropological Association declares there is no such thing as race which is merely a “social construct.” If that is the new scientific principle, there are plenty of scientific facts to back up this principle. According to The South African Institute for Medical Research in review – Journal of South African Science, THE HIGH FREQUENCY OF ALBINISM IN AFRICA provides more clues to early African history. The Department of Human Genetics at the SAIMR is currently involved with numerous research projects, most related to human genetic disorders and population origins–one of these, ‘Albinism in African peoples’ having received particular attention because it offers new insights into the historical movement of peoples in sub-Saharan Africa.
About one in 35 southern African blacks is a carrier of an albinism mutation, a surprisingly high prevalence for a genetic disorder where the homozygote is at a survival disadvantage. It is postulated that the albinism carrier may be at an advantage, possibly also with malaria as the selective agent. It has been suggested that mosquitoes are less likely to alight and take blood from a lighter-skinned person and thus the albinism carrier may be at an advantage over darker-skinned people.
The testing of this hypothesis is opening a new line of research into malaria studies, which may yet show some other selective agent may be responsible for the high frequency of albinism in Africa. The new scientific genetic information derived from the Human Genome Project, an international effort to decode the information embedded in the human genome, confirmed to the world by scientists in the East Room of the White House (June 2000). We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world”. “All human beings are 99.99% the same at the DNA level and the remaining 0.1% genetic variation that exist seldom segregate in a manner that confirms to the racial boundaries constructed by social political means.”
Many years before the Human Genome’s Project announcement of its historical DNA findings on so called “race” (in June of 2,000), historians have revealed that human beings, during the primitive era in ancient/antiquity Africa – The Origin of Humankind/Humanity states that due to the lack of knowledge about inbreeding (between closely related parents) they did not understand why their off spring were born with “white skin.” Scientists say, “White skin” is a form of Albinism (a genetic defected offspring — lacking melanin).
Cystic Fibrosis was thought to be a disease that affects mostly Europeans, but there are studies that now confirm that the most likely origin of the mutation is the African Continent. The CF studies also tie-in with population migration investigations. Since the common African mutation has also been found in Zambia and Cameroun, it too supports the Bantu Expansion Hypothesis. It is worth noting that the mutation has also been found in African-Americans, in Saudi Arabia and in Greece on the same chromosome background (haplotype), suggesting a single origin. The most likely origin of the mutation is indeed the African Continent.
Cystic fibrosis (CF) was first described in Europe in the late 1930s. It was later shown to be surprisingly common with, on average, one in 20 individuals of European origin carrying a CF mutation. It was widely believed to be absent or very rare in Black Africans and was taught as such to generations of medical students. Only a handful of cases were described in African Blacks in a period of over thirty years, although it was well documented among African-Americans. CF was originally thought to be present in the latter because of admixture with individuals of European descent.
Oculocutaneous albinism (OCA) is a rare, genetically inherited condition passed on by both parents to their offspring, resulting in a significant reduction in or absence of pigmentation in the hair, skin, and eyes at birth. Individuals with albinism are very fair-skinned and fair-haired, with (most often) blue eyes that can take on tones of purple or red in bright lighting.
But due to such lack of knowledge as to why their “white skinned” off springs came about, African mothers and fathers became more and more fearful and suspicions and began to separate their growing number of “white skinned” off springs away from the “black skinned” (pigmented) population.
Eventually most of the “white skinned” off springs of “African” mothers and fathers formed several groups and began to migrate northward through Egypt to another area of Africa which is now called Europe, seeking a more hospitable living environment and to escape the intensity of the equatorial hot climate of the great river valleys and great lakes region of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa which was then and still is South of what is now called Egypt.
The “albino” group moved up in the mountainous area during the Ice Age or Glaciations period that lasted thousands of years further isolating themselves from their original parent population in Africa. And by being in such isolated living condition for such a prolonged period they also interbred (within the existing parent groups) thereby creating additional “albino” offspring from “albino” mothers and fathers who were then and still are direct descendants of African mothers and fathers.
A mutation results in a change of the DNA sequence within a gene or chromosome of an organism resulting in the creation of a new character or trait not found in the parental type. There is blonde hair among the black Australian aborigines. That is an example of a mutation. Albinism is a good example of a mutation. Other examples of mutations are blondism or whiteness among monkeys, apes, and chimpanzees.
Genetic analysis enables scientists to estimate the geographic ancestry of a person by using ancestry-informative markers, and by inference the probable racial category into which they will be classified in a given society. In that way there is a distinct statistical correlation between gene frequencies and racial categories.
However, because all populations are genetically diverse, and because there is a complex relation between ancestry, genetic makeup and phenotype, and because racial categories are based on subjective evaluations of the traits, there is no specific gene that can be used to determine a person’s race.
Geographic analyses attempt to identify places of origin, their relative importance and possible causes of genetic variation in an area. The results can be presented as maps showing genetic variation. Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues argue that if genetic variations are investigated, they often correspond to population migrations due to new sources of food, improved transportation or shifts in political power. For example, in Europe the most significant direction of genetic variation corresponds to the spread of agriculture from the Middle East to Europe between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. Such geographic analysis works best in the absence of recent large-scale, rapid migrations.
Posted in: ArchaeologyBiologyEuropeEvolutionHuman Evolution doi:10.1126/science.aab2435
From : http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin
