Thursday, January 1, 2026

Early Christianity, Platonic Philosophy and Biological Annihilation

 https://www.academia.edu/145707778/Platonic_philosophy_Early_Christianity_and_Biological_Annihilation_Ode_to_former_M_I_T_History_Professor_David_F_Noblehttps://www.academia.edu/145707778/Platonic_philosophy_Early_Christianity_and_Biological_Annihilation_Ode_to_former_M_I_T_History_Professor_David_F_Noble

"many Europeans kept the dark skins of their African ancestors well within the Bronze & Iron ages"

 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502158122

 We then applied that protocol to 348 ancient genomes from Eurasia, describing how skin, eye, and hair color evolved over the past 45,000 y. The shift toward lighter pigmentations turned out to be all but linear in time and place, and slower than expected, with half of the individuals showing dark or intermediate skin colors well into the Bronze and Iron ages.

 We found the earliest instance of light skin color in the Swedish Mesolithic, but it comes from only one sample in >50. Things changed afterward, but very slowly, so that only in the Bronze Age did the frequency of light skins equal that of dark skins in Europe; during much of prehistory, most Europeans were dark-skinned.

 the spread of early Neolithic farmers from Anatolia is known to have profoundly changed the genetic makeup of populations (30), to the point that some authors speak of “population turnover,” e.g., in the British Isles (13) and in Denmark (24). What we observed for pigmentation traits appears to be, in part, a consequence of that massive migration. Actually, the transition to food production also led to an increase in infectious disease and to a poorer diet (see, e.g., ref. 31), but once in the new territories, immigrating farmers had two evolutionary advantages over their hunting-gathering counterparts. By farming and animal herding they increased the amount of available food, and had a skin phenotype fit for the lower levels of UV radiation.

 Even under reduced UV radiation, then, food availability was a factor. Some hunting and gathering populations could still obtain sufficient vitamin D from dietary sources, such as fish and game. Only when farming settlements got larger and the fauna was depleted, pale skin colors replaced for good the dark phenotypes.