Category Archives: Pigmentation

The above figure is from The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe. At the time I noted it because the Bell Beaker people who arrived ~2500 BC […]

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One of the first posts on this blog relating to archaeogenetics involved an essay by me involving reflections on the fact that a particular Y chromosomal haplogroup, N1c (N3a now), had a peculiar distribution which ranged from Siberia to Finland. The argument, at the time, was whether it was a lineage which moved east to […]

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Skin color is important and interesting. It is important because people think it is important. Humans often classify each other by complexion, and it has a high social importance in many cultures. This tendency starts at a very young age. When my children are toddlers they’ve all misidentified photographs of black American males with a […]

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Last fall Crawford  et al., Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations, was published in Science and made a huge splash. As I’ve been saying recently, and most people agree, much of the remaining “low hanging fruit” in human evolutionary genomics, and to some extent, human medical genetics, is going to be in Africa on […]

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Very interesting abstract at the ASHG meeting of a plenary presentation,Novel loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations. This is clearly the work that one of the comments on this weblog alluded to last summer during SMBE. There I was talking about the likely introduction of the derived SLC24A5 variant to the Khoisan peoples […]

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In the recent paper, Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure, there was a section natural selection. Since my post on the paper was already very long I didn’t address this dynamic. But now I want to highlight this section: The functional category that displays the most extreme allele frequency differentiation between present day San and ancient […]

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The golden of pigmentation genetics started in 2005 with SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans. Prior to that pigmentation genetics was really to a great extent coat color genetics, done in mice and other organisms which have a lot of pelage variation. Of course there was work on humans, mostly […]

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One of the secondary issues which cropped up with Nina Davuluri winning Miss America is that it seems implausible that someone with her complexion would be able to win any Indian beauty contest. A quick skim of Google images “Miss India” will make clear the reality that I’m alluding to. The Indian beauty ideal, especially […]

The post Selection happens; but where, when, and why? appeared first on Gene Expression.

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One of the secondary issues which cropped up with Nina Davuluri winning Miss America is that it seems implausible that someone with her complexion would be able to win any Indian beauty contest. A quick skim of Google images “Miss India” will make clear the reality that I’m alluding to. The Indian beauty ideal, especially […]

The post Selection happens; but where, when, and why? appeared first on Gene Expression.

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The Pith: the evolution of lighter skin is complex, and seems to have occurred in stages. The current European phenotype may date to the end of the last Ice Age.
A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, The timing of pigmentation lightening in E…

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Michelle points me to this article in The Lost Angeles Times, The Colors of the Family: I was holding my 1-year-old, ambling about downtown with some friends. White friends. She must have thought my boy belonged to one of them. There’s a simple explanation: I’m black but my son, Ashe, is white. At least he […]

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Dienekes and Maju recently pointed to a paper, Contrasting signals of positive selection in genes involved in human skin color variation from tests based on SNP scans and resequencing, in Investigative Genetics. Skin color is an interesting trait because it’s one of the big “wins” in human genomics over the past 10 years. To a great […]

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I was pointed today to a piece in the BBC titled What makes a mixed race twin white or black?. The British media seems to revisit this topic repeatedly. There are perhaps three reasons I can offer for this. First, it tends toward sensationalism. Even though the BBC is relatively staid, when it comes to […]

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I was pointed today to a piece in the BBC titled What makes a mixed race twin white or black?. The British media seems to revisit this topic repeatedly. There are perhaps three reasons I can offer for this. First, it tends toward sensationalism. Even though the BBC is relatively staid, when it comes to […]

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Sort of and possible. I’ve been talking about this for years, and Greg Cochran points me to an abstract at the human genetics conference referenced earlier. Novel coding variation at TYRP1 explains a large proportion of variance in the hair colou…

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John Hawks illustrates what can be gained at the intersection of old data and analysis and new knowledge, Quote: Boyd on New World pigmentation clines:
I’m using some statistics out of William Boyd’s 1956 printing of Genetics and the Races of Man[1]. It gives a good accounting of blood group data known more than fifty years […]

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Recently I was looking for images of the alpine biomes of the New Guinea highlands* and stumbled onto some intriguing, though not entirely surprising, set of photographs of individuals from Papua New Guinea. They were noteworthy because they manifested the conventional Melanesian physical type, but their hair had a blonde cast to it. For example, […]

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17/17
Razib Khan