Blue eyes came before light skin

Adam Khor

Or so they say.

http://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-genome-sequenced.html

Wibbs

MIght shed light on one of the niggling questions I've had for a while. Namely the idea that Europeans went white soon after leaving Africa, yet native Tasmanians who had been living in a climate not unlike Europe for around the same length of time(if not slightly longer) stayed very dark. The farming selection pressure may be the key to this. The Tasmanians never took up agriculture and stayed hunter gatherers. Another angle to take would be to look at the ages involved with the selection for pale skin in Asians. This took a different evolutionary route, so if it shows a similar timescale involving the advent of agriculture then that pretty much nails it as the(main) selection pressure.

Against the agriculture pressure you have Neandertals. They were hunter gatherers and their diet would have been pretty high in vitamin D yet the genetics seem to show them as pale. Different selection pressure? Or maybe because they had lived in higher latitudes for so much longer(200,000 plus years) compared to us that it evolved as a vitamin D thang but more slowly? IE if we never came up with agriculture would European and Asians slowly turned pale anyway? Agriculture just sped up the process?

Adam Khor

I feel dumb asking but, why agriculture, exactly?

Wibbs

The idea seems to be that the grain rich diet of farmers lacks for vitamin D so this put selective pressure on choosing lighter skin to absorb it from the sun.

It's a neat idea, but I'd like to see any Asian populations results in the mix.