Most ancient Briton yet found was black-skinned, blue-eyed and clearly laughing at enraged Daily Mail comments about him

Ive met a few people with back skin and blue eyes. It’s stunning. Beautifull … Too bad it’s not expressed more.

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I read that Conan’s tribe was based upon welsh, irish and scottish warriors. I think there is a map of the Hyborian age superimposed over modern europe somewhere in Internet. Or was a map of Lord of the Rings?

And add some fuck the meddlesome boffins with their DNA and their changes of knowledge for seasoning.

Thank you, seriously, @beschizza, for taking the pain to klick and more so for saving me the pain of having to give the Mail page impressions.

I still need some mouthwash for me brain now. Where’s my Scotch? Oh, no, I know: I’ve got some Sullivan’s Cove somewhere left. To the Cheddar Man!

Oh, and obligs:
https://youtu.be/cWDdd5KKhts

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There’s also a dash of “This person came here after an ICE AGE!!! So climate change existed back then, so it’s nothing to do with human beings. TRUMP WAS RIGHT!!!”

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Nope. Ancestral trait is, to the best of my knowledge, heavy pigmentation. All sorts of primates with hair have this.

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Well, I am learning. Though I thought I have seen chimps with no hair and they are more of a neutral grey. Though yes, I know we aren’t direct decedents. It is pretty amazing what we can now glean thank to a few fragments and the DNA.

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Game of thrones

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I will probably eat it for arguing with a gif, but this is a rubbish notion of science and epistemology. “Truth” has very little status in science, which rarely claims to establish what is “true”, and usually claims to provide accurate models of the world. Even if we believe he’s talking about materialism, that the world “is as it is” and we are simply observing it, scientific knowledge is not the world, it is a description of the world based on expert consensus.

Perhaps what Tyson is claiming here is “the circle of experts has established a scientific consensus; you (the GIF reader) are not part of that circle, and therefore your belief or disbelief is immaterial to that consensus,” i.e., he is making a claim to authority on behalf of “scientists” and excluding “non-scientists”. But it would be foolish to claim that belief has no part in it, since the intuition of experts and their vague standards for what is considered credible evidence - the fundament of the consensus that forms scientific knowledge - certainly constitute “belief” in any useful meaning of that word.

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Or rather from a few fragments of DNA, give or take confidence intervals sometimes so large I could fit my last salary in it…

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They may be able to detect the mutation that results in white skin. Or absence of it in this case.

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Except for the natives of the americas, of course. They remained brown for some reason.

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If you’re British, you’ve reportedly got about a 10% chance of descending from this guy’s tribe.

My reading of the article was, that if your ancestry is white British, 10% of your genes would have come via Cheddar man’s group.

Due to maths, it is a virtual certainty that every person alive today has some degree of descent from this group.

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Oh yes! A lot of fictional places were created after Europe.

Believe it or not, there’s a very good explanation for that. The native American peoples residing around the latitude of Northern Europe (e.g. Inuit) traditionally consumed a diet heavy in fish oils, providing them all the Vitamin D they needed and obviating the reason that Northern Europeans became white.

Remember, the UK is around the same latitude as Hudson Bay, the Midwest is around the same latitude as Turkey, and the southernmost United States are around the same latitude as North Africa. It’s more of a mystery why Native Americans from the South aren’t darker.

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How things have changed.

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“Englishness” has always been a myth. The Angles and Saxons were immigrants too. Like the romans before them, and the norsemen after them.

I had an odd conversation in the US, where someone was complaining - to me - about immigrants, and I felt compelled to point out I was an immigrant too. The answer was “you know what I mean”. And that’s the whole problem in a nutshell - we know exactly what they mean.

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We don’t really have a clear idea of what they looked like. Nor too much else about them. There’s still an ongoing debate as to whether they were a Celtic culture or their own separate thing.

I think it’s safe to say the residents of Scotland were, by that point in history, already pale as Fuck. We’re talking about an iron age people we have some contemporaneous written references for (where in I don’t recall them being described as “dark”). We’ve got a pretty good idea that the other residents of the area were pale as Fuck. And there’s a lot less space and divergent evolution between Scottish people today and the picts. Than there is between the earliest identified modern human in Briton and the picts.

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