Comments by "Iain Mc" (@iainmc9859) on "Irish DNA: What is the Genetic History of Ireland?" video.

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  5. According to David Reich, DNA analysis has shown that Western Hunter Gatherers were typically dark skinned, dark haired, and blue eyed.[41] The dark skin was due to their Out-of-Africa origin (all Homo sapiens populations having had initially dark skin), while the blue eyes were the result of a variation in their OCA2 gene, which caused iris depigmentation.[42] Archaeologist Graeme Warren has said that their skin color ranged from olive to black, and speculated that they may have had some regional variety of eye and hair colors.[43] This is strikingly different from the distantly related eastern hunter-gatherers (EHG)—who have been suggested to be light-skinned, brown-eyed or blue eyed and dark-haired or light-haired.[44] Two WHG skeletons with incomplete SNPs, La Braña and Cheddar Man, are predicted to have had dark or dark to black skin, whereas two other WHG skeletons with complete SNPs, "Sven" and Loschbour man, are predicted to have had dark or intermediate-to-dark and intermediate skin, respectively.[45][26][b] Spanish biologist Carles Lalueza-Fox said the La Braña-1 individual had dark skin, "although we cannot know the exact shade."[47] According to a 2020 study, the arrival of Early European Farmers (EEFs) from western Anatolia from 8500 to 5000 years ago, along with Western Steppe Herders during the Bronze Age, caused a rapid evolution of European populations towards lighter skin and hair.[42] Admixture between hunter-gatherer and agriculturist populations was apparently occasional, but not extensive.[48] Evolution of Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic phenotypes in Eurasia. Dark-skinned western hunter-gatherers resided in Western Europe, and expanded to some extent towards north and eastern Europe.[42] Some authors have expressed caution regarding skin pigmentation reconstructions: Quillen et al. (2019) acknowledge studies that generally show that "lighter skin color was uncommon across much of Europe during the Mesolithic", including studies regarding the “dark or dark to black” predictions for the Cheddar Man, but warn that "reconstructions of Mesolithic and Neolithic pigmentation phenotype using loci common in modern populations should be interpreted with some caution, as it is possible that other as yet unexamined loci may have also influenced phenotype."[49] Geneticist Susan Walsh at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, who worked on Cheddar Man project, said that "we simply don't know his skin colour".[50] German biochemist Johannes Krause stated that we do not know whether the skin color of Western European hunter-gatherers was more similar to the skin color of people from present-day Central Africa or people from the Arab region. It is only certain that they did not carry any known mutation responsible for the light skin in subsequent populations of Europeans.[51] A 2024 research into the genomic ancestry and social dynamics of the last hunter-gatherers of Atlantic France has stated that "phenotypically, we find some diversity during the Late Mesolithic in France", at which two of the WHG's sequenced in the study "likely had pale to intermediate skin pigmentation", but "most individuals carry the dark skin and blue eyes characteristic of WHGs" of the studied samples.[52] Cut and Paste from Wikipedia ... although they probably chatted over computers and tested samples like Scientists rather than stood around shipboard water fountains and interjected with a lack of any professional knowledge and training !
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