A Tale of Two Discoveries

“The science is settled.” This is the motto of those who do not understand that science is never “settled.” Science is not dogma or theology; it is a series hypotheses tested and retested over time. Rather than settle, science changes.

Biased uses of science were evident after British archaeologists unveiled a facial reconstruction of “Cheddar Man,” the Ice-Age skeleton discovered in 1903 in Gough’s Cave in the English county of Somerset. The DNA-based reconstruction shows him with blue eyes, long, curly hair, and dark skin. The Guardian noted that if a Briton who lived 10,000 years ago had dark skin, it means that “the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought — and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.”

Aarathi Prasad, a writer of South Asian extraction, expressed a more personal view in an article called “Thanks to Cheddar Man, I feel more comfortable as a brown Briton.” “I grew up being told that a prerequisite for our national identity was white skin,” she wrote, adding, “that prejudice has been proven false.”

Some headlines were worse. “Cheddar Man is ‘black!’ Another racial panic for white supremacists” (Slate), “How ‘Cheddar Man’ flips British identity” (CNN), “Dark-skinned Cheddar Man is hard cheese for the racist morons of the far right, says Brian Reade” (The Daily Mirror). The Independent suggested that far-right leaflets should be rewritten to say: “This country should be for BRITISH people with pure BRITISH blood, for the true BLACK race, not these white immigrants that have come over here diluting our British genes.”

This is bad logic. Whatever the color of Cheddar Man’s skin, he was an ancestor of many present-day Britons, who are today white. Arabs, North Africans, South Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans have nothing in common with Cheddar Man beyond skin that is darker than that of present-day Europeans. They do not have a claim on Britain.

The Negritos of Asia have black skin and curly hair, as do the Dravidians of southern India and Sri Lanka. No one says they therefore have a claim on Africa.

In contrast to the reaction to the news about Cheddar Man, there were no political conclusions drawn from a different study, which found that half of all European men are related to King Tut. The iGENEA center in Zurich, Switzerland, concluded that King Tutankhamun and the royal family of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty belonged to haplogroup R1b1a2. At least 50 percent of all Western European men belong to this haplogroup, which means they share a common ancestor with King Tut. Not even one percent of modern-day Egyptians belong to haplogroup R1b1a2.

This finding is in keeping with another recent discovery:  Ancient Egyptians had more in common genetically with Europeans and Turks than with black Africans. This study, which examined Egyptian mummies dating from 1400 BC to 400 AD, found that the ancient Egyptians were genetically similar to ancient peoples of the Levant (Philistines, Canaanites, and Assyrians) and to Neolithic Europeans. This should not be a surprise: Some Egyptian mummies have red or light-colored hair. Today’s Egyptians have some sub-Saharan alleles, but this mixing appears to have begun only about 700 years ago.

We do not expect to see articles gleefully announcing that “We wuz kangs” has been proven wrong.