{"id":73593,"date":"2012-08-27T22:55:05","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T06:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=18031"},"modified":"2012-08-27T22:55:05","modified_gmt":"2012-08-28T06:55:05","slug":"europeans-got-less-shaded-in-stages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/08\/27\/europeans-got-less-shaded-in-stages\/","title":{"rendered":"Europeans got less shaded in stages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/08\/170px-Nicole_kidman3cropped.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-18033\" title=\"170px-Nicole_kidman3cropped\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/08\/170px-Nicole_kidman3cropped.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"170\" height=\"218\" \/><\/a><em><strong>The Pith:<\/strong> 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A new paper in <em>Molecular Biology and Evolution<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/mbe.oxfordjournals.org\/content\/early\/2012\/08\/25\/molbev.mss207.abstract\">The timing of pigmentation lightening in Europeans<\/a>, is rather interesting. It&#8217;s important because skin pigmentation has been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/16857289\">one of the major successes<\/a> of the first age of human genomics. In 2002 we really didn&#8217;t know the nature of normal human variation in skin color in terms of specific genes (basically, we knew about <em>MC1R<\/em>). This is what Armand Leroi observed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0670031100\/geneexpressio-20\">Mutants<\/a> in 2005, wondering about our ignorance of such a salient trait. Within a few years though Leroi&#8217;s contention was out of date (in fact, while <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0670031100\/geneexpressio-20\">Mutants<\/a>\u00a0was going to press <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/16357253\">it became <\/a>out of date)\u00a0. <strong>Today we do know the genetic architecture of pigmentation.<\/strong> This is why <a href=\"http:\/\/gedmatch.com\/\">GEDmatch<\/a> can predict that my daughter&#8217;s eyes will be light brown from just her SNPs (they are currently hazel). This genomic yield was facilitated by the fact that pigmentation seems to be a trait where most human variation is &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.<br \/>\nA new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, The timing of pigmentation lightening in E&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,30,713,566,2114,2115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy","category-human-evolution","category-human-evolutionary-genetics","category-pigmentation","category-slc24a5","category-slc45a2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73593"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73656,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73593\/revisions\/73656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}