Europeans Came From Three Ancestry Groupings

Taco Cowboy writes A recent study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Tübingen in Germany has found that present day Europeans are descendants of three different groups of people — A near east farmer group, an indigenous hunter gatherer group, and an ancient North Eurasian group from Siberia. "Nearly all Europeans have ancestry from all three ancestral groups," said Iosif Lazaridis, a research fellow in genetics in Reich's lab and first author of the paper. "Differences between them are due to the relative proportions of ancestry. Northern Europeans have more hunter-gatherer ancestry — up to about 50 percent in Lithuanians — and Southern Europeans have more farmer ancestry." The most surprising part of the project, however, was the discovery of the Basal Eurasians. Before Australian Aborigines, New Guineans, South Indians, Native Americans and other indigenous hunter-gatherers split, they split from Basal Eurasians. The study also found that Mediterranean groups such as the Maltese, as well as Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated, while far northeastern Europeans such as Finns and the Saami, as well as some northern Russians, had more East Asian ancestry in the mix.

Comments

Re:Jews

[anatoli]

This is somewhat more complicated. http://www.livescience.com/402...

Re:Fair and darker skin

[jandersen]

Did you read the original article rather than just skim over it? One of the surprises is that there is a third component in European ancestry. Another surprise is that the blue eyes apparently came with dark skin and the lighter skin colour came with brown eyes.

The third interesting thing is that two of our lineages are very old, but a third contribution came in around 7000 years ago, just at the same time as agriculture. It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.

Teaching/Learning machanism

[DrYak]

You can imagine 10 different sects popping up with different versions of the dietary rules. The ones that happened to align with health and reduced death would have an evolutionary advantage, and ultimately become dominant.

That's basically how teaching/learning mechanism on the whole did evolve. That's why lot of mammal have youngs observe the adult and copy behavious. That's why in some mammal species, the parent actively teach the young. That's why some mammals (humans, dogs, etc.) from very strictly hierarchical societal organisation, with the underling strongly following the alpha, etc.
That's also why memes work on the internet.

"Religion" itself, is just a side phenomenon, that happens to hi-jack this transmission of knowledge methode and packs together useful information ("Things to avoid eating not to get sick") with complete non-sensical mythology/legends. That all still gets perpetuated because "that what we've always been doing".