Posted on 02/15/2013 1:33:40 AM PST by Pharmboy
Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races.
Researchers have identified a mutation in a gene that confers several distinct traits to East Asians, including thicker hair.
The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded.
snip
The first of those sites to be studied contains the gene known as EDAR. Africans and Europeans carry the standard version of the gene, but in most East Asians, one of the DNA units has mutated.
Seeking to understand if the gene was the cause of thicker hair in East Asians with the variant gene, a team of researchers led by Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., decided to test the gene in mice, where its effects could be more easily explored.
...The Broad team engineered a strain of mice whose EDAR gene had the same DNA change as the East Asian version of EDAR.
When the mice grew up, the researchers found they did indeed have thicker hair shafts, confirming that the changed gene was the cause of East Asians’ thicker hair. But the gene had several other effects, they report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hunter gathering societies were/are pretty much content to feed themselves on a day to day, it’s the people that wanted more that developed agriculture.
Assume you have a village and the village is divide into six groups of equal numbers to hunt and gather food.
Every day the 6 groups go out and every day the 6 groups return each with some food, but 2 of the groups return every day with more food than the other 4 groups combined. Everyone gets an equal share.
When times are good there may not be a real problem, but when times are hard the 2 more productive groups will say
“we can provide enough food for ourselves but we can’t provide for the other 4 that don’t produce as much”.
The 2 more productive groups can stay and starve with the others or they can leave and feed themselves.
The 2 groups that leave will take with them the superior skills that made them more productive and pass these superior skills along.
Some in the 4 groups that are left might survive, but they do not have superior skills to pass along so their society stays stagnant.
The same thing is repeated over and over again, the more productive leave as a means of survival because they cannot survive and also provide for the non or if you prefer the less productive. When they leave their superior skills go with them.
Finally one day someone had the bright idea “instead of searching all over hells half acre for this plant that gives me seeds to eat everyday, I will gather extra seed and not eat them instead I will plant some of these seeds in one place so I know where they are” and bingo we had agriculture.
Here, read this. It varies, but many H-G societies DO store food.
Not sure about the incisors, but Native Americans are descended from Siberians.
Many doesn’t mean ALL. Don’t you know that, or is that above your level. It really doesn’t take a scientist to know that.
Some H-G in Africa after 100,000 years still don’t store any significant amount of food, what do you think people did before they left Africa for other parts?
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Thanks Pharmboy.Africans and Europeans carry the standard version of the gene, but in most East Asians, one of the DNA units has mutated.IOW, it wasn't a mutation, it was a boys-meet-girls story. |
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Smaller breasts ... than whose?
You Funny
Considering that civilization DID first emerge out of Africa (in ancient Egypt) as well as the Middle East (the "fertile crescent" of what is now Israel, Syria, Iraq, & Iran) which is right next to Africa...I don't see your point.
Yes, Africa in modern times--that is the last 400 years--has been a basket case. There has never been an one political entity controlling all, or even most of, Africa--as it's topography, including the world's biggest desert and some of the world's biggest rain forrests--doesn't exactly make unification easy, or even possible. The Meditaranian region, Europe, China--and the fertile crescent, are much more amenable for travel--and military/political control...i.e. empires, the topography which of course which has hosted many such empires...and civilization....and development, unlike much of the rest of the world, excepting of course, North America.
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