this is a really irresponsible article. not because it's wrong, exactly, but because it's completely speculative - and not in an academic sense. it's just "well, maybe white people come from asia". maybe they come from uranus.

or maybe it's completely ridiculous to think that a single dna sample describes the entirety of genetic diversity in western europe 7,000 years ago. maybe there was a gradient.

maybe it's actually even totally obvious that there was a gradient.

europe has never been entirely white in the historical era. most spaniards, italians and greeks are of a tanned complexion. this is a combination of genetic drift from the south and plasticity, rather than any kind of selection. to understand the plasticity look at a californian of scandinavian ancestry. pasty white? hardly. why think europe would or even could have been of a homogenous skin tone 10,000 years ago? there's an implicit purity myth underlying that. and, that's not a myth that required further debunking.

so, there was a gradient. they found somebody on one end of it. they'll find people on the other end of it as time goes on. and the understanding will be a continuity of high variation deep into the past, not implications about some kind of fantastical past that had these ideal types living in some abstracted racial purity.

in actuality, there's no such thing as white people - and no such thing as black people. there's a lot of people that exist in a spectrum. that is all.

it's interesting that he cites sforza, though, because his data really isn't consistent. what sforza demonstrates is what remains - to my knowledge - the dominant theory of the origin of caucasian peoples in general, namely that they developed in isolated packets on the other side of the ice sheets and moved south when the sheets started melting (not just into europe, but also into central and eastern asia. that creates a common light-skinned ancestor between europeans and both west and east asians dating to about 15000 years ago). he sees three general migrations. that first migration was starting around 10,000 years ago - enough time that it would have penetrated spain, but not eliminated all variation with skin type. but it was about superior hunting technology,not skin colour. as far as we know, spain has never been homogenous in regards to skin tone. ever. and it's always seen substantial migration coming from the south. the second migration came with agriculture, which moved near eastern peoples into europe. what colour these people were is an interesting question, but i think it's almost certain that they weren't white in the scandinavian sense. the third migration brought indo-european languages in through the dominance of horse domestication. we can isolate the indo-european homeland quite well to the area north of ukraine, which makes it seem as though they were probably white. there's some debate over whether that means pasty white or more of a turkish white.

so let's carefully understand what i just said. that's a movement of white people south, and then the replacement of those white people by "swarmy" people moving north from the middle east, followed by another movement of white peoples. that is to say that the dominant understanding of the migration of european peoples is not related to racial dominance or skin colour evolving to an environment (the vitamin d thing is bollocks), but to technological innovation. if skin colour had anything at all to do with it, it was merely coincidental.

but it moved back and forth. that's what i'm getting at: brown, white, tanned, white. and, again, that would have created a spectrum full of diversity, not something homogenous.

another place to see this variation is iran. skin colour has a wide spectrum in iran, because it's been invaded by many different peoples. but you'll note that there's no pattern regarding one colour being more dominant than the other. lighter skinned iranians defeated darker skinned elamites, then darker skinned arabs defeated the iranians, and lighter skinned turks and mongols defeated the arabs. today, they're all there in iran, all mixed up. so, there's a great amount of diversity.

where you see the homogeneity develop is only in areas with very small amounts of gene flow. that would include scandinavia, as well as central africa - but not eastern africa, where a gradient also exists.

so, we can drop the silliness. this discovery neither backs up the silly and blatantly racist idea that vitamin d absorption provides an evolutionary advantage (one would expect the inuit and eastern native americans to be pasty white, and yet they are not), nor does it demonstrate much of anything at all about the diversity of the population in spain 7000 years ago.

it's just one sample.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/07/where-did-white-people-come-from/

the way to abolish the perceived racial hierarchy isn't to wave it away with a lot of shoddy science.

it's simply to point out that the idea that white people have been dominant throughout history is nothing more than a myth in the first place.

similarly with the eyes...

finding a dark skinned person with blue eyes 7000 years ago doesn't say anything about where the mutation developed. it's just as plausible that it developed in central europe and drifted south as it did that it developed in africa and drifted north.

but, that offends american sensibilities regarding "inter-racial" offspring. there's an assumption that white and black could not have interbred. it's implicit, unstated - because it's perceived of as obvious.

but it's not obvious at all. and, yes, it's completely fucking racist.