"He was a short stocky man, with the high cheekbones and slightly oblique blue eyes of the Ladogan." (p. 73)
OK. I never noticed or queried the word, "Ladogan," before and am quite surprised by its meaning. Of course, "Ladogan" is a phenotype, not a "race."
Human beings will develop into different phenotypes in the future on Earth and, even more so, if they colonize other planets which they are just starting to do in this story. Reading sf, I have always been aware that the human race has taken different forms in the past and should take more in the future. (I now have to write "should," not "will.")
26 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
"Phenotypes" is yet another example of how richly varied Anderson's vocabulary was.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
"Ladogan" was the word that I quoted from PA. "Phenotype" was in the internet explaining "Ladogan."
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Got it. Dang! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Most phenotypes are climatic adaptations, sometimes exaggerated by isolation and genetic drift in small groups.
If the future continues the trend to movement and rapid communication, I would expect Earth to become gradually homogenized.
OTOH, genetic engineering is coming. Judging from hair-dye sales, there would be a hell of a lot more blonds if parents could pick the hue their kids would end up with... 8-).
That's not a new phenomenon either. People in Tuscany in 1500 looked pretty much like native-born Tuscans do now.
But if you look at Renaissance paintings -- ones with crowd scenes or the "Three Graces" or whatever, where the artist could pick -- you'd think they looked more like Norwegians.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It does seem rather puzzling to me, tho, why blond blue eyed "Nordic" looks should be so popular with so many different kinds of people. So much so that when genetic engineering becomes cheap and practical, many parents may well choose such a "style" for their children.
No parents wants their children to be ugly or even excessively plain, but the idea of homogenizing the entire human race into Nordic blondes does seem extreme!
Ad astra! Sean
But there will be many black people wanting to preserve and enhance their look as well.
Paul: if you've lived in Africa, you become conscious that there's at least as much variation in looks as there is in Europe -- by the time I left Kenya, I could make a pretty good guess at whether someone was, say, a Somali or a Kikuyu (or Kamba, they look very similar) or a Maasai. They're as different-looking as Swedes and Sardinians.
Sean: "blond-preference" is very old in European culture. Even Greeks and Romans were impressed by the -physical- appearance of the northern barbarians, which they thought "godlike", though they also thought they were dumb as a bucket of rocks and lacking in elementary self-control.
And preference for pale skin is also common in East Asia. "Bihaku" means "pale beauty" in Japanese, and there are old Japanese sayings like "in rice and women, the whiter the better" or "pale skin hides the seven faults".
This is probably because it was associated with aristocratic women, who didn't have to go outside and work in the sun.
You get the same thing in India.
I was in Bangalore for a friend's wedding a few years ago, and one thing you noticed immediately was that the models in ads on billboards were all northwestern-Indian types, tall and relatively fair, even though the local population(*) were mostly short and very dark.
The shop assistants in high-end stores, particularly clothing and other personal goods, all looked like the people in the advertisements, too.
And in the personal ads in the newspapers, "seeking pale bride" was pretty common.
You find that in Indian literature going back a long way, too.
In both Europe and India that probably goes all the way back to the first Indo-Europeans, who apparently from the DNA research looked rather like Lithuanians or Belorussians -- tall, fair-skinned, often blond (one of their ancestral groups has the first known case of the blondism mutation) with broad foreheads, straight noses, high cheekbones, and defined jaws.
Rather like a young Vladimir Putin, in fact... 8-). Except taller.
(*) there are people from all over India in Bangalore since it's a thriving tech center, but the base population is Kannada, a Dravidian-speaking group.
"Non Angli sed angeli."
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Of course, albeit I did think of grotesque, pathetic examples like the late Michael Jackson, who began as a normal looking black American and ended his days a parody of a similarly normal looking white (thru cosmetic surgery).
Mr. Stirling: I agree, I have noticed how favored the preference in literature, art, popular culture, etc., for Nordic/pale beauty looks has been in India/the far East. I fully expect genetic engineering to make that preference even stronger.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I forgot to add I would not have thought of a thug like Vladimir Putin as a chick magnet! In my admittedly biased opinion, I've thought of him as having more of a REPTILOID look.
Ad astra! Sean
The preference for pale skin is odd in a way.
Pale skin is only an advantage in high latitude cloudy regions & then only if dietary vitamin D is hard to get. I recently heard of evidence that northern Europeans were dark skinned before they took up agriculture.
Elsewhere dark skin to avoid sunburn etc. is a prety major advantage. If anything, we should be geneticly engineering people to be dark skinned. I'm not aware of any advantages to various hair & eye colors so those should be left to chance.
I'm thinking in terms using the 'Heinlein solution' to the ethics of genetic engineering. http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/01/robert-heinlein-and-looking-beyond-this.html
As for 'races': I read "Who We Are & How We Got Here" by David Reich, about recent discoveries about ancient DNA. One thing I recall from the book is that the DNA evidence shows that there were distinct geographic subpopulations that might be called 'races' that made genetic contribution to many existing populations, but which don't exist now.
Jim: yes, he called them "ghost populations".
They're one reason that early DNA research on Amerindians kept giving odd results -- showing "European" admixture in unlikely situations.
It turns out that there's a ghost population, called "ancient north eurasians", who contributed heavily to both the ancestral migrants over the Bering Strait and into the New World (about 1/3) and to the Yamnaya who were the proto-Indo-European speakers (about 50%) and who are a large part of the European DNA background.
So Amerindians and Europeans, especially North Europeans, turn out to have a large element of common ancestry.
JIm: the original hunter-gatherers of western Europe were dark-skinned (and often blue-eyed) but they have only a very faint genetic inheritance in the modern populations.
What happened was that in the early Neolithic farmers from Anatolia colonized Europe, directly through Greece and the Balkans, and along the Mediterranean and then Atlantic coasts.
As they went, they mixed the western hunter-gatherers, but only a bit -- it was more of a population replacement, generally.
Then in the late Neolithic/Copper Age the Yamnaya spread west into the Danube valley, and then from there into what's now Poland and Germany, where they mixed with the locals (themselves a mixture of Anatolian-derived farmers and lccal hunter-gagherers) in a 75-25% mix, formed the Corded War/Battle Axe culture, and then expanded explosively east and west and south, all the way from Ireland to beyond the Urals (and down into South Asia).
So modern Europeans are basically a mixture, in different proportions, of Neolithic farmers and the Yamnaya, with traces of hunter-gather; all in different proportions in different parts of the continent.
So did your reading tell you where the pale skin mutation arose & if my impression that it spread due to lack of vitamin D in grains is correct?
Kaor, Jim!
In a lighter vein, there's also Anderson's amusing speculation in "The Long Remembering" that blue eyes and blond hair was inherited from mating with Neanderthals!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Neanderthals did have genes for low melanin production -- they were pale-skinned, and probably had a lot of red hair.
Alas for Poul's joke, we probably didn't get those from Neanderthals; the mutations which produce those phenotypes in modern humans are similar to but distinct from the ones in humans.
(But there probably -were- Neanderthal-human hybrids with light hair color; they just didn't pass that down.)
The KITLG allele is the mutation that produces blondism in Europe -- the Australian and New Guinea/Melanesia examples are due to a quite different mutation.
The oldest example of this KITLG allele mutation comes from an "Ancient North Eurasian" dating to about 17,000 years ago.
It spread into Europe with the Yamnaya, who were about 50% Ancient North Eurasian.
Note that this hair color was not originally associated with blue eyes -- the typical Yamnaya pattern was light hair and hazel or brown eyes.
You still see a lot of that in Eastern Europe.
Light eyes seem to have arisen independently, in Mesolithic Europe, where people were darker-skinned -- hence the brown-skinned, blue-eyed phenotype which was common then as revealed by ancient DNA analysis.
When the Yamnaya moved into northern Europe, they picked up genes for light-colored eyes from the locals, then spread them widely through the secondary expansion of the Corded Ware/Battle Axe culture, which was genetically a mix of Yamnaya, Anatolian-derived Neolithic farmers, and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers.
Note that the expansion of the Corded Ware was more widespread than that of the original Yamnaya; the actual Yamnaya culture never got further than the Danube (and possibly the Balkans) while the Corded Ware produced migrations that reached from Ireland to western Siberia, and then from there into South Asia.
As to skin color, apparently ancient Africans had moderately dark skin, which evolved towards an olive shade in the Middle East; that was the color brought to Europe during the Neolithic migration.
The very deep black color you find most commonly in the south Sudan is a more recent development -- starting about 500K years ago.
European really pale skin is due to a "depigmentation gene", SLC24A5, which apparently got to Europe about 6000 years ago (the Yamnaya again) and became more and more common subsequently by natural selection.
It's also present in other areas -- East Africa, for example -- but not in the same proportions, because of the greater selectice pressure in northerly latitudes.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Dang! Considering how I rather like the Neanderthals, I'm a bit regretful at having to abandon notions of blond hair and blue eyes coming from them! (Smiles)
Fascinating, your comments about the Yamnaya, who were the proto-Indo-Europeans. And I had not realized the deep black skin color of many Africans south of Egypt came from a fairly recent mutation.
Ad astra! Sean
Thanks Mr. Stirling for the information.
Sean: where is this greeting 'Kaor' from? An Anderson story & I forgot that detail?
Jim,
"Kaor" is the Barsoomian (Martian) greeting in ERB's John Carter books. "Kaor" also gives consent. Thus, it means both "Hail" and "Aye."
Paul.
Kaor, Jim!
Paul beat me to giving the explanation he gave. I like ERB's Barsoom stories so much I took a fancy to using "Kaor" in real life and started using it. It's just me being a fanboy nerd! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Thanks.
I never read the Barsoom books.
Maybe I should give them a try.
Jim,
Read them in order, starting with A PRINCESS OF MARS.
Paul.
Kaor, Jim!
I agree with Paul! And, keep in mind ERB wrote scientiFANTASTIES, so be patient with the scientific absurdities to be found in his Barsoom stories.
Ad astra! Sean
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