Racism

[Mark]

What a pleasure to read your writing, Hym. Thank you for sharing!

Posted by Hym (here)
I remember the highest likelihood of agency hit squads, one of which did the shooting itself. I remember the King family, knowing full well the truth, searching for the truth in court of an agency of the u.s. gov't's guilt in the assassination and not any guilt of james earl ray, after they had lengthly conversations with him.

This is so, MLK knew full well the power of the forces arrayed against not only him, but anyone who threatened the status quo. This video shows a man who knows he doesn't have long to live. It is one of his last, if not his last, public appearance before his assassination.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=e49VEpWg61M

Posted by Hym (here)
I would ask any black man why he would work for an agency that has never been held culpable for the death of Martin, providing the weapons that were used in Malcolm's murder, for inserting provocateurs as operatives in any empowerment movement, all done primarily for opposition to the profiteering war in Vietnam, the one step over the line in the most personal of self-sacrifices against evil. In this all I see no disconnect from economic and racial equality.

I don't speak for all black men who've worked for the military industrial complex or government, but as one who has done and is currently doing that, I believe I may be able to shed some light on your question. Blacks have fought for this nation since the American Revolution; recall Crispus Attucks, the first to die during the so-called Boston Tea Party. In every conflict. Recall the Buffalo Soldiers, who fought against native folks during the frontier years.

Past some originating generations of enslavement, the tie to Africa dissipated, as such things occur and people become creatures of their lived landscapes. Over many, many generations of trauma and pain, of life and love, of being tools of the control matrix while virtually - and physically - building this nation from the ground up, watering its soil with blood, sweat and tears, black Americans have come to feel a sense of ownership of this land. Not by dint of privilege but by dint of hard, soul-aching work, presence and sheer grit. Of surviving against all odds, of defeating attempts at genocide and by being so strong and resilient in the face of all efforts to deny, denigrate and destroy us physically, mentally and spiritually by an oppressor system and those who have propagated it.

We believe we ARE this nation. We are its promise in action. We are the proof of this system's full potentiality in effect, as in, the guarantee and promise of freedom to those who fight for it. Well, who has fought for it more than us? Not only against enemies foreign but also enemies of that very freedom the Constitution and Declaration enshrine, within.

You will never see black people leaving this nation en masse. And here, I'm speaking of those of us whose ancestors have been here for hundreds and thousands of years, as mine have. For one, we have no place to go, we are mixed, black, white and native. A new people, genetically engineered by slave masters and love. We are as much a part of this landscape as anyone who can be considered such and we are more a part of it than many who claim it as a mere vestige of their inherent expression of European-derived privilege.

We work against those elements of the system that seek to keep us disenfranchised, that seek to destroy us from the face of the earth and that work occurs within the system and without.

Martin saw no disconnect either. Which is why he sought to hold an interracial poverty march, right before his assassination. It has always been true that blacks and poor whites have had more in common than apart. President Lyndon B Johnson said it best: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Posted by Hym (here)
I find it hard to listen to the many obfuscations of the truths this great man shared with us, even while understanding the mechanisms of manipulation within academia, the media and the profiteers. I remember the turn to truths, from those that live far beyond hate, that Malcolm shared when he realized the common values we all share. Medgar Evers and millions of those as worthy as any other that ever lived who were victimized by the hatred, the greed and the fear. At the same time I hold no white guilt for the sins of other souls, as I know the temporary time limit of this human skin and the illusion of any value it does and does not have. I'll be working in the fields while others waste time blaming.

I appreciate your personal perspective greatly. The work engaged, is the Great Work, of alchemical transformation of a landscape and a people who are One, but who don't realize it yet because we are set against each other so skillfully by the masters of deceit and manipulation.

Posted by Hym (here)
And, unless you have stepped up and in for others who are not of the majority wherever you live, when these challenges have threatened your income, your financial security, your personal freedom and your physical health...you do not know what it takes to be here and be of any worth. Your discussions about equality hold no merit with me. For me it has often been a matter of the rights of opportunity given as the duty of anyone in any government. It has almost always been the direct reality of economic equality not being given and even searched for when it is not present.

Yes.

Posted by Hym (here)
Listening to my son and his stays in south america I see a stark contrast in the lives of those who are discriminated against, yet live in "democracies". It is always those who, like Lula, raise the common economic lives of the poor who are attacked. It is no coincidence that those being uplifted, who most often only want the opportunity to work for a humane wage, and not to gain some welfare, are of color not shared by those in control. It may be that overt racism can be dealt with much easier than living in any place where lip service pretends to equally provide opportunity. It is never a difficult thing to see, even as the lives of many are complex.

Such a beautiful share. Props and appreciation.

[Hym]

Thank You, Rahkyt.
I would rail against any black exodus from here. That'll never happen.

When I noted that agencies were likely responsible for the assassination of Dr.King I also meant the army squads assigned to the area at the time.


Here is an indelible experience I had when I was young.....

When I was 7 my Dad took me to a teamsters union strike in L.A. I don't recall him taking any other of my siblings to those picket lines. I remember the cold of the very early morning that day and welcoming the warmth as the day went on, but that happened very slowly as I wasn't used to staying so relatively still for so long. I recall how odd it was for all of the men there not working and watching his friends stopping the truckers to talk to them.

At one point in the morning a dark panel van pulled up. Police got out, big police and they quickly began harassing the strikers. My Dad told me that they were the Metro Squad. After they pushed the strikers around they singled out a Mexican-american man and put him in the van. There may have been more than one van and more than one police car there. I don't remember because I was so focused on the attack against the workers there.

As the van and the other cars were pulling away I asked my Dad what were the cops doing. He said that they were going to take this man, one of the loaders/swampers who worked with him to get his CDL, beat the crap out of him and then drop him off somewhere it would be hard for him to get back. I was shocked by this and asked him why. He said those cops were hired by the company they were striking against. He then said "He (my Dad's friend) is paying a price for us." The majority of the drivers and their loaders were black or hispanic at that time and most likely are the same majority to this day.

My son's birthday, August 28, is the memorial day that Dr. King made his "I Have A Dream" speech. That makes sense on many levels if you ever get to know him.

[Mark]

Hello, Hym, thank you again for sharing your experiences. I am appreciative of and encourage all who wish to do the same, these are stories of real people living real experiences. None of the issues we discuss in this thread are hypothetical or ideological, they have to do with what we go through and how we interpret, through our subjective lenses, the world around us. None of us has all the answers, but we all possess a small piece of it. And it is only by sharing those piecees that we can see the larger picture and understand the parameters of what is truly going on and why.

Posted by Hym (here)
As the van and the other cars were pulling away I asked my Dad what were the cops doing. He said that they were going to take this man, one of the loaders/swampers who worked with him to get his CDL, beat the crap out of him and then drop him off somewhere it would be hard for him to get back. I was shocked by this and asked him why. He said those cops were hired by the company they were striking against. He then said "He (my Dad's friend) is paying a price for us." The majority of the drivers and their loaders were black or hispanic at that time and most likely are the same majority to this day.

This story is amazing and so pertinent. Your father's quote reminds me of something that I've spoken of before in this thread but that deserves revisiting, because it cannot be under-emphasized as it has to do with the very formulation of this nation and the current racial dichotomy that we are all trapped systemically within. What your father was speaking to directly and probably consciously is the very essence of the divide that was deliberately created by the British and then consolidated and continued by the American aristocrats that succeeded them in ruling this nation.

Bacon's Rebellion occurred in 1676-77 and it was the first, and last, large-scale multi-racial uprising against a government in American history. People from across the class structure, to include indentured Irish and Africans, fought together against Indians, whom were the original target, and British forces that came in to bolster the government and suppress the rebellion. According to Wikipedia (which suffices for this general, descriptive purpose), this collective action by the general populace had the following effect:

The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class. The ruling class responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.

Racialized slavery and the obsolescence of indentured servitude had been coming for a while. Throughout the mid to late 1600s laws had been passed locally and at the state level making it more difficult for African descended folk to obtain freedom, from enshrining intergenerational enslavement to tying enslavement to the status of the mother, which was designed in order to absolve slave masters from the responsibility of all of the rapey behavior they were involved in as well as the responsibility to and care of the children produced by that rapine behavior, throughout that era of American history, which spanned hundreds of years.

It was also at this point that the ruling class began to offer the previously indentured Irish jobs on the slave patrol, as overseers and other now middle-class occupations, as kind of a barrier between the enslaved and those who, at that point, were beginning to be considered as a singular, white race. So this was the very beginning of what is now a global consideration, that those of European descent are one people, heretofore known as "white" people. Prior to this point, this was not a political designation. Europeans were and are prejudiced against each other, generally along the lines of core (Great Britain, Germany, France, etc.) versus periphery nations (Italy, Portugal, Greece, etc.). But in America, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, whiteness as a bulwark against blackness, was formally institutionalized.

As an examination of Bacon's Rebellion will reveal - taken alongside a further exploration of American history from the viewpoint of organized resistance against the depredations of capital - it has always been about the money.

Land was also granted to the Irish and other lower-class whites, especially as the westward expansion continued but in the east, this practice served to invest those lower class whites in the system and its propagation and further separate them from the blacks they had allied themselves with against governmental forces previously.

As yours and your father's experience attests, Hym, those same practices are in effect today. They have been institutionalized over time and continue to separate us, or, as occurred in your personal experience, help us to understand the overall plight of the lower and underclass by way of graphic and poignant example.

His statement to you, "He is paying a price for us" is an exact understanding of white supremacy and capitalism as practiced in America. The lower classes in general and the black and brown inhabitants of those strata, pay the price in pain and suffering, in living lives of the permanent underclass, which serve to strike fear into whites and select blacks and browns inhabiting the upper lower and middle classes. That fear is seminal, in that it says to all of us that the jobs we hold are at the sufferance and will of those who create the jobs and they can be taken away at any time. The beating that brown (or black) man took served further to show all of the workers, but white workers in particular, that their job status and economic stability is ephemeral and dependent upon their acquiescence to the demands of capitalism and the institution of racial hierarchy. As perception extends up the class structure, these realizations become more stark as, the higher you rise, the harder the fall. The message seems to be, death and destruction of all you hold dear, if you do not comply.

I would like to emphasize now that this generalization stands examination across the board and also across the span of American history. Any objective review of this nation's history and the codification of racialized slavery, the subsequent Black Codes following emancipation, Jim Crow institutionalization, Segregation and then partial de-segregation and integration, in residence as well as employment, will show this interpretation to have been and to be, even still, in some ways, the norm.

Posted by Hym (here)
My son's birthday, August 28, is the memorial day that Dr. King made his "I Have A Dream" speech. That makes sense on many levels if you ever get to know him.

A wonderful, blessed synchronicity, which speaks to your family's purpose and destiny, perhaps, if you are a believer in such things. It is a pleasure holding these conversations with you.

[Mark]

It is good to have an understanding of the history, especially of the parts not generally told. The parts you don't learn in High School, the parts even colleges and universities generally don't get into very deeply.

The reason why it is so good is because the devil is in the details, where it is difficult to make generalizations or blanket statements with no justification in history or even logically, because the actual reality is there with you, before you, engaged and understood, made a part of your general corpus of knowledge.

This article documents that background of scientific racism in America, doesn't get into Darwin or Linnaeus or the other proponents that informed the rising Eugenicists of the late Victorian era and early 20th century, but it informs, generally and provides a structure for further knowledge to augment. The links provide other tales that inform the present as well.

A brief history of the enduring phony science that perpetuates white supremacy

The mysterious and chronic sickness had been afflicting slaves for years, working its way into their minds and causing them to flee from their plantations.

Unknown in medical literature, its troubling symptoms were familiar to masters and overseers, especially in the South, where hundreds of enslaved people ran from captivity every year.

On March 12, 1851, the noted physician Samuel A. Cartwright reported to the Medical Association of Louisiana that he had identified the malady and, by combining two Greek terms, given it a name: Drapetomania.

Drapetes, a runaway, and mania, madness.

He also announced that it was completely curable.

Negroes, with their smaller brains and blood vessels, and their tendency toward indolence and barbarism, Cartwright told fellow doctors, had only to be kept benevolently in the state of submission, awe and reverence that God had ordained.

“The Negro is [then] spellbound, and cannot run away,” he said.

The Dawn of American Slavery: Jamestown 400 special report

Cartwright’s presentation a decade before the Civil War was part of the long, insidious practice of what historians call scientific racism — the spread of bogus theories of supposed black inferiority in an attempt to rationalize slavery and centuries of social and economic domination and plunder.

Here, enslaved people were beneath even the human desire for freedom. They had to be diseased.

This thinking would thrive in the 18th and especially the 19th centuries. It would mutate, vary in perversion and persevere for 400 years right up to the present day. Starting with theories of physical and intellectual inferiority that likened blacks to animals — monkeys and apes especially — or helpless children, it would evolve to infer black cultural and then social inferiority.

“What black inferiority meant has changed in every generation . . . but ultimately Americans have been making the same case,” said historian Ibram X. Kendi.

Such thought exists today with pernicious assumptions about the current nature of black life and black people, still featuring age-old racist references to blacks as animals. It persists despite the advent of modern DNA science, which has shown race to be fundamentally a social construct. Humans, as it turns out, share about 99.9 percent of their DNA with each other, and outward physical characteristics such as hair texture and skin color, about which racists have long obsessed, occupy just a tiny portion of the human genome.

Even so, many Americans, blind to the origins of racist notions, “think that there’s such things as black blood and black diseases and that black people are by nature predisposed to dancing and athletics,” Kendi said. “These are common ideas.”

Modern examples — sometimes overt, sometimes seemingly springing from the collective American subconscious — underscore the insidiousness of pseudoscientific ideas about race that were first promoted in earlier centuries.

Consider comedian Roseanne Barr’s use of an ape analogy in a tweet about Valerie Jarrett, an African American adviser to President Barack Obama, which led to the cancellation of Barr’s ABC television show.

Now consider Cartwright’s claims in 1851 that, among other things, a Negro withstood the rays of the sun better because of an eye feature like one found in apes.

Cartwright also speciously observed that the black man’s neck was shorter than a white person’s, his “bile” was a deeper color, his blood blacker, his feet flatter, his skull different.

Anthony and Mary Johnson: the free black pioneers whose surprising story tells much about race in Virginia

Yet, in addition to his keen eyesight, he had other animal-like senses, smelling better and hearing better than the white man.

“Like children, [Negroes] require government in everything . . . or they will run into excesses,” Cartwright said. Slavery, he concluded unsurprisingly, was for the enslaved person’s own good.

The twisted vestiges of scientific racism continue to inspire white hatred of and violence toward blacks today.

“Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional,” mass murderer Dylann Roof wrote in the crude manifesto that he posted on the Internet in 2015. “Negroes have lower Iqs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior.”

On June 17, 2015, Roof went into an African American church in Charleston, S.C., and shot nine black worshipers to death. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

'More sensation than reflection'
Self-interested justifications for atrocities against and the oppression of African Americans go back to the 1400s and an early Portuguese defense of slave trading written by Gomes Eanes de Zurara, wrote Kendi, a professor at American University in Washington, in his book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the 2016 National Book Award.

Zurara wrote that captured Africans had “lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings . . . [and] only knew how to live in bestial sloth.” Once enslaved, their souls could be saved and their lives improved, he said.

On this side of the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson played an early and highly influential role in the establishment of pseudoscientific ideas about black racial inferiority.

On Feb. 27, 1787, more than a decade after he helped write the Declaration of Independence, future president Jefferson published his book “Notes on the State of Virginia,” an extensive study of subjects including his state’s geography, climate, religion and its enslaved black population.

The haunted houses’: Legacy of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion lingers, but reminders are disappearing

The book made clear that when the revered Founding Father said it was “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he was not including black people.

“In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” wrote Jefferson, whose livelihood depended on the existence of slavery. “In imagination they are dull [and] tasteless. . . . This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

“Deep rooted prejudices . . . real distinctions which nature has made . . . and many other circumstances will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race,” he wrote.

It was perhaps the most damaging and enduring instance of scientific racism in American history, Kendi said.

“This was one of the . . . best selling nonfiction books in early America,” he said. “And black and other anti-racist activists were arguing against Jefferson’s theory of black intellectual inferiority into the 1830s.”

'Pervading darkness'
In 1849, Samuel Cartwright was engaged by a Louisiana medical committee to investigate “the diseases and physical peculiarities of our negro population.”

He seemed well qualified. The 57-year-old native of Fairfax County, Va., had practiced in Natchez, Miss., for 25 years, and his patients included his friend Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy. The same year the report was issued, he was appointed professor of “diseases of the Negro” at what is now Tulane University.

He began his report for the Louisiana committee by reviewing “the anatomical and physiological differences between the negro and the white man.”

Skin color was obvious.

But “there are other differences more deep, durable and indelible,” he wrote. “The membranes, the muscles, the tendons . . . even the negro’s brain and nerves . . . are tinctured with a shade of pervading darkness.”

Then there was the true cause of the enslaved person’s “debasement of mind,” he wrote.

“It is . . . [the] defective hematosis, or atmosperization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium . . . [that] has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves,” he claimed.

The remarkable survival story of Angela, the first enslaved African woman recorded in Virginia

Although Cartwright’s ideas were actually part of a long racist tradition, by the time he rendered them they had a new urgency, said Khalil Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

The rise of the movement to abolish slavery “created a crisis of knowledge about . . . who people of African descent were in the hierarchy of man, and what precisely were they capable of,” he said.

Until then, he said, despite pronouncements like Jefferson’s, science wasn’t essential to justifying slavery. Now, under threat, the then-250-year-old institution was direly in need of a “scientific” rationale.

“There is a great convulsion before us,” Josiah C. Nott, a South Carolina physician, anthropologist and a future medical director in the Confederate army, told a Southern Rights Association meeting in 1851.

“It is time that we should arouse from our lethargy and prepare for the crises,” he said.

Nott offered his pseudoscientific rationale: “Look around you . . . at the Negro races,” Nott said. “Their physical type is peculiar; their grade of intellect is greatly inferior; they are utterly wanting in moral and physical energy.”

Embedded within his speech was a not-so-hidden motive: The institution of slavery, he said, “has grown up with us from our infancy, it has become part of our very being; our national prosperity and domestic happiness are inseparable from it.”

Evolutionary ladder
Around that time, in 1850, an enslaved man named Jack stood before a camera in Columbia, S.C. His face was deeply creased, perhaps from age, perhaps from long exposure to the weather.

He was described as a “driver” — of what was not specified. Livestock? Wagons? People?

Originally from Guinea, in West Africa, he was owned by one B.F. Taylor Esq., who had a plantation in Columbia, S.C.

That March, Jack, who looked about 40, and six other enslaved men and women, were brought to the studio to have their photographs taken. They were specimens, and for the most part they were pictured naked.

The images were made at the behest of Louis Agassiz, the famous Swiss American scientist and Harvard professor, who was studying what was called “polygenism.”

This was the latest “scientific” tool applied to the idea of supposed black inferiority: the now-discredited notion that man sprang from numerous sources and that “races” could therefore be categorized and ranked.

It would carry well into the 20th century.

The photographs were “designed to analyze the physical differences between European whites and African blacks, but at the same time . . . prove the superiority of the white race,” photography scholar Brian Wallis wrote in a 1995 essay on the pictures.

“In nineteenth-century anthropology, blacks were often situated along the evolutionary ladder midway between a classical ideal and the orangutan,” he wrote.

The Bible was used to justify slavery. The Africans made it their path to freedom

Such thinking went with the rise in the early 1900s of modern eugenics — the idea that a “race” could and should be purified by selective breeding and the elimination of flawed peoples.

In 1916, a New York lawyer and racial theorist named Madison Grant wrote a notorious book called “The Passing of the Great Race.”

Grant, whose father, a Union army doctor, had earned the Medal of Honor in the Civil War, believed in a rigid racial hierarchy, with “nordics” at the top and blacks and others at the bottom.

“Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within,” Grant wrote.

His book was translated into several languages.

One reader in Germany was especially admiring. He, too, mused about extermination, but of a different “race.” His name was Adolf Hitler, and he reportedly referred to his copy of the book as his Bible.

In 1936, African American sprinter Jesse Owens smashed the ideas of Hitler and Madison when he won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics.

But Owens’s own track coach belittled the success of black runners: “It was not long ago that his ability to sprint and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle.”

The old notion lived on, and so have many white social and economic advantages.

Even when “Americans have discarded old racist ideas, new racist ideas have constantly been produced for their renewed consumption,” Kendi wrote.

Some day, he hoped, the time will come “when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with black people is that they think there is something wrong with black people.”

‘The haunted houses’: Legacy of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion lingers, but reminders are disappearing

Freedom and slavery, the ‘central paradox of American history’

Anthony and Mary Johnson were pioneers on the Eastern Shore whose surprising story tells much about race in Virginia history

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

[Gracy]

This guy really intrigues me, had to listen to his entire talk with Joe Rogan today. His name is Daryl Davis, and he is on a one man mission to end racism in America via education, the elimination of ignorance.

I recall briefly stumbling across his unique and fascinating story some time back, hearing about the 200 or so Klan members who wound up walking away from it due to growing relationships with him, and even seeing photos of these friendships, robes and all if you can believe it!





When I saw he had done Rogan for 2 1/2 plus hours, I simply had to hear this man out.

Here is the talk, comes with my absolute highest recommendation, especially about the first hour and twenty minutes or so describing how he started down the road of befriending, and eventually inspiring many high level Klan members to consider taking their lives in a different direction.

Absolutely riveting. A great man imo!

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oGTQ0Wj6yIg

[Mark]

Even though the beginnings of the modern science of genetics were in American slave studies, American eugenics movements of the late Victorian, Geography and Environmental Determinism and, a bit later, the Nazi concentration camps, its efficacy and current state of exploratory remorselessness has resulted in the application of the science to many questions that shed light on topics otherwise relegated merely to myth and whimsy. There are a number of questions regarding the issue of skin color that remain mysterious, it seems that the prevailing theory of cold climes being the cause for lightening skin coloration remains predominant, which makes sense environmentally, but does not necessarily account for all examples, for instance, the Inuit. This article does provide some context for the movement of peoples and the evolution of the European population.



How Europeans evolved white skin
By Ann Gibbons

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 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.”

[Mark]

Posted by Gracy May (here)
This guy really intrigues me, had to listen to his entire talk with Joe Rogan today. His name is Daryl Davis, and he is on a one man mission to end racism in America via education, the elimination of ignorance.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oGTQ0Wj6yIg

I've also heard of this gentleman and his work, although I have never listened to or watched him discuss it. Thanks for sharing this resource, I will definitely check it out and I hope others do as well!

This is the deep work of our times and those who do it are to be commended. People are people, I've found and, one on one, it is always possible to make a way with most, to create common cause and to find places and spaces of agreement and connection.

I've done a bit of this work myself, although not in the direct and confrontational manner Daryl has. In being open and engaging, I have found that people open up to me and share their stories, why they have held prejudices against black folks and others. I've often found that it generally goes back to one incident that often happened during childhood where there was a bad experience with someone of color that then colored their perception of all people of color from that moment on. It is a typical human response and comes down to a safety and fear issue, which makes perfect sense. I've been blessed to have been able to break those stereotypes for a good number of people in my life integrating spaces in America and abroad, just by being who I am with my background and experience.

It is all about the human connection. Actually showing people that we are more alike than different, no matter our skin color.

[Mark]

These days it really is all about the science. To counter arguments based upon incorrect underlying assumptions, it is necessary to know the facts as they stand. There are a few in this article, with links to other resources.

How to fight racism using science
Misguided assumptions about race are going mainstream, but hard facts can help you combat entrenched attitudes



It seems we can’t move for comments about race dominating our media landscape, be it about an actor formerly known as a princess, or by an actor previously unknown to anyone outside of his famous acting dynasty. These are fractious times, and such debates appear to be increasing in frequency. But there are some fights for which you can arm yourself in advance – and when the argument is about race, the weapon of choice is science.

Racism is a prejudice that has a longstanding relationship with science. The invention of race occurred in the age of empires and plunder, when men of the emerging discipline of science classified the people of the world, mostly from their armchairs. Carl Linnaeus is the father of biological taxonomy, having invented the system that we use today: genus and species – Homo sapiens. He was also a central figure in the emergence of scientific racism too, alongside Kant, Voltaire and a host of other European men.

Classifications were based primarily on skin colour, some on a handful of skull measurements, and they also came with some shoddy value judgments: Linnaeus had the people of Africa as lazy and “governed by caprice”; Native Americans were “zealous and stubborn”; East Asians were haughty, greedy, and “ruled by opinions”. Voltaire believed that black people were a different species. All of these taxonomies were inherently hierarchical, with white Europeans always on top.

In the 19th century, Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton and others tightened their scientific arguments for race though, as Darwin noted, no one could agree on how many races there actually were, the range being between one and 63. Galton was an amazing scientist, and a stunning racist. The most delicious irony about him is that the field he effectively established – human genetics – is the branch of science that has demonstrated unequivocally that race is not biologically meaningful. Modern genetics clearly shows that the way we colloquially define race does not align with the biology that underpins human variation. Instead, race is a cultural taxonomy – a social construct. This doesn’t mean it is invalid or unimportant, nor does it mean that race does not exist. Humans are social animals, and the way we perceive each other is of paramount importance. Race exists because we perceive it.

Racism seems to be making a comeback in public life: the prime minister has a well-stocked back catalogue of racist remarks, most notably describing Congolese people as “piccanninies” with “watermelon smiles”. Antisemitism is a defining issue for the 21st-century Labour party. Sport has always suffered from racist fans, and in 2018, bananas were thrown on to pitches at black footballers such as Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, as they were routinely 30 years ago. The England cricketer Jofra Archer was subjected to racist abuse in a Test match in New Zealand in November.

We all know someone who has casually racist opinions: the misattribution of elite athletic success to ancestry rather than training, that east Asian students are naturally better at maths; or that Jews are innately good with money. Racism may be back, so get tooled up, because science is no ally to racists. Here are some standard canards of prejudice, and why science says something different.

Skin in the game


What we see with our eyes is the merest fraction of a person. But humans are a highly visual species, and skin colour is the primary factor in allocating race. This idea is modern though, only becoming the primary classifier during the so-called Age of Enlightenment. Modern genetics reveals a much more complicated – and fascinating – picture.

Lighter skin is, at least partially, an adaptation to less sunny skies, as a means of protecting us from folate deficiency. Homo sapiens originated as an African species, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we were ancestrally dark-skinned, nor that everyone was the same colour. Some of the differences we can see and measure between populations are local adaptations to evolutionary pressures such as food availability and disease. Similarly, genes for lighter pigmentation have been selected by an evolution away from the equator. But the palette of skin colour within the African continent is far greater than anywhere else, meaning that a simplistic model of selection based on exposure to the sun only explains a fraction of that diversity. There are 1.3 billion Africans, 42 million African Americans. Not only are these huge numbers, but the people in question are more diverse genetically than anyone else on Earth. And yet westerners refer to all of them as “black”. This is a scientifically meaningless classification, and one that is baked into western culture from five centuries of scientific racism. Stereotyping based on pigmentation is foolish, because racial differences are skin deep.

These lands are your lands


“England for the English” warbled Morrissey in his song The National Front Disco. Now that Mozza has given apparent support to For Britain, a political party even Nigel Farage thinks is full of “Nazis and racists”, it’s no longer clear the lyrics were ironic. Although Morrissey denies he is a racist, the sentiment is an old racist refrain. In July last year, President Trump suggested that if four elected US congresswomen didn’t like it in the US, they should go back to where they came from. Three of them were born in the United States and one is a Somali-born American citizen. Meanwhile, Trump’s paternal grandparents were German immigrants, his mother Scottish-born, his first wife Moravian, his third, Slovenian. It is never clear where the benchmark for indigeneity lies.

Indigeneity is a tricky concept. The British Isles have been invaded throughout their history: 1066 was the most recent hostile conquest, but before that, we were occupied by Vikings, who followed Angles, Saxons, Alans, and dozens of other tribes. The Romans ruled for a while, with conscripts not from Rome but from all over their empire, including Gaul, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.

About 4,500 years ago, Britain was populated primarily with farmers who had European ancestors. DNA taken from the bones of the long dead suggests they were probably olive-skinned, with dark hair and brown eyes.

The Beaker folk arrived in Britain about 4,400 years ago, and again according to ancient DNA, within a few centuries had replaced almost the entire population. We don’t know how or why, whether it was violence, disease, or something else.

Before them there were darker-skinned hunter-gatherers, who had been there a few thousand years. Then it all gets a bit foggy. The earliest evidence of British humans is in the crumbling coastline of Happisburgh in Norfolk, where size nine footprints of an unknown species of human were set in soft stone 900,000 years ago.

No country, people, political power or border is permanent. The only true indigenous Brits were not even our own species. So, when racists say “England for the English”, or when they talk about indigenous people, I do not know who they mean, or more specifically, when they mean. They probably don’t either.

Pure blood


White supremacists are obsessed with DNA. I spend time lurking in some of the nastiest corners of the internet, partially so that you don’t have to, but also to track their conversations about ancestry. Racist online cesspits such as Stormfront and 4Chan and 8Kun are flooded with thousands of posts about racial purity and ancestry-testing products. Occasionally, these commercial kits reveal previously unknown ancestry from people that white supremacists loathe. White purity is the key idea within white supremacy, and reactions are often conspiracy-fuelled (“the companies are owned by Jews”), or just absurd: “When you look in the mirror, do you see a jew [sic]? If not, you’re good,” which somewhat undermines the point of the tests.

There are no purebred humans. Our family trees are matted webs, and all lines of our ancestry get tangled after a few generations. All Nazis have Jewish forebears, all racists have African ancestors. Non-racists often think that their ancestry is somehow pure too, and this can be bolstered by misinterpreting commercial genetic ancestry kits. But no matter how isolated or wholesome you think your family tree is, it is a node on a tangled bank, linked directly to everyone else on your continent after only a few centuries, and everyone in the world after a couple of millennia.

Genealogy and genetic genealogy are not perfectly aligned, and due to the way DNA is shuffled during the production of sperm and egg, much is cumulatively lost over the generations. What this means is that you carry DNA from only half of your ancestors 11 generations back. You are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the 18th century. You are descended from multitudes, most of whom you know nothing about, and many of whom you have no meaningful genetic relationship with.

Black power


The last white man to win the 100m final at the Olympics was Allan Wells in 1980, a year when the US boycotted the event. This was also the last time white men competed in the final, five in total. For many, this forms the basis of a long-standing assumption that black people – and more specifically African Americans, Jamaicans or Canadians – have a biological advantage for explosive energy sports.

Unfortunately, elite sportspeople are an abysmal sample on which to make generalisations about populations – they are already wonderfully freakish outliers. The sample size is hopeless, too: the total number of athletes that have competed in the 100m Olympic final since Wells took the gold is 58. Five of them were African, and not from the west African countries from where the enslaved were taken. By this metric, Africans are exactly as successful as white people in the 100m since 1980.

The argument that informs this misguided idea is that centuries of slavery have resulted in selection for explosive energy genes (about which we know very little). This is also a total nonstarter, for many reasons. Most significantly, we can look for the signals of evolutionary selection in African Americans since the beginning of transatlantic slavery, that is, genes that have proliferated in that population. A 2014 study of the DNA of 29,141 African Americans showed no signs of selection across the whole genome for any trait in the time since their ancestors were taken from their African homelands.

But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that genes were selected that related to power and strength. Why then do eastern Europeans dominate weightlifting, yet are absent from sprinting? Why do African Americans dominate in boxing, but not wrestling? Where are all the black sprint cyclists? Why is it that in the 50m freestyle in swimming in the whole history of the Olympics, the number of African American finalists is… one? None of these facts align with the slavery explanation for African American dominance in the 100m.

The transatlantic slave trade also imported millions of West African people to South America. The number of South Americans of any ancestry to have competed in the 100m finals? Zero.

The point is this: sprinters in the Olympics, or indeed any elite sportspeople, are not a dataset on which a statistician could draw any satisfactory conclusion. Yet it is precisely the data on which extremely popular racial stereotypes are based. Elite athletes deserve better praise than the belief that they have auspicious ancestry.

[Mark]

I've had some extra time today so forgive the extra articles, I didn't want to leave and continue with my RL adventures before stopping at the abode of race and intelligence, a topic I've seen mentioned as an aside quite some number of times, in this space over the years. It is difficult for me not to address it every time that I've seen it but I haven't, generally, as it is an in-depth and fraught discussion. I find this article to address it superbly with many, many links and examples to the actual science and the pseudo-scientific discussions and implications that often obscure the very real differences that can be found between and within diverse populations.

I find that just knowing how intricate the discussion is and recognizing the sheer impossibility of accurately coming to the conclusion many "race" scientists and supremacist apologists have just to make a splash, some money or noteriety, casts the debate in more of a social and cultural rather than scientific context which reveals the true intentions underlying the debate in the first place.

Stop Talking About Race and IQ
Take it from someone who did.

By WILLIAM SALETAN



The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox, Harris fired back, and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein. Two weeks ago, Klein and Harris released a two-hour podcast in which they fruitlessly continued their dispute.

I’ve watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s just defending science against political correctness.

I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person. I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in. That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.

Here’s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.

I’m not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in a specific DNA region have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where, despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been established.

It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated through assortative mating, it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.

The trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic, and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.

There are two scientific problems with making this kind of inference. The first is that bringing race into the genetic conversation obscures the causal analysis. Genes might play no role in racial gaps on IQ tests. But suppose they did: To that extent, what would be the point of talking about race? Some white kids, some black kids, and some Asian kids would have certain genes that marginally favor intelligence. Others wouldn’t. It’s still the genes, not race, that would matter.

This is a rare point of consensus in the IQ debate. In his interview with Harris, Murray notes that in The Bell Curve, race was a crude proxy for genetics. Since the book’s publication in 1994, our ability to assess genetic differences has come a long way. Today, scientists are evaluating thousands of genes that correlate with small increments in IQ. “The blurriness of race is noise in the signal,” Murray tells Harris. “It’s going to obscure … genetic differences in IQ.”

“Race science,” the old idea that race is a biologically causal trait, may live on as an ideology of hate. But as an academic matter, it’s been discredited. We now know that genes flow between populations as they do between families, blurring racial categories and reshuffling human diversity. Genetic patterns can be found within groups, as in the case of prostate cancer. But even then, as Ian Holmes notes in the Atlantic, the patterns correlate with ancestry or population, not race.

When you drag race into the IQ conversation, you bring heat, not light.

The second problem with extending genetic theories of IQ to race is that it confounds the science of heritability. Sullivan and Harris cite research that indicates IQ is, loosely speaking, 40 percent to 80 percent heritable. It can seem natural to extend these estimates to comparisons between racial groups. That’s what I did a decade ago. But it’s a mistake because these studies are done within, not between, populations. They measure, for example, the degree to which being someone’s twin or biological sibling, rather than simply growing up in the same household, correlates with similarity of IQ. They don’t account for many other differences that come into play when comparing whole populations. So if you bring race into the calculation, you’re stretching those studies beyond their explanatory power. And you’re introducing complicating factors: not just education, income, and family structure, but neighborhood, net worth—and discrimination, which is the variable most likely to correlate directly with race.


Murray and others have answers to these objections. They argue that education programs have failed to close racial gaps, that studies haven’t proved that getting adopted has much lasting effect on kids’ IQ scores, and that collective increases in IQ scores are based on factors other than “general” intelligence. These are complex disputes full of nuances about replicating studies, interpreting test questions, and extrapolating from trend lines. But notice how far we’ve drifted from biology. The science here is oblique, abstract, and tenuous. Are you still comfortable speculating about genetics? Are you confident, for instance, that studies that compare black children to white children properly account for family assets and neighborhood, which differ sharply by race even within the same income bracket?

It’s one thing to theorize about race and genes to assist in disease prevention, diagnosis, or treatment, as Reich has done. But before you seize on his essay to explain racial gaps in employment, ask yourself: Given the dubiousness of linking racial genetics to IQ, what would my words accomplish? Would they contribute to prejudice? Would they be used to blame communities for their own poverty? Would I be provoking thought, or would I be offering whites an excuse not to think about the social and economic causes of inequality?

Murray, Sullivan, and Harris try to soften their speculations by stipulating, as I once did, that even if racial differences in IQ are genetic, you shouldn’t make assumptions about any individual. They’re correct that it’s both wrong and irrational to make such inferences from aggregate data. But it’s also easier to treat people as individuals when you don’t start with racial generalizations.

If you’re libertarian or conservative, you might think I’m calling for censorship. I’m not. I’m just asking for precision. Genes are the mechanism under discussion. So talking about the genetics of race and the genetics of IQ is more scientific, not less, than pulling race and IQ together.

Many progressives, on the other hand, regard the whole topic of IQ and genetics as sinister. That, too, is a mistake. There’s a lot of hard science here. It can’t be wished away, and it can be put to good use. The challenge is to excavate that science from the muck of speculation about racial hierarchies.

What’s the path forward? It starts with letting go of race talk. No more podcasts hyping gratuitous racial comparisons as “forbidden knowledge.” No more essays speaking of grim ethnic truths for which, supposedly, we must prepare. Don’t imagine that if you posit an association between race and some trait, you can add enough caveats to erase the impression that people can be judged by their color. The association, not the caveats, is what people will remember.

If you’re interested in race and IQ, you might bristle at these admonitions. Perhaps you think you’re just telling the truth about test scores, IQ heritability, and the biological reality of race. It’s not your fault, you might argue, that you’re smeared and misunderstood. Harris says all of these things in his debate with Klein. And I cringe as I hear them, because I know these lines. I’ve played this role. Harris warns Klein that even if we “make certain facts taboo” and refuse “to ever look at population differences, we will be continually ambushed by these data.” He concludes: “Scientific data can’t be racist.”

No, data aren’t racist. But using racial data to make genetic arguments isn’t scientific. The world isn’t better off if you run ahead of science, waving the flag of innate group differences. And if everyone is misunderstanding your attempts to simultaneously link and distinguish race and IQ, perhaps you should take the hint. The problem isn’t that people are too dumb to understand you. It’s that you’re not understanding the social consequences of your words. When you drag race into the IQ conversation, you bring heat, not light. Your arguments for scientific candor will be more sound and more persuasive in a race-neutral discussion.

The biology of intelligence is full of important questions. To what extent is it one faculty or many? How do we get it, grow it, maintain it, and use it? If it’s heritable, should we think of it less as merit and more as luck, like inheriting money? To what extent does a class structure based on intelligence duplicate or conceal a class structure based on family wealth? Is intelligence truly supplanting other kinds of inheritance as a competitive advantage? Is it unleashing social mobility? Or is it, through assortative mating, entrenching inequality? These are much better conversations than the one we’ve been stuck in. Let’s get on with them.

[Mark]

So, let's get down to it. Speaking of human differences, let's go back a bit further, to see if we can find the root of change, of differentiation and evolution within the human family. This article is a beginning to that search.



Neanderthal discovery sheds new light on human history

By James Rogers

Scientists at Princeton University have made a stunning Neanderthal ancestry discovery that sheds new light on human history.

Neanderthal DNA has typically been associated with modern humans outside of Africa. However, by developing a new method for finding Neanderthal DNA in the human genome, the Princeton researchers have, for the first time, searched for Neanderthal ancestry in African populations, as well as those outside the African continent.

A paper on the research has been published in the journal Cell.

NEANDERTHAL BEACHCOMBERS WENT DIVING FOR SEASHELLS, SCIENTISTS DISCOVER

“When the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, using DNA collected from ancient bones, it was accompanied by the discovery that modern humans in Asia, Europe and America inherited approximately 2 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals — proving humans and Neanderthals had interbred after humans left Africa,” the scientists explained, in a statement. “A comparable catalogue of Neanderthal ancestry in African populations, however, has remained an acknowledged blind spot for the field due to technical constraints and the assumption that Neanderthals and ancestral African populations were geographically isolated from each other.”

The new computational method for detecting Neanderthal ancestry, dubbed IBDmix, has already delivered results.

“This is the first time we can detect the actual signal of Neanderthal ancestry in Africans,” said co-first author Lu Chen, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics (LSI), who is co-first author of the study. “And it surprisingly showed a higher level than we previously thought.”

GRISLY DISCOVERY: BONES REVEAL NEANDERTHAL CHILD WAS EATEN BY LARGE BIRD

Researchers found that Neanderthal ancestry in Africans was not due to an “independent interbreeding event” between Neanderthals and African populations. Instead, they came to the conclusion that migrations of ancient Europeans back into Africa introduced Neanderthal ancestry into populations in the African continent.



By comparing data from simulations of human history to data from real people, experts also found that some of the Neanderthal ancestry detected in Africans was the result of human DNA introduced into the Neanderthal genome. “This human-to-Neanderthal gene flow involved an early dispersing group of humans out of Africa, occurring at least 100,000 years ago — before the Out-of-Africa migration responsible for modern human colonization of Europe and Asia and before the interbreeding event that introduced Neanderthal DNA into modern humans,” the scientists said, in the statement.

The study, which was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, was led by Joshua Akey, a professor at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. The researchers acknowledge that they were able to analyze a limited number of African populations and hope that their findings will inspire further study.

CLIMATE CHANGE DROVE SOME NEANDERTHALS TO CANNIBALISM

Experts have gained fresh insight into Neanderthals in recent years. In 2018, for example, archaeologists in Poland identified the prehistoric bones of a Neanderthal child eaten by a large bird.



In another study released in 2018, scientists suggested that climate change played a larger part in Neanderthals’ extinction than previously thought.

SOME OF OLDEST NEANDERTHAL BONES HAVE BEEN DNA TESTED SHOWING MORE THAN 70 DIFFERENCES

Last year, researchers in France reported that climate change drove some Neanderthals to cannibalism.

In another study, experts studied seashells fashioned into tools that were discovered in Italy in 1949 to reveal how some Neanderthals had a much closer connection to the sea than was previously thought, according to a statement released by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The closest human species to homo sapiens, Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for around 350,000 years. Scientists in Poland report that Neanderthals in Europe mostly became extinct 35,000 years ago. However, there are a number of theories on the timing of Neanderthals’ extinction, with experts saying that it could have occurred 40,000, 27,000 or 24,000 years ago.

[Mark]

There are some fundamental differences in the human family that may come from the melding of differential populations, long ago. It wasn't just Neanderthals, it was also Denisovan and others. There are benefits that have come from that admixture, but also a realization that humanity is one family, and there has never been a pure race of any type, anywhere. We've been mixing blood and genes forever. That realization alone should release some people from any feelings of superiority or inferiority they may harbor.

ANCIENT SEX BETWEEN DIFFERENT HUMAN SPECIES INFLUENCES MODERN-DAY HEALTH

It's just as well we Homo sapiens got some Neanderthal and Denisovan genes into our DNA.

When Homo sapiens left Africa and encountered the Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, the two ancient hominins did the obvious thing and had sex with one another, exchanging life-saving genetic adaptions. That genetic exchange allowed human-hybrid children to skip the thousands of years of natural selection Neanderthals experienced in Europe, and inherit virus-fighting and life-saving genes fast.

This genetic boon occurred some 100,000 years ago, but Neanderthal genes — along with the genes from another species of ancient human, the Denisovans — continue to influence our health today.

Now, scientists say this influence may be more expansive than they previously thought. In fact, ancient humans’ genetic exchange could be one of the major causes of adaptive evolution in humans, according to a new study.

Using new computational methods, scientists determine that the gene flow between archaic humans affects modern-day human metabolism, our response to different types of pathogens, and a scattering of neuronal traits. The findings were published on Tuesday in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Study authors Alexandre Gouy and Laurent Excoffier first analyzed “archaic introgression maps” for 35 Melanesian individuals. Introgression maps, Gouy tells Inverse, tell you which blocks in your genome are likely to be of archaic ancestry. They’re traced by comparing the genomes of ancient hominins — obtained from Neanderthal and Denisovan fossils — and modern humans using statistical tools.

Basically, you can “see a genome as a mosaic of blocks inherited from your ancestors,” he says. As ancient hominins interbred with modern humans, some of these blocks along the genome can be traced back to Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors.


The researchers then looked at introgression maps across participants in the 1,000 Genomes Project. For the purposes of the study, the researchers focused on those of people from East Asia, Europe, and Papua New Guinea.

WHAT DID HUMANS INHERIT?

Their analysis of patterns of introgression, along with data sets of connected genes and subnetworks, yielded complex and fascinating findings.

It’s previously been shown that the Denisovan gene EPAS1 likely helps Tibetans live in high-altitude places, and that some Neanderthal variants are associated with behavioral traits, including mood disorders and an inclination towards cigarettes.



The new study found that, in European populations, Neanderthal genes are also linked to metabolism, iron- and oxygen-binding in red blood cells and muscles, as well as olfactory receptors. Among East Asians and Europeans, ancient introgression is associated with a GABA transporter and a neurotransmitter transporter, the study suggests. In Papuans, genes showing “a significant excess of introgression” associated to autism susceptibility and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were found.

Especially intriguing was the finding the presence of introgressed mutations in Papua New Guineans that are potentially linked to resilience to malaria, Guoy says. These mutations are linked to Denisovan ancestry.

NOT ALL INHERITANCE IS THE SAME

Importantly, just because one has Densivoan or Neanderthal DNA in their genome that doesn’t mean that inheritance is going to show up in their genes in the same way. Each human population has a specific history, and ancient hominins interbred with modern humans at different times and in different places.

“That is why introgressed genes are sometimes specific to a population,” Gouy says. “Different people can carry the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, but it can be found in different places of their genome.”



For example: The region of the genome that may be involved in resistance to malaria among Papua New Guineans is inherited from Denisovans. These mutations are almost always found in Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians — which is why they aren’t present across the global population.

It’s also not as simple as saying because a person with Neanderthal DNA has ADHD, then Neanderthals had ADHD. While this study points out that Denisovan and Neanderthal-inherited genes are related to health and behavior, “it remains very difficult to quantify precisely the effect of those mutations,” Guoy says.

“What we can say so far is that some introgressed mutations have been associated to neurological processes,” he says. “We cannot know yet precisely how it will affect the health or behavior of an individual, based on genomic data only.”

A DIFFERENT WAY OF EXAMINING GENE INTERACTIONS

The study is based on two novel approaches, Guoy says. One allows researchers to find networks of genes showing an excess of introgression in particular populations, and the one to other tests whether specific mutations in certain genes tend to be found together in modern individuals. That clumping is known as when genes are “co-introgressed.”

These techniques allowed them to gain new insights by examining the data from a network-interaction perspective. Gouy says that they can see their approach as complementing more traditional methods that focus on single genes, this simply allows them to take a different perspective on the same data.

“I personally find it fascinating to see that interbreeding with other human lineages shaped human adaptations,” Gouy says. “As we were developing approaches to understanding modern human adaptations by looking at gene interactions, we realized that such interactions for Neanderthal and Denisova-inherited mutations had been overlooked.”

The results from genomic studies need to be interpreted with caution, Gouy says. Behavior results from a complex interaction of genes and the environment — and it’s difficult to assess the full impact genes have.

But it is obvious that the interaction between genes affects us in some way, and historically our archaic mutations have been overlooked. These played a role in human evolution and health, and more research is needed to know the full extent.

Abstract:
Anatomically modern humans carry many introgressed variants from other hominins in their genomes. Some of them affect their phenotype and can thus be negatively or positively selected. Several individual genes have been proposed to be the subject of adaptive introgression, but the possibility of polygenic adaptive introgression has not been extensively investigated yet. In this study, we analyze archaic introgression maps with refined functional enrichment methods to find signals of polygenic adaptation of introgressed variants. We first apply a method to detect sets of connected genes (subnetworks) within biological pathways that present higher-than-expected levels of archaic introgression. We then introduce and apply a new statistical test to distinguish between epistatic and independent selection in gene sets of present-day humans. We identify several known targets of adaptive introgression, and we show that they belong to larger networks of introgressed genes. After correction for genetic linkage, we find that signals of polygenic adaptation are mostly explained by independent and potentially sequential selection episodes. However, we also find some gene sets where introgressed variants present significant signals of epistatic selection. Our results confirm that archaic introgression has facilitated local adaption, especially in immunity related and metabolic functions and highlight its involvement in a coordinated response to pathogens out of Africa.

[Mark]

This is where it gets really interesting. I read some years ago an apocrophal tale about J.R.R. Tolkien. The story was, that he had been granted access to Oxford's oldest records, which, apparently, was not something often done. I recall the tale as stating that he spent years down in subterranean vaults/basement areas, researching. Considering the many Ages of humanity spanning the threshold of time, back in these days, the world did indeed look like a chapter out of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Different types of humans roaming the landscape, warring, loving, living.

Is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and associated books really a true history of some lost pre-historic time period?

Has anybody else ever heard this story or read of it? If so, please leave a link, or expand upon the tale.

And we are their descendants, mixed up, mixed together to become something new. Still evolving, still mixing, still changing, still growing in multiple dimensional modalities. Somewhere within this history, there is a mystery.

Homo heidelbergensis: The Answer to a Mysterious Period in Human History?


Cranium 5, a skull found at Sima de los Huesos and thought to be either a late Homo heidelbergensis or an early Neanderthal. (Credit: Rept0n1x/Wikimedia Commons)

There’s a murky chapter in human evolution, one that occurs right before our species entered the scene.

Over 1 million years ago our ancestors belonged to the primitive-looking species Homo erectus. Jump to 300,000 years ago and Earth is home to at least three lineages of big-brained humans: Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans. So what happened in the intervening 700,000 years?

There’s a wealth of research on H. erectus as well as modern humans and our cousins, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Much less is known about our Middle Pleistocene predecessors. Since the first specimen from the time span was reported in 1908 — a 610,000-year-old jawbone classified as Homo heidelbergensis — researchers have found Mid-Pleistocene fossils across Europe, Asia and Africa.

These little-understood hominins increased in brain size, spread to new lands and hunted challenging game with finely crafted weapons. One of these lineages led to modern humans. But the details of their lives and evolutionary relationships are still slim.

Now, thanks to ancient DNA analyses, our Mid-Pleistocene family tree is becoming clearer. But other questions remain. Above all: Were these ancestors modern enough that we would consider them human?

Between H. erectus and H. sapiens

Most anthropologists agree that if you traced your ancestry back about 1 million years, you’d find a population of Homo erectus. From the neck down, the creatures resembled present-day people: They had modern stature and body proportions, distinguished by relatively long legs and short arms. But no H. erectus would be mistaken for a H. sapiens. With hulking brows and flatter skulls, the species had brains about two-thirds our size: The average volume of 30 well-preserved H. erectus skulls was 950 cm3, compared to 1350 cm3 for recent humans.

Fast-forward to 300,000 years ago and the H. erectus lineage gave rise to at least three varieties of humans: European-based Neanderthals, Denisovans in Asia and the ancestors of all living people, Homo sapiens in Africa.

The intervening span is what anthropologists call “the muddle in the middle”. The time period is characterized by poorly understood fossils, book-ended by better-studied H. erectus and modern humans.



Between H. erectus and H. sapiens, intermediate species existed, variably named Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor, depending on a researcher’s views. Many anthropologists just call the whole bunch Middle Pleistocene hominins, after the geologic time period 130,000 to 780,000 years ago.

One spectacular site, Sima de los Huesos in Spain, has yielded the most Mid-Pleistocene hominin remains. Excavations there since the 1980s have unearthed more than 7,000 fossils representing at least 28 individuals dated to 430,000 years ago.

But other, similar-looking Mid-Pleistocene hominins have been found across Europe, Asia and Africa. They appear somewhat primitive, thanks to robust faces and brows, but have skull volumes around 1230 cm2, intermediate between H. erectus and later human averages. These ancient humans had evolved from H. erectus, but they had not yet become Neanderthals, Denisovans or H. sapiens.

Our direct ancestors were among these bigger-brained hominins spread across the Old World. But anthropologists disagree about which specimens to include in this illustrious lineage, and what to call them.

Evolutionary Possibilities

One view is all big-brained Mid-Pleistocene hominins — from Africa, Europe and Asia — belong to a single species, usually called Homo heidelbergensis (here, here). The lineage descended from Homo erectus and led to later humans. In this scenario, Homo heidelbergensis was the shared ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Others contend that Mid-Pleistocene specimens show too much variation to be lumped into a single species. This implies the global pool of H. heidelbergensis-looking hominins had already formed distinct lineages. Proponents of this hypothesis often draw the division between African and Eurasian fossils. They use Homo heidelbergensis for Eurasian fossils leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans, and Homo rhodesiensis for Mid-Pleistocene African hominins likely on the lineage leading to modern humans. The shared ancestor gets pushed to earlier specimens, such as ~800,000-year-old remains from Spain sometimes called Homo antecessor.

But population territories were probably more complicated than simple continental borders. Groups expanded, contracted and migrated as environments changed. They overlapped and interbred. The result was that, even if there were multiple species of Mid-Pleistocene humans, they likely intermingled with each other, both geographically and sexually.

Tidying Up the Muddle

Recent paleogenomics work has imposed some order on the muddle. By comparing DNA differences between lineages, researchers have estimated the timing of the evolutionary splits between modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, which took place during the Mid-Pleistocene. Using this molecular clock dating approach, a 2017 Science paper reported that Homo sapiens diverged from the others around 520,000 to 630,000 years ago, and then the sister species Neanderthals and Denisovans split 390,000 to 440,000 years ago.

That timeline agrees with a 2016 genomic analysis of the ~430,000 year old Sima fossils — the oldest human ancient DNA yet recovered. The sequences suggest the individuals belonged to the Neanderthal lineage after it split from Denisovans. It’s safe to classify the Sima hominins as Neanderthal ancestors.

But getting human DNA this old was a near miracle. The molecules survived because the cave keeps a cool 50 degrees Fahrenheit; they were recovered because researchers put in extraordinary effort. The scientists salvaged just 0.1 percent of the Sima genome from one bone and tooth.

Ancient DNA won’t be found in most Mid-Pleistocene fossils, especially those from hot, tropical climates, harsh on biomolecules. Still, the dates we do have — divergences between H. sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans — provide a strong foundation for making sense of the muddle in the middle.

Becoming Human

Other questions about our ancestors can’t be answered by DNA. Regardless of which population(s) directly led to H. sapiens, Mid-Pleistocene hominins across the globe increased in brain size, which seems to have enabled more advanced behaviors. Compared to earlier H. erectus, stone tools made by Mid-Pleistocene hominins were more sophisticated — thinner and more symmetrical. They also hunted larger, more challenging prey including herds of elephants, horses and rhino. Killing these animals requires planning, experience and cooperation.

Perhaps these ancestors were more human than not.

[Hym]

Saw a documentary on an over the air broadcast, Corp.For Public Broadcasting-not PBS. The narrator and the gist of the doc was the core of all interconnected, but by mainstream politics and media not connected, health and employment as the result of racism.

The doc showed overlapping maps showing racial concentrations, economic opportunities availability, educational expenditures, longevity, etc. and correlated the obvious racial exclusionary history of the areas of Chicago. Again, those who do not include everyone and then allocate to serve the present needs of all communities are blatantly racist.

The author also showed the needless expenditures of a community upon disaster preparedness and showing one drill, spending up $250,000, using abandoned tenements to stage the waste of monies, showing how F***ing ignorant those preparing and funding the drills really are. Yes, they don't get it. Those funds belong to the entire community, not just those who dwell in fear and prejudice.

[Mark]

Lighter eyes, a trait commonly associated with Europe, did not necessarily evolve there. The evidence suggests that darker hued populations originated this innovation for reasons unknown, perhaps as a random mutation, although the environmental conditions of Europe probably allowed for its success and wildfire-like selection and distribution throughout the population in successive generations.

Genetic analysis reveals blue eyes evolved before light skin



Skeletal remains from a 7,000 year old Spaniard have been genetically sequenced and suggests that the evolutionary onset of light-colored eyes predates light skin. The results also gave clues to what his diet might have been like. The lead author on the paper was Iñigo Olalde of Barcelona’s Institut de Biologia Evolutiva and it was published in Nature.

The remains were discovered in northwestern Spain at the La Braña-Arintero site. The skeleton belonged to a man from the Mesolithic Period who has been dubbed La Braña 1. One of his teeth yielded enough DNA to complete a genetic analysis. The results gave important clues about the evolution of appearance and diet in the region.

Though the height and approximate age at time of death were not released, the researchers were able to determine that La Braña 1 did not look quite how they expected. His dark hair and dark skin were not unusual, but he likely had light eyes which was very unusual for this time period. The exact shade of his eyes could not be determined, but it was clear to the researchers that they were not brown. This could very well mean that light eyes made their evolutionary debut before light skin.

Fresh baked bread, rice, and cheese are dietary staples in Spain today, though this was not always the case. According to the analysis, he only had a few copies of the genes responsible for breaking down starch. This indicates that the diet was limited in grains and starchy vegetables like potatoes. Though wheat and other grains were already domesticated by this point, they were not common in Europe at this juncture. Once agriculture became more commonplace, it is likely that those who had more copies of genes allowing them to digest starch had an advantage, as they were able to consume this easily obtained food.

La Braña 1’s genome also shows that he was lactose intolerant, meaning he did not consume dairy products. While lactose intolerance is seen as an anomaly in some regions, it is globally and historically the norm. Many people produce the enzyme lactase early in life when they depend on breast milk, but that function decreases over time. Many people are able to produce lactase throughout their entire lives and eat dairy without a problem, but this lactose persistence is actually much more rare.

Another male skeleton, named La Braña 2, was also discovered by the team in 2006. Unfortunately, the DNA was not as well preserved in this second individual, which is making it difficult for the researchers to sequence. They are currently working to restore the genome and provide more information about what the earliest Europeans looked like during the Mesolithic Period.

[Mark]

Continuation upon the theme in the previous post today, genetics for blue eyes have been traced to a single ancestor approximately 8,000 years ago. The coalescence of ethnicity and what we now call racial groups, from previously existing brown and black melanated populations.

One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes



By Jeanna Bryner - Live Science Editor-in-Chief

People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.

A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin.

"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.

The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism.

"It's exactly what I sort of expected to see from what we know about selection around this area," said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the study results regarding the OCA2 gene. Hawks was not involved in the current study.

Baby blues

Eiberg and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages.

They specifically looked at sequences of DNA on the OCA2 gene and the genetic mutation associated with turning down melanin production.

Over the course of several generations, segments of ancestral DNA get shuffled so that individuals have varying sequences. Some of these segments, however, that haven't been reshuffled are called haplotypes. If a group of individuals shares long haplotypes, that means the sequence arose relatively recently in our human ancestors. The DNA sequence didn't have enough time to get mixed up.

"What they were able to show is that the people who have blue eyes in Denmark, as far as Jordan, these people all have this same haplotype, they all have exactly the same gene changes that are all linked to this one mutation that makes eyes blue," Hawks said in a telephone interview.

Melanin switch

The mutation is what regulates the OCA2 switch for melanin production. And depending on the amount of melanin in the iris, a person can end up with eye color ranging from brown to green. Brown-eyed individuals have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production. But they found that blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

"Out of 800 persons we have only found one person which didn't fit — but his eye color was blue with a single brown spot," Eiberg told LiveScience, referring to the finding that blue-eyed individuals all had the same sequence of DNA linked with melanin production.

"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," Eiberg said. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics.

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.

"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids."

• Genes: The Instruction Manuals of Life
• 10 Things You Didn't Know About You
• Top 10 Missing Links

[Mark]

Posted by Hym (here)
The doc showed overlapping maps showing racial concentrations, economic opportunities availability, educational expenditures, longevity, etc. and correlated the obvious racial exclusionary history of the areas of Chicago. Again, those who do not include everyone and then allocate to serve the present needs of all communities are blatantly racist.

Fear and hate will not provide the human family with a viable path into the future. This is a time when we must work together to overcome some pretty hefty issues, from broken governments and ancient political conspiracies to elite excesses and the equitable distribution of planetary resources. The competitive "winning" attitudes and perspectives that drive our economics based upon endless and bottomless consumptive greed, have driven us, no matter the origin of these emotional and spiritual causative factors, to the brink of .. something. We have a choice. Wall ourselves off from the rest of humanity, or work together. Is it every man, woman and tribe for themselves? Will that way of thinking provide us with a viable path forward?

Posted by Hym (here)
The author also showed the needless expenditures of a community upon disaster preparedness and showing one drill, spending up $250,000, using abandoned tenements to stage the waste of monies, showing how F***ing ignorant those preparing and funding the drills really are. Yes, they don't get it. Those funds belong to the entire community, not just those who dwell in fear and prejudice.

And this is the crux of the issue. Those who complain the most, hold the most wealth, want to separate themselves the most, exist by parasitical means feeding off of other sectors of the population. Be it through corporate welfare, government contracts or just plain ol' capitalist exploitation of labor, their wealth is derived from those they profess to hate. Their fear and prejudice, perhaps, in some part comes from that sub-conscious realization as well as the knowing that what goes around in some way, shape or form, does indeed come back round again, like an old friend, faithful to the end.

[Ernie Nemeth]

Rahkyt.

What do you think is the real possibility that perhaps the assumption that all humans evolved on earth is mistaken?

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have blue eyes and white skin?

I heard somewhere that the black skin races are the indigenous race, while the others are from other worlds.

Do you think there is any truth to this?

[Mark]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
What do you think is the real possibility that perhaps the assumption that all humans evolved on earth is mistaken?

I am familiar with the stories of Aldebaran and all of the other tales of the New Age regarding extraterrestrial origin. I think there is a real possibility that colonies of humanoids from other star systems have inhabited earth and merged DNA with the indigenous hominids and also later homo sapien and that those genetic strains have become a part of us.

I would like to see genetic evidence of such. Of the existence of DNA strands that were not present in the human family prior to the influx of extraterrestrial DNA. If humanoids from other planetary systems, like the Anunnaki, came here and were able to genetically manipulate a form of hybrid to create the human family, the evidence of that should be available genetically.

The evidence might be in the realm of that "mysterious" time frame in evolutionary history, perhaps, between the Australopithecus and the Homo families, where the jump in cognition occurred about 2 million years ago. Or, it could have happened later, between the disparate Homo species and the differentiation to Homo sapien about 2-400,000 years ago, at which point the mental capacity seemed to expand dramatically.

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have blue eyes and white skin?

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have brown eyes and black skin? Or purple skin? Or green skin?

In an infinite creation, there are infinite possibilities, Ernie. White skin is not special.

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
I heard somewhere that the black skin races are the indigenous race, while the others are from other worlds.

And I have heard somewhere that the hair type and epidermis of "black skinned" populations are unique in the world, and that the hair of whites and Asians is more like the great apes than the "black skinned" "sub-Saharan" African population, which differentiates them from those sub-human entities and perhaps makes them closer relatives to those apes than the members of those "black skinned" races. The skin color of the great apes is also white. Your thoughts?

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
Do you think there is any truth to this?

In an infinite multiverse, there are infinite variations. I do not discount anything except the reality of race as a defining distinction of the human family.

[Ernie Nemeth]

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have brown eyes and black skin? Or purple skin? Or green skin?

In an infinite creation, there are infinite possibilities, Ernie. White skin is not special.

And I have heard somewhere that the hair type and epidermis of "black skinned" populations are unique in the world, and that the hair of whites and Asians is more like the great apes than the "black skinned" "sub-Saharan" African population, which differentiates them from those sub-human entities and perhaps makes them closer relatives to those apes than the members of those "black skinned" races. The skin color of the great apes is also white. Your thoughts?

Okay.

My thoughts are that when I heard the idea that white skin is a mutation I started thinking of other ways such a trait could be explained without resorting to calling it a mutated version of the original. It seems to me that either conclusions should not be reached until we have more data or we have to consider the real possibility that there are other worlds and other humanoids indigenous to each.

Somehow melanin-deficiency seems ...uh... racist.

Oh now I get it. Sometimes I'm a bit slow. Not good at such word-play.

Turned the table on me. Nice one.

Point taken.

sorry

[Agape]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
Rahkyt.

What do you think is the real possibility that perhaps the assumption that all humans evolved on earth is mistaken?

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have blue eyes and white skin?

I heard somewhere that the black skin races are the indigenous race, while the others are from other worlds.

Do you think there is any truth to this?

Apologies to Mark/Rakhyt for interjection. Apologies to myself for discussing our starry origin as I’m aware of without being able to “prove it” in lab.

I’m not “new age” and our origin is not “new age”, it’s not only ancient - in your terms - it’s perhaps, older than this piece of Universe.

I can’t care less now about not being able to “prove it” since I’ve got lots of beatings, threats and my tools were taken away and I’m happy to have survived.

But back to our origin ...please 🙏 do not attack.
My Bodhgaya ET Event Report is out there, not threatening anyone. I’m not “CG”.
I do fear you humans a lot , for being who you prefer to be.

We all are translucent plasma bodies in origin. That’s “softer than unboiled egg”. There’s no “DNA” floating in our plasma bodies since DNA is coagulated fragments of information net condensed to this gravity and atmospheric pressure.

If you break an egg and what you call “white” is actually transparent and translucent.
It has no colour at all.

Your plasma body likewise, has no colour unless it increases its core activity and temperature. Presence of protective isotopes contributes for any sort of “eye colour” as a result.

Of course if you boil an egg, you may classify it as “white” and “yolk”.

If you burry it to Earth the way Chinese cuisine does it becomes famously “black egg”. If you boil your Easter eggs in black tea or onion peels it turns the whites almost “mahogany”.

How nice to have so many colours ?

Notice that unboiled eggs can’t survive here on their own, once cooked their life expectancy is short.
Black eggs can allegedly survive bit longer.


Perhaps ..

if all the broken fragmented information/mind/dna within us start working together can it return a piece of it self to the original yolk ?

Scientifically impossible from eggs perspective but there’s so much we do t know about life beyond DNA, yet.


Wish you all happy colors to your Sunrise


🧩🌈🌸🌟