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In recent years, we have found to our amazement how people in the Western world have signed-up and spent large amount of money, to be involved in the scientific approach in genetics and DNA, in order to find out more about their ‘true’ or past ethnic and racial origins. DNA is a fascinating subject and although the vast majority of participants who send away their samples to genetic companies – their DNA, to find out more about their past migrations and what genetic markers they possess, it seems to be a way of satisfying their own curiosity in who or what they are or think they are. The unfortunate reality is when the findings are returned, there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding in comprehending what exactly do the findings mean, and how they should be understood and interpreted from a layperson’s position.
In this paper, I will attempt to lay out some of the basic research techniques, along with the findings, that have led us to this point in time, in us wanting to know more about our ancestral past and which group or region on the globe they came from. I will also look at some of the scientific conclusions that are sometimes hard for former colonial countries to accept, such as there were only dark or black populations that lived and inhabited the planet for hundreds and thousands of years, before the modern Europeans came into existence as we know them today – which has become a hard and uncomfortable pill for these nations to swallow. I will also share with you some of the relationships our prehistoric ancestors had with their environment and climate, which brought about psychological and physical changes to where we are today.
Science and Race
In the journal Nature in January 1987, three extraordinary scientists collaborated at the University of Berkeley, California in the United States, to investigate the origins of humankind and their links to one another. Their names were Rebecca Cann, Allan Wilson and Mark Stoneking whose findings were eventually published in Newsweek in 1988, to the general public. In this study, they decided they were going to examine what we now know as mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter in each generation. In this study, they took specimens from the placentas of 147 women from various ethnic groups and analysed each’s mitochondrial DNA. By comparing these in order of affinity, they assembled a giant tree, a vast family network, a sort of chronological chart for mankind, which linked up all the various samples and, therefore, the world’s races, in a grand, global genealogy.
The reason why women's placentas were used for this study is because this usually discarded organ is ‘a rich source of my DNA that can be examined easily owing to the large quantities that can be extracted and examined meticulously by scientists. The study went on to produce three conclusions which we are more familiar with in the 21st century. Firstly, it revealed that very few mutational differences exist between the mitochondrial DNA of human beings, be they Vietnamese, New Guineans, Scandinavians or Tongans.
Secondly, when the researchers put their data in a computer and asked it to produce the most likely set of linkages between the different people, graded according to the similarity of their mitochondrial DNA, it created a tree with two main branches. One consisting solely of Africans. The other contained the remaining people of African origin and everyone else in the world. The limb that connected these two main branches must, therefore, have been rooted in Africa, the researchers concluded. Lastly, the study showed that African people had slightly more mitochondrial DNA mutations compared to non-Africans, implying their roots are a little older. In total these results seem to provide overwhelming support for the idea that mankind arose in Africa and, according to the researchers’ data, very recently. Their arithmetic placed the common ancestor as living between 142,500 and 285,000 years ago, probably about 200,000 years ago.
Based on the various genetic materials extracted from all the specimens collected and examined, it was concluded that everyone on the planet was related to one woman who they dubbed ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, who is the mother of humankind whose facial reconstruction was created to show she was certainly African phenotypically, with dark skin to match. Prehistoric Phenotypes During and After Migration In the science of human biology, we are taught that our skin is the largest of all our organs, so naturally this phenotype has to be considered a crucial study from a prehistoric perspective, if we are to understand the type of relationship our skin colours have to do with the environment and the various climatic changes, which occurred during the prehistoric era. During the last one hundred years or so; anthropologists and paleoanthropologists, just to name a few, have been researching skin colour and found out its importance to the sun, especially the molecule we now know has ‘melanin’ or the dark pigments our skin produces, which is a defence mechanism that shields us from the ultraviolet rays of the sun.
When Mitochondrial Eve’s children left Africa to populate the rest of the world, it is important for us to know how did they look and what type of colour complexion(s) they would have possessed back in those prehistoric environments? The reason why this question is important is because there is a notion that Europeans living during the prehistoric ages looked like how Europeans look today – but further examinations show they look very much African and still maintain large quantities of melanin, even if we are to take into consideration the last ice age.
African Exodus: The origins of Modern Humanity, Chris Stringer & Robin McKie, Page 118. African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity - Chris Stringer, Robin McKie - Google Books
African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity: Amazon.co.uk: Stringer, Chris, McKie, Robin: 9780224037716: Books
DNA: The Secret Of Life, James Watson, page 241. DNA: The Secret of Life : James D. Watson : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The Eve-olution of HumaniTree cont...
From the 1500s onwards, skin colour was being constructed under the paradigm of inferior and superior, not from a scientific perspective but, rather, from a political hegemonic colonial viewpoint, which went on to dominate all disciplines and sciences in the Western world we live in. Now known as pseudo-science, skin colour and so-called races has nothing to do with inferior or superior cognition of an individual – skin colour or the lack of melanin is related to an inherited trait, which is connected to the shades of colour we gain from our parents.
Today, with DNA we are now being taught there is no such things as races – there is only one race and that is the human race, which makes humankind more closely related than being distant, which we can now categorise as the monogenetic group – whereby the polygenetic theories of the colonial past does not hold up, owing to scientific studies of genes and relatedness of various groups of people. When Mitochondrial Eve’s children left Africa to populate the rest of the world, they would have had to have left the continent of Africa with their dark skin. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia are believed to have inhabited that continent from about 60,000 years ago, so between other continents, skin tones and shades of complexion would have been no different to those living in Africa, for hundreds and thousands of years.
The first modern humans who migrated out of Africa almost certainly had dark skin, as do their descendants in Australia and the relict populations who still survive at points in between… it’s possible that for many thousands of years all modern humans outside Africa, as well as those inside, had black skin. So, what research is telling us, when Mitochondrial Eve’s children left Africa and went into Arabia and Asia, they still retained their dark complexion. Even when they entered Europe some 45,000 years ago they would also have retained black skin and other African features.
Skin colour for our prehistoric ancestors had a biological significance, which has nothing to do with being superior if you are white, fair, or light complexion – unless it was to do with its relationship to the sun and its protection, which is related to the production of melanin. Dark skin is rich in the pigment, melanin, protecting deeper layers of skin from sunburn and skin cancer. In sunny places, it seems reasonable to assume that natural selection would act to conserve genes that make skin dark, as many mutations producing pale skin would be a disadvantage, which shows the importance of climate and skin tones along with the production of vitamin D, which is necessary for bone development a protection from the sun rays.
Before The Dawn: Recovering the Lost History Of Our Ancestors, Nicholas Wade, page 121. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors: Amazon.co.uk: Wade, Nicholas, Sklar, Alan: 9781400102327: Books.
The Incredible Human journey, Alice Roberts, page 98.
Evolution is not about progression, it is about adaptation'
What we can ascertain from the research into mitochondrial DNA, is that we are one human family who have migrated around the world over the thousands of years we have lived on the planet. Some of you may ask the question, I have focused a lot on Africans, dark skin, and their descendants; but what must be concluded is that all universal ethnic groups are joined biologically and genetically, as one human family, and this is the most important part of this paper. Some of you may question if Black, dark, or brown people are the mothers and fathers of humanity, then where does white, fair or European skin tone come from?
During the making of the film, Humanitree, in which I was one of the lead research consultants on this documentary project, we spoke to various doctors, professors and scientist from around the world in many different academic fields, who proclaimed through their own research techniques that Europeans and Caucasians, as a cluster group, with their present phenotypes are no older than 8,000 years on the planet, which shows us that the history of the world and prehistory in the upper palaeolithic period had only one type of people, which many Europeans are grudgingly accepting under the New World religion of science and technology.
This does not mean, by any means, that dark skin people are more superior than whites – what it shows is that the darker races are older and created the oldest and earliest cultures and civilisations in world history, and this is why timelines and dates are important, to put things into a historical perspective owing to the deliberate falsification the colonists engaged in during the periods of enslavement, colonisation and imperialism. This is the beginning of de-colonisation for the New Welsh Curriculum in all the Areas of Learning and Experiences, which will now be mandatory.
When we, in the Urban Circle team, interviewed prospective scholars for the Humanitree documentary which went on for over one year, we mentioned the phenotype of Cheddar Man – the oldest Brit to be discovered, which showed him looking very much like an Australian Aborigine or Black Indian with blue eyes. We found, to our surprise, when they spoke about their prehistoric research in Europe, their data gave them the following: Cheddar Man’s descendants didn’t evolve to have lighter skin.
Rather, the genetic line of Cheddar Man, and of a similarly dark-skinned continental European hunter-gatherer, fizzled out and was replaced by that of light-skinned descendants of the people of the Russian steppe, around 4,500 years ago. Less than 10 per cent of the DNA of modern Europeans comes from hunter-gatherers of that time… people from the Russian steppe had light skin and brown eyes, while Western European hunter-gatherers had dark skin and blue eyes. When it comes to skin colour, full genome DNA analysis suggests there were at least three variants in the Europe of 5,000-plusmyears ago: the dark skins, dark curly hair and blue eyes of the Western European hunter-gatherers, such as Cheddar man, the light skins, brown eyes and dark hair of the first farmers who migrated from Anatolia, and the pale skins, brown eyes and mainly dark (but also blond) hair of the pastoralists from the Russian steppe. The latter two groups largely replaced the dark-skinned hunter-gatherers, although blue eyes might be one hunter-gatherer genetic trait that has survived.
Skin Deep: Journey in The Science of Race, Gavin Evans, Page 100
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