Posted on 02/06/2018 11:31:05 PM PST by blam
The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed.
The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.
It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.
The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.
Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project, said: “It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all.”
Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed, saying the connection often drawn between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth. It has always changed and will change”.
The findings were revealed ahead of a Channel 4 documentary, which tracked the ancient DNA project at the Natural History Museum in London as well as creating a new forensic reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s head.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
They're scaled down.
Thanks. I will check into it.
The only problem is my mother had no siblings and we know very little, really next to nothing about her father’s family. As far as I know he had only one sibling, a brother but he died from alcoholism in his 30’s and was never married. We know nothing about his parents or grandparents. And both of her male cousins on her mother’s, side, her mother’s only sibling’s children were both childless and are long dead.
Same with my dad. He had an older sister but she died a month before he was born as did his dad, a week before my dad was born. His mother came to America from Norway when he was a toddler, leaving him behind with her parents and coming back to bring him to America when he was about 5 or 6 after she remarried here in the States. And there was some sort of big falling out between his mother and her 1st husband’s family but no one is sure why. As I understand his father sister, his aunt even filed a custody lawsuit to try to keep him in Norway, alleging his mother was unfit. My dad vaguely remembers that this aunt who he hardly knew, came to the dock the day he left, gave him candy, flowers and a stuffed animal and that she was tall and had strawberry red hair and as my father told me, much like mine, and that she was crying but that is all he knew or remembered about her.
My dad didn’t even know that his step father was not his natural father until he was in his late teens and didn’t know he had had a sister until he was in his late 40’s and has only one faded B&W photo of her that his mother had kept hidden away.
My dad has two half-brothers but the youngest moved to CA before I was born I only met him once in 1976 but I wouldn’t know him from Adam if I bumped into him or his two sons today and my other uncle and his wife couldn’t have children and both of their two children were adopted.
Both my parents passed in the late 90’s so the only people in my family who may know anything about my relatives is my older brother and my father’s half-brother.
I do have a big box of photos though that I inherited when my father passed, but the old ones that show some relatives from before I was born are all in black and white and last time I went through them with my older brother, he isn’t sure who some of the people in the photos are.
I do have my mother’s maternal great grandparent’s immigration papers from the mid 1800’s when they immigrated from Germany and my father’s maternal cousin in Norway sent him a family tree a few years before my father passed.
Some years ago my niece got into Ancestry.com and found some documents related to my father’s mother’s immigration to America, the ship she came on and being listed as being a “domestic” but couldn’t find anything about my mother’s family except for a census that showed that after her father died that she and her mother lived with her aunt in the late 1930’s.
When my mother died and we went to bury her in her family’s plot, the only one of two left, when the cemetery went to dig her grave, they found a small coffin and the remains of a very young child and the cemetery manager after researching the very old cemetery records, found out that she died in late 1918 and was named Martha, but there was no last name or parent’s names listed. The only thing to be done was to bury my mother and then rebury little Martha over her.
My brother and I tried to do research on who this child was as my mother nor anyone in her family ever mentioned any relative by this name, but there had been a fire in the local courthouse in the late 1920’s and most records from before then were lost. So who Martha remains a complete mystery to us. Was she my mother’s older sister, perhaps a victim of the Spanish Flu? Many times people back then didn’t speak of such deaths. Or was she the illegitimate child of a relative, perhaps her father’s alcoholic brother or even her fathers? Or was she the child of a family friend or neighbor who couldn’t afford to bury their child, especially during the great influenza plague? My brother and I don’t know. But I think my mother, who loved children so much would be comforted that little Martha, whoever she was, is no longer alone.
LOL...
Okay...the lack of info is problematical, but stick with the info that you DO have: 1) your parents' hair & eye color 2) your's and your sibling/s 3) the progeny's hair & eye color.
Because I don't have a lot of generational ( only a few, though I have 8 generations to use on my maternal side ) info, on my paternal side, I use what I have and it works out VERY well.
But still and all, genetics is an interesting study and at l,east you just may learn a lot about it, on your study of it, whether or not it helps you figure out your family traits or not. :-)
Okay...the lack of info is problematical, but stick with the info that you DO have: 1) your parents' hair & eye color 2) your's and your sibling/s 3) the progeny's hair & eye color. .
Because I don't have a lot of generational ( only a few, though I have 8 generations to use on my maternal side ) info, on my paternal side, I use what I have and it works out VERY well. .
But still and all, genetics is an interesting study and at l,east you just may learn a lot about it, on your study of it, whether or not it helps you figure out your family traits or not. :-) .
I do think a novelization of my parents’ and their parent’s and grandparent’s lives with the missing pieces filled in with some fiction based on history, both historical events and some of the things that I do know or have been told to me, would perhaps make for a great novel, including the things my father told me about his serving in the South Pacific during WWII.
And his mother’s life as a very young widow who had in the span of three months lost a child and her husband and then gave birth to her son, yet rebelled against living the rest of her life as the grieving widow or married off to an older widower as her parents wanted her to do and for a time was a bit of a flapper and ran a bit on the wild side, who according to what my uncle told me, became friends with the famous explorer Roald Amundsen and scandalized her family and her town by going on motor cycle rides with him and his friends after her 1st husband died and then decided to embark to America where she could make a new life for herself and her son.
And my mother’s difficult time after her father died and that of her mother’s sister who took in my mother and her mother in, my mother’s aunt who raising two young boys while her husband, a WWI vet who was gassed and left a bedridden and an invalid, who struggled to make ends meet and went to work in a shop as a clerk and then as bookkeeping and later becoming a full-fledged accountant back in a time when while many women worked, few became professionals and became relatively wealthy in her own right as she did. My aunt Serene, was as I remember, a very tough and plain talking cookie, but also very kind to me. She always called me “Toots” with a wink and a smile and that’s something I remember about her and I tend to call my great nieces “Toots” too. : )
If only I had the time, the patience and most of all, the talent for writing and undertaking such a task. But yes, I’ve thought about it.
I’ve been considering having my brother and I do a 23 and Me type genetic test.
While it wouldn’t tell me the personal history of my family members, it might give me some hints from where some of them came from. Particularly my mother’s father. Given his one of the few things we know about him, his surname of Gibb, we think he may have been Welch in origin and may have been a descent of the The Welsh Tract settlers coming to Pennsylvania in the 1600’s.
There is also some thought that my father’s real father’s family may have come to Norway from Scotland and may have been a Catholic, which may explain or have been part of the reasons for the falling out of my father’s mother’s family and his father’s family.
And then there is what I know of my father’s grandfather who during the German occupation of Norway during WWII, had to hide out with the Norwegian underground for a while because as editor of the town newspaper, wrote editorials against the Nazis and also once stood in his back yard and fired his pistol at German planes flying over his house. And of one of his daughters who seemed to be partying, dating and dancing and making very “nice” with several German officers, and as a result was always bringing home extra rationed items and otherwise forbidden goods to her family, was also was the one who told her father because of what one of her German officer “friends” told her, that her father was about to be arrested by the SS, and convinced and arranged for him to go to the underground up in the mountain until things cooled off, but after the war was never arrested or prosecuted as a Quisling, leading us to believe that perhaps she was actually agent for the underground.
Oh. The stories. So many stories that could be told, both factual and dramatized.
Those gene companies, in teensy letters, tell you that YOU don't own the info...that THEY do and they sell your info!
Also, I'm not all THAT sure as to the accuracy of the most well known ones.
Because I know my maternal side, for many generations back, I'm satisfied with that knowledge and personally, I won't do one of those tests, knowing what I know about them.
I’ve been wanting to do just that. My brother isn’t getting any younger and sadly in recent years hasn’t been in the best of health. I had wanted to have my dad talk about our family history and his experiences in WWII and record his memories on tape, but sadly never got to do it before he died.
I want to get my brother and me and his children and their children all together to go through the big box of family photos including the “brownie” photos my father took while in the Philippines during WWII and our remembrances and for me and my brother to either and or record or write down what we know about the pictures so perhaps my great nieces and nephews may not one day see them as junk or photos of unknown people who don’t mean anything to them.
FWIW my dad took a lot of home movies on 8 reel from the early to mid 60’s and some years ago, and after my father died, I sent them off to be put on a DVD. Unfortunately, some of the reels were not salvageable but many of them were and they did a very good job of what they could.
I had several copies made and gave them to my brother and to my niece and nephew and kept a copy for myself.
A few years ago when some of my little nieces were staying with me for a sleep over I showed it to them. But at the time they were perhaps a bit too young to understand that the little kids in the home movies were actually me and their grandpa when we were kids.
Now that they are a bit older, perhaps I can show it to them again.
My family has always had a thing for "family stories" and many of them serve/d as parables, so that all you have to do is say the tag line and the kid gets it, when you need to make a point! And yes, this is STILL going on/being used today, on the current generation of kiddos.
My grandmother was the "family historian" and began training me, to take over, from the time I was very little.
Throw in the stories that my parents added to the mix and what I and my immediate family have tacked on, and it has gotten to the point where I have to write everything down, to hand down, by now, because it's too much to do by memory for later generations.
JUST DO EVERYTHING YOU POSTED AND DO IT ASAP!
People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population. It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.
Yeah, that really explains how the population of Britain -- one of the most ethnically and genetically 'repainted' places on Earth -- is 100 percent descended from this cheese guy. What's that? Oh, not everyone has been tested, and most of those who have been turned out to have no DNA in common with him? Weird. :^)
Mostly it explains a lot about the political leanings of the bozos who put out this 'research'. Thanks blam.
I would like to slam my results against those -- so far I've had a bunch of archaic stuff show up, and would like to add one more.
Sounds like Henry Louis Gates has been busy. In his reckoning, (not research) everyone on the planet was black.
My daughter toured the cheddar caves. They still make and age cheddar cheese in those caves. The milk comes from cows grazing in that valley. Daughter brought some of that cheese for me to taste. It was great, even the mold rind of the open air aging tasted really good.
And Cheddar Man’s bones are right along the pathway in the cave for everyone to see.
Ah yes, the mold in the air aging the cheese.
Yeah, Cheddar Man worked as a greeter in the prehistoric version of Walmart that used to be in those caves. ;^)
Genetic Genealogy Tools
http://www.y-str.org/p/ancient-dna.html
Ancient DNA Calculator Update
https://iowadnaproject.wordpress.com/tag/archaic-humans/
Utilizing Ancient DNA at GedMatch
https://dna-explained.com/2014/09/22/utilizing-ancient-dna-at-gedmatch/
He's only interested in those who are/were. :^)
blue eyes among aborigines
http://www.google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&source=hp&q=blue+eyes+among+aborigines&gbv=1
The guys you linked appear reputable.
There was a thread or so recently where 23andme and similar companies fudge their results “to mess with racists”.
Can’t help but wonder how prevalent such behavior is.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3612348/posts
I’ve studied my family history extensively. My blood goes back to the stone ages of Sweden. I’ve been curious to try that DNA stuff to see if it’s bogus.
I just had a mental image of how my ancestors would have been in the general area back then.
“Hey, we just chewed all the moss off this rock and Krogger burped and frightened all our goats off a cliff. What do we do for dinner?”
“Well Lawg, let’s give this fermented fish a shot. It’ll be a hit, I tell you.”
-And thus many horrible things were birthed into the world.-
Okay, so my ancestors might not have been quite that bad.
Maybe.
I’m curious too, but likely to come up with hilarious misadventures for them like above.
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