Whiteness and Europeans haven’t always gone hand-in-hand

One of the most interesting results in the preprint on ancient European genetics (or more accurately, the ethnogenesis of Europeans in a genetic sense) is the fact that the ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherer sample from Luxembourg had a GG genotype on the SLC24A5 locus.

The sample size might be one, but the fact that the individual was homozygous for GG implies to me that the G allele was present at a far higher fraction in Northern Europe 8,000 years ago than today.

Why this matters functionally is that no matter how you look at it, when comparing Europeans and dark skinned populations (e.g., Africans, South Indians, and Australasians) this locus is the one that explains the highest proportion of the variation on pigmentation of any gene.

Read the full, original story: Phenotypic Whiteness as an Outcome of Neolithic Admixture

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