Neanderthal Ancestors May Be To Blame For Why You Can't Get a Tan (telegraph.co.uk)

turkeydance shares a report from The Telegraph: If you struggle to get a tan, consider yourself a night owl or are plagued with arthritis, then your Neanderthal ancestors could be to blame, a new genetic study has shown. Although Neanderthals are often portrayed in drawings as swarthy, in fact they arrived in Northern Europe thousands of years before modern humans, giving time for their skin to become paler as their bodies struggled to soak up enough sun. When they interbred with modern humans those pale genes were passed on. Likewise, genetic mutations which predispose people to arthritis also came from our Neanderthal ancestors, as did the propensity to be a night owl rather than a lark, as northern latitudes altered their body clocks. A raft of new papers published in the journals Science and the American Journal of Human Genetics has shed light on just how many traits we owe to our Neanderthal ancestors.

Scientists also now think that differences in hair color, mood and whether someone will smoke or have an eating disorder could all be related to inter-breeding, after comparing ancient DNA to 112,000 British people who took part in the UK Biobank study. The Biobank includes genetic data along with information on many traits related to physical appearance, diet, sun exposure, behavior, and disease and helps scientists pick apart which traits came from Neanderthals. Dr Janet Kelso, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Germany, said: "We can now show that it is skin tone, and the ease with which one tans, as well as hair color that are affected."

Comments

Racism

[Anonymous Coward]

The article indicates that early humans developed strategies to avoid interbreeding, recognizing that there were dangers associated with doing so. Although many people consider religion ridiculous now, it may have provided a survival advantage at one time, promoting an orderly society. It seems like the attempts to avoid interbreeding may have also conferred a survival advantage, and that trait may persist to this day as racism and avoiding diversity. It makes me wonder if racism, awful as it is, may have once provided a very real survival advantage to early humans.

Re: Racism

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an asshole for labeling me a troll. I'm asking a serious question of whether racism is the evolutionary remnant of something that once conferred a survival advantage. I'm suggesting that humans evolved to avoid mingling and mating with those who looked and acted differently as a mechanism to prevent interspecies mating. What once might have provided an advantage to early humans is now probably harmful, but our genes haven't caught up to that reality.

Early humans didn't understand genetics and the actual differences between them and neanderthals. Early humans looked different from neanderthals and probably acted differently. The article suggests that humans and neanderthals didn't just try to avoid interbreeding but also isolated themselves socially. If interbreeding was dangerous, there would have been a survival advantage to avoiding those who looked and acted differently.

There are plenty of evolutionary traits that were once useful but no longer are. The desire to avoid mingling with those who looked and acted differently would have once served a purpose of preventing interspecies mating. The same trait might manifest itself today as racism. Although it would no longer serve a useful purpose, I'm suggesting that racism might be an evolutionary trait. Traits like skin color have evolved because of the latitudes that humans resided at. However, in the times were talking about, humans didn't travel the world and freely migrate as they do today. Europeans and Americans might well have never encountered anyone from Africa, and mixed-race mating might not have been much of an issue. However, interspecies mating obviously did occur.