Cheddar Man: Mesolithic Britain's Blue-Eyed Boy

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Cheddar man could easily pass for an Indian. The Indian languages are mostly based on Sanskrit and Sanskrit type languages (grouped as Indo-Iranian) represents the earliest form of Indo-European language and likely this group present in Central Asia were the one's who entered Europe around 5000 Yrs ago at exactly the same time they entered Persia, Greece and India.

British ancestry is 60% indigenous so plenty of dreaded "paki" blood flows through good old British racists

These girls are fraternal twins.



Their father appears white though may be mixed, and their mother is mixed. There is another pair of twins like this.



In this case, both parents are mixed.

In both of these instances, both parents likely have the genes for red hair, fair skin, and in the first example, blue eyes, but they are fairly recessive (they are actually polygentic and are getting drowned out by the melanin producing genes, but are serving as a diluting factor). It's not until a child inherits only those genes from both parents that we see the effect of the genes themselves.

The fact that Scandinavians were already fair complexioned by the time Cheddar Man was born is interesting. The Scandinavian population experiences a population bottle neck at some point that, combined with it's isolation, caused certain traits to become prevalent in the population, some of them negative. Much as there is an increased prevalence of certain disorders in the Ashkenazi population due to social isolation, there is similarly an increase in the prevalence of certain disorders in the Scandinavian population. There is a rumor that natural blonds will die out by 2020. This likely isn't true for a number of reasons, but if all natural blonds began to procreate with people with black hair, such that everyone had black or brown hair, the possibility of the reemergence of natural blonds still exists as long as the genes exist in the population.

The genes for things like blond hair, fair skin, and blue eyes probably existed for many generations in the human population before an individual inherited only such genes and expressed their phenotype.

There's Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Caucasoid includes Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Hispanics and so on. If someone isn't Mongoloid as in Asian as in Chinese and Japanese etc, or Negroid as in African etc, then they are caucasian. Then of course there are mixtures. You see a lot of these mixtures in the Caribbean where Cubans and Dominicans can look anywhere from European white to African black.

While these categories may lend to a degree of practicality, much as the terms "black" and "white" do, when speaking of race, they are still social constructs at best and it's important that people keep that in mind.

Light colored eyes and hair are a recessive mutation which means it arose very recently around the end of the last ice age

Blond hair has also arisen independently (based on the same amino acid change in TYRP1 gene) in non Scandinavian populations such as in Melanesians and Australian aboriginals so that kind of kills the blonde nordic Neanderthal theory

Blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.

There seems to be some type of psuedo-scientific push to claim Asians and Europeans evolved from separate lines of evolution not from Africa. Cheddar man gives a nice dose of reality to smug racists

The article says modern Europeans share 10% DNA with "Cheddar man".

However, they don't say that shared DNA is skin color ???

As far as we know, racist, colored-hating, slave-owning, evil whites came and killed poor Cheddar.

The article evens says "Current thinking is that the Mesolithic population that Cheddar Man belonged to was mostly replaced by the farmers that migrated into Britain later"

I think most modern populations on mainlands displaced previous populations. Cheddar man has living descendants who are still in the area though and were identified through genetic testing.

I think evolutionary geneticists have quantitative ways to determine the age of a gene variant.

But to illustrate what I was speaking of, for simplicity, let's assume eye color follow simple dominant/recessive inheritance patterns. Also, assume there are no blue eyed people in the world at this time, and everyone has brown eyes. Now let's say that a random mutation occurred in one of my mother's egg cells at the time of her fetal development that was a gene variant for blue eyes, and that egg happened to be the egg I came from, and that's the only gene on the planet at this point in time that can yield blue eyes. Let's also assume I am her only child.

I will be born with that gene, and the gene for brown eyes, so will have brown eyes.

Now, let's say I have two children and they both inherit the blue eyed gene. They will both still have brown eyes.

If we lived in a culture that does not approve of consanguineous pairings, and consist of a large, mobile population, for example, like the U.S. a blue eyed person may never materialize even though the gene propagates throughout the population, and if it did materialize, it would likely be a rare occurrence.

If, however, we lived in a culture where consanguineous cousin pairings were the norm, and the population was small or people were not very mobile, if both of my children carried the gene, and both had kids who carried the gene, and those kids, who are cousins, reproduced with each other, there is a 25% any child of theirs will inherit two blue eyed genes and have blue eyes.

But that's a simplification, eye color determination involves three gene pairs.

you're confused.
"Caucasoid" is not a default setting. It was thought of an actual race.

"Caucasoid" does NOT, and never did, "include Native Americans".

In past centuries Amerinds were thought of as a race unto themselves (the "red" race). In the 19th century onward they were thought of as a branch of the Mongoloid, or east Asian race.

Krafty says above that in the past Australian Aboriginoies were thought of as Caucasian. Never heard of that myself. In recent centuries they have been lumped in t their own Australian Aborigonie race. .

The last part of your post is correct though. The modern population of the Americas south of the US border is populated by folks too mixed to be lumped into traditional racial classifications. Brazilians and Dominicans tend to be Mulatto (mixed European and African ancestry), and Mexicans, and Peruvians tend to Mestizo (mixed European and Amerind ancestry).

Last edited by naturalplastic on 09 Feb 2018, 5:43 am, edited 2 times in total.

It's either one or a combination. Using the process of elimination, are they negorid? Doesn't appear so anthropologically. Are they mongoloid? Doesn't appear so anthropologically. That leaves caucasoid. Or caucasoid plus mongoloid.

I don't know which "they" you are talking about. Amerinds, or Australian Abos. But either way I don't see your logic. Race is bs concept anyway. But they took the concept seriously in the 19th and early 20th century.

But race is an aid to memory. Labels enable you to put things in baskets.

Don't see why you cant put Australian Aborigonies into their own basket separate from both Black Africans and White Europeans.

I'm not even sure what that comment means.

White supremacists lie...Genes don't lie.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... t-its-dna/

Cheddar man's DNA is well represented in our modern British population

That pretty much explains something called the genetic bottleneck or island effect where a small gene pool concentrates alleles such as fair hair and blue eyes as in the British Isles and Scandanavia. That's why our "phenotype" arose very recently in historic terms (in terms of human evolution the last ice age is virtually yesterday). I think the Nature article stated that fair skin/eyes/hair could clearly advertise good health to a prospective mate plus there may have been a preference for aesthetic reasons to select for light eye color (although tribes in Africa, Pacific and Asia consider the appearance as demonic).

Yes. It seems it's population bottlenecks that dominate the direction of evolution of phenotype and species. It makes me wonder, with a population of 7 billion that's highly mobile, how significantly has our evolution as a species slowed? It seems that it would be far more difficult for any one trait to now overtake the entire species.

Well, Neanderthals were some of our ancestors.
What I consider to be more significant is, blue eyed people in the past were dark skinned. That really should throw a wrench into white nationalist racial theories. People haven't always looked like they do today, and doubtlessly won't look like us in the far future.