By Ann GibbonsApr. 2, 2015 , 5:00 PM
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.
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| 1820 drawing of a Book of Gates fresco of the tomb of Seti I, depicting (from left) four groups of people: Libyans, a Nubian, an Asiatic, and an Egyptian. |
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 depigmentation 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.”
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
White people is a racial classification and skin color specifier, used mostly and exclusively for people of European and (more technically) Western Eurasian descent; depending on context, nationality, and point of view. The term has at times been expanded to encompass persons of Middle Eastern and North African descent (for example, in the US Census definition), persons who are often considered non-white in other contexts, and at times excluded people of Southern European descent. The usage of "white people" or a "white race" for a large group of mainly or exclusively European populations, defined by their light skin, among other physical characteristics, and contrasting with "black people", Amerindians, and other "colored" people or "persons of color", originated in the 17th century. It was only during the 19th century that this vague category was transformed in a quasi-scientific system of race and skin color relations.
The concept of a unified white race did not achieve universal acceptance in Europe when it first came into use in the 17th century, or in the centuries afterward. Nazi Germany regarded some European peoples such as Slavs as racially distinct from themselves. Prior to the modern age, no European peoples regarded themselves as "white", but rather defined their race, ancestry, or ethnicity in terms of their nationality. Moreover, there is no accepted standard for determining the geographic barrier between white and non-white people. Contemporary anthropologists and other scientists, while recognizing the reality of biological variation between different human populations, regard the concept of a unified, distinguishable "white race" as socially constructed. As a group with several different potential boundaries, it is an example of a fuzzy concept.
The concept of whiteness has particular resonance in the Anglosphere: e.g., in the United States (White Americans), Canada (white Canadians), Australia (white Australians), New Zealand (white New Zealanders), the United Kingdom (white British), and South Africa (white South Africans). In much of the rest of Europe, the distinction between race and nationality is more blurred; when people are asked to describe their race or ancestry, they often describe it in terms of their nationality. Various social constructions of whiteness have been significant to national identity, public policy, religion, population statistics, racial segregation, affirmative action, white privilege, eugenics, racial marginalization, and racial quotas.
The term "white race" or "white people" entered the major European languages in the later 17th century, in the context of racialized slavery and unequal social status in the European colonies. Description of populations as "white" in reference to their skin color predates this notion and is occasionally found in Greco-Roman ethnography and other ancient or medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of a white, pan-European race. Scholarship on race distinguishes the modern concept from pre-modern descriptions, which focused on physical complexion rather than race.
According to anthropologist Nina Jablonski:
The Ancient Egyptian (New Kingdom) funerary text known as the Book of Gates distinguishes "four groups" in a procession. These are the Egyptians, the Levantine and Canaanite peoples or "Asiatics", the "Nubians" and the "fair-skinned Libyans".[27] The Egyptians are depicted as considerably darker-skinned than the Levantines (persons from what is now Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan) and Libyans, but considerably lighter than the Nubians (modern Sudan).
The assignment of positive and negative connotations of white and black to certain persons date to the very old age in a number of Indo-European languages, but these differences were not necessarily used in respect to skin colors. Religious conversion was sometimes described figuratively as a change in skin color. Similarly, the Rigveda uses krsna tvac "black skin" as a metaphor for irreligiosity.
Classicist James H. Dee states "the Greeks do not describe themselves as 'white people'—or as anything else because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves." People's skin color did not carry useful meaning; what mattered is where they lived. Herodotus described the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair. and the Egyptians – quite like the Colchians – as melánchroes (μελάγχροες, "dark-skinned") and curly-haired. He also gives the possibly first reference to the common Greek name of the tribes living south of Egypt, otherwise known as Nubians, which was Aithíopes (Αἰθίοπες, "burned-faced").[33] Later Xenophanes of Colophon described the Aethiopians as black and the Persian troops as white compared to the sun-tanned skin of Greek troops.
Explore the evidence for human evolution in this interactive timeline - climate change, species, and milestones in becoming human.
The Earth's climate has fluctuated between warm and cold during human evolution..
Some of the most important milestones in human evolution occurred during times of greatest fluctuations.
Explore the relationship between climate and human evolution more deeply by magnifying the timeline
Modern racial hierarchies
The term "white race" or "white people" entered the major European languages in the later 17th century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade[35] and the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Spanish Empire.[36] It has repeatedly been ascribed to strains of blood, ancestry, and physical traits, and was eventually made into a subject of scientific research, which culminated in scientific racism, which was later widely repudiated by the scientific community. According to historian Irene Silverblatt, "Race thinking […] made social categories into racial truths."[36] Bruce David Baum, citing the work of Ruth Frankenberg, states, "the history of modern racist domination has been bound up with the history of how European peoples defined themselves (and sometimes some other peoples) as members of a superior 'white race'."[37] Alastair Bonnett argues that 'white identity', as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history.[38]
According to Gregory Jay, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,
In the 16th and 17th centuries, "East Asian peoples were almost uniformly described as white, never as yellow."[40] Michael Keevak's history Becoming Yellow, finds that East Asians were redesignated as being yellow-skinned because "yellow had become a racial designation," and that the replacement of white with yellow as a description came through scientific discourse.[41]
A social category formed by colonialism
A three-part racial schema in color terms was used in seventeenth-century Latin America under Spanish rule.[42] Irene Silverblatt traces "race thinking" in South America to the social categories of colonialism and state formation: "White, black, and brown are abridged, abstracted versions of colonizer, slave, and colonized."[43] By the mid-seventeenth century, the novel term español ("Spaniard") was being equated in written documents with blanco, or "white".[43] In Spain's American colonies, African, Native American (indios), Jewish, or morisco ancestry formally excluded individuals from the "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre) requirements for holding any public office under the Royal Pragmatic of 1501.[44] Similar restrictions applied in the military, some religious orders, colleges, and universities, leading to a nearly all-white priesthood and professional stratum.[44][45] Blacks and indios were subject to tribute obligations and forbidden to bear arms, and black and indio women were forbidden to wear jewels, silk, or precious metals in early colonial Mexico and Peru.[44] Those pardos (people with dark skin) and mulattos (people of mixed African and European ancestry) with resources largely sought to evade these restrictions by passing as white.[44][45] A brief royal offer to buy the privileges of whiteness for a substantial sum of money attracted fifteen applicants before pressure from white elites ended the practice.[44]
In the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, the designation English or Christian was initially used in contrast to Native Americans or Africans. Early appearances of white race or white people in the Oxford English Dictionary begin in the seventeenth century.[28] Historian Winthrop Jordan reports that, "throughout the [thirteen] colonies the terms Christian, free, English, and white were […] employed indiscriminately" in the 17th century as proxies for one another.[46] In 1680, Morgan Godwyn "found it necessary to explain" to English readers that "in Barbados, 'white' was 'the general name for Europeans.'"[47] Several historians report a shift towards greater use of white as a legal category alongside a hardening of restrictions on free or Christian blacks.[48] White remained a more familiar term in the American colonies than in Britain well into the 1700s, according to historian Theodore W. Allen.[47]
Science of race
Western studies of race and ethnicity in the 18th and 19th centuries developed into what would later be termed scientific racism. Prominent European scientists writing about human and natural difference included a white or west Eurasian race among a small set of human races and imputed physical, mental, or aesthetic superiority to this white category. These ideas were discredited by twentieth-century scientists.[49]
18th century beginnings
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus proposed what he considered to be natural taxonomic categories of the human species. He distinguished between Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens europaeus, and he later added four geographical subdivisions of humans: white Europeans, red Americans, yellow Asians and black Africans. Although Linnaeus intended them as objective classifications, his descriptions of these groups included cultural patterns and derogatory stereotypes.[50]
In 1775, the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach asserted that "The white colour holds the first place, such as is that of most European peoples. The redness of the cheeks in this variety is almost peculiar to it: at all events it is but seldom to be seen in the rest.".[51]
In the various editions of his On the Natural Variety of Mankind, he categorized humans into four or five races, largely built on Linnaeus' classifications. But while, in 1775, he had grouped into his "first and most important" race "Europe, Asia this side of the Ganges, and all the country situated to the north of the Amoor, together with that part of North America, which is nearest both in position and character of the inhabitants", he somewhat narrows his "Caucasian variety" in the third edition of his text, of 1795: "To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa."[52][50][53][54] Blumenbach quotes various other systems by his contemporaries, ranging from two to seven races, authored by the authorities of that time, including, besides Linnæus, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant.
In the question of color, he conduces a rather thorough enquire, considering also factors of diet and health, but ultimately believes that "climate, and the influence of the soil and the temperature, together with the mode of life, have the greatest influence".[55] Blumenbach's conclusion was, however, to proclaim all races' attribution to one single human species. Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on environmental factors, such as solarization and diet. Like other monogenists, Blumenbach held to the "degenerative hypothesis" of racial origins. He claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia,[56] and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor diet. He consistently believed that the degeneration could be reversed in a proper environmental control and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original Caucasian race.[57]
19th and 20th century: the "Caucasian race"
During the period of the mid-19th to mid-20th century,[58] race scientists, including most physical anthropologists classified the world's populations into three, four, or five races, which, depending on the authority consulted, were further divided into various sub-races. During this period the Caucasian race, named after people of the North Caucasus (Caucasus Mountains) but extending to all Europeans, figured as one of these races, and was incorporated as a formal category of both scientific research and, in countries including the United States, social classification.[59]
There was never any scholarly consensus on the delineation between the Caucasian race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid one, including the populations of East Asia. Thus, Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard (1920) classified as "brown" most of the populations of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, and counted as "white" only the European peoples and their descendants, as well as some populations in parts of Anatolia and the northern areas of Morocco, Algeria And Tunisia.[60] Some authorities[who?], following Huxley (1870), distinguished the Xanthochroi or "light whites" of Northern Europe with the Melanochroi or "dark whites" of the Mediterranean.[61]
Although modern neo-nazis often invoke National Socialist iconography on behalf of white nationalism, National Socialist Germany repudiated the idea of a unified white race, instead promoting Nordicism. In National Socialist propaganda, Eastern European Slavs were often referred to as Untermensch, and the relatively under-developed status of Eastern European countries such as Poland and the USSR were attributed to the racial inferiority of their inhabitants.[62] Fascist Italy took the same view, and both of these nations justified their colonial ambitions in Eastern Europe on racist, anti-Slavic grounds.[63] These nations were not alone in their view; there are numerous cases in the 20th century where some European ethnic groups labeled or treated other Europeans as members of another, inferior race.
21st century
Alastair Bonnett has stated that a strong "current of scientific research supports the theory that Europeans were but one expression of a wider racial group (termed sometimes Caucasian)," a group that, Bonnett notes, would include not only Europeans, but also South Asians, North Africans, and even Northeast Africans such as Ethiopians.[64][65] Bonnett notes that this scientific definition of a Caucasoid race has little currency "outside certain immigration bureaucracies and traditional anthropology," and concludes that popular notions of whiteness are not scientific, but socially constructed.[64]
Racial categories remain widely used in medical research, but this can create important problems. For example, researchers Raj Bhopal and Liam Donaldson opine that since white people are a heterogeneous group, the term white should therefore be abandoned as a classification for the purposes of epidemiology and health research, and identifications based on geographic origin and migration history be used instead.[66]
According to geneticist David Reich, based on ancient human genomes that his laboratory sequenced in 2016, ancient West Eurasians descend from a mixture of as few as four ancestral components related to the Eastern Hunter Gatherers (EHG), the Neolithic Iran, the Neolithic Levant and Natufians, and the Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG):[67]
The cultural boundaries separating white Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing. Professor David R. Roediger of the University of Illinois, suggests that the construction of the white race in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slave owners from slaves.[257] By the 18th century, white had become well established as a racial term. According to John Tehranian, among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Germans, Greeks, white Hispanics, Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs and Spaniards.[258] Finns were also on several occasions "racially" discriminated against[259] and not seen as white, but "Asian". The reasons for this were the arguments and theories about the Finns originally being of Mongolian instead of "native" European origin due to the Finnish language belonging to the Uralic and not the Indo-European language family.[260]
During American history, the process of officially being defined as white by law often came about in court disputes over pursuit of citizenship. The Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to "any alien, being a free white person". In at least 52 cases, people denied the status of white by immigration officials sued in court for status as white people. By 1923, courts had vindicated a "common-knowledge" standard, concluding that "scientific evidence" was incoherent. Legal scholar John Tehranian argues that in reality this was a "performance-based" standard, relating to religious practices, education, intermarriage and a community's role in the United States.[261]
In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of Indian descent were not white men, and thus not eligible to citizenship.[262] While Thind was a high caste Hindu born in the northern Punjab region and classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Aryan race, the court conceded that he was not white or Caucasian since the word Aryan "has to do with linguistic and not at all with physical characteristics" and "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences" between Indians and white people.[262] In United States v. Cartozian (1925), an Armenian immigrant successfully argued (and the Supreme Court agreed) that his nationality was white in contradistinction to other people of the Near East—Kurds, Turks, and Arabs in particular—on the basis of their Christian religious traditions.[263] In conflicting rulings In re Hassan (1942) and Ex parte Mohriez, United States District Courts found that Arabs did not, and did qualify as white under immigration law.[264]
Still today the relationship between some ethnic groups and whiteness remains complex. In particular, some Jewish and Arab individuals both self-identify and are considered as part of the White American racial category, but others with the same ancestry feel they are not white nor are they perceived as white by American society. The United States Census Bureau proposed but then withdrew plans to add a new category to classify Middle Eastern and North African peoples in the U.S. Census 2020, over a dispute over whether this classification should be considered a white ethnicity or a race.[265] According to Frank Sweet "various sources agree that, on average, people with 12 percent or less admixture appear White to the average American and those with up to 25 percent look ambiguous (with a Mediterranean skin tone)".[266]
The current U.S. Census definition includes as white "a person having origins in any of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."[256] The U.S. Department of Justice's Federal Bureau of Investigation describes white people as "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa through racial categories used in the Uniform Crime Reports Program adopted from the Statistical Policy Handbook (1978) and published by the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards, U.S. Department of Commerce."[267] The "white" category in the UCR includes non-black Hispanics.[268]
White Americans made up nearly 90% of the population in 1950.[253] A report from the Pew Research Center in 2008 projects that by 2050, non-Hispanic white Americans will make up 47% of the population, down from 67% projected in 2005.[269] According to a study on the genetic ancestry of Americans, white Americans (stated "European Americans") on average are 98.6% European, 0.19% African and 0.18% Native American.[270] Southern states with higher African American populations, tend to have higher percentages of African ancestry. According to the 23andMe database, up to 13% of self-identified white American Southerners have greater than 1% African ancestry.[270] Southern states with the highest African American populations, tended to have the highest percentages of hidden African ancestry.[271] Robert P. Stuckert, member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio State University, has poignantly stated that today the majority of the descendants of African slaves are white.[272]
One-drop rule
The "one-drop rule"–that a person with any amount of known black African ancestry (however small or invisible) is considered black–is a classification that was used in parts of the United States.[273] It is a colloquial term for a set of laws passed by 18 U.S. states between 1910 and 1931, many as a consequence of Plessy v. Ferguson, a Supreme Court decision that upheld the concept of racial segregation by accepting a "separate but equal" argument. The set of laws was finally declared unconstitutional in 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled on anti-miscegenation laws while hearing Loving v. Virginia, which also found that Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was unconstitutional. The one-drop rule attempted to create a bifurcated system of either black or white regardless of a person's physical appearance, but sometimes failed as people with African ancestry sometimes passed as "white", as noted above. This contrasts with the more flexible social structures present in Latin America (derived from the Spanish colonial era casta system) where there were less clear-cut divisions between various ethnicities.
As a result of centuries of having children with white people, the majority of African Americans have some European admixture,[274] and many white people also have African ancestry.[275][276] Writer and editor Debra Dickerson questions the legitimacy of the one-drop rule, stating that "easily one-third of black people have white DNA".[277] She argues that in ignoring their European ancestry, African Americans are denying their fully articulated multi-racial identities. The peculiarity of the one-drop rule may be illustrated by the case of singer Mariah Carey, who was publicly called "another white girl trying to sing black", but in an interview with Larry King, responded that—despite her physical appearance and the fact that she was raised primarily by her white mother—due to the one-drop rule she did not "feel white".[278][279] Recently, the possibility of genetic testing has raised new questions about the way African Americans describe their race.[280]
Puerto Rico
| Puerto Rico by the Spanish and US Census 1812–2010 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Population | Percent | Ref(s) |
| Self-identified as white | |||
| 1812 | 85,662 | 46.8% | [281] |
| 1899 | 589,426 | 61.8% | [281] |
| 2000 | 3,064,862 | 80.5% | [282] |
| 2010 | 2,825,100 | 75.8% | [283] |
Contrary to most other Caribbean places, Puerto Rico gradually became predominantly populated by European immigrants.[281] Puerto Ricans of Spanish, Italian (primarily via Corsica) and French descent comprise the majority. (See: Spanish settlement of Puerto Rico).
In 1899, one year after the U.S acquired the island, 61.8% or 589,426 people self-identified as white.[281] One hundred years later (2000), the total increased to 80.5% (3,064,862);[282] not because there has been an influx of whites toward the island (or an exodus of non-White people), but a change of race conceptions, mainly because of Puerto Rican elites to portray Puerto Rico's image as the "white island of the Antilles", partly as a response to scientific racism.[284]
Hundreds are from Corsica, France, Italy, Portugal, Lebanon, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany, along with large numbers of immigrants from Spain. This was the result of granted land from Spain during the Real Cedula de Gracias de 1815 (Royal Decree of Graces of 1815), which allowed European Catholics to settle in the island with a certain amount of free land.
Between 1960 and 1990, the census questionnaire in Puerto Rico did not ask about race or color.[285] Racial categories therefore disappeared from the dominant discourse on the Puerto Rican nation. However, the 2000 census included a racial self-identification question in Puerto Rico and, for the first time in since 1950, allowed respondents to choose more than one racial category to indicate mixed ancestry. (Only 4.2% chose two or more races.) With few variations, the census of Puerto Rico used the same questionnaire as in the U.S. mainland. According to census reports, most islanders responded to the new federally mandated categories on race and ethnicity by declaring themselves "white"; few declared themselves to be black or some other race.[286] However, it was estimated 20% of white Puerto Ricans may have black ancestry.[287]
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