Archaeology as Ideology: Ancient Britons were Not “Black”! By Brian Simpson

     The new marvel Black Panther movie, with a largely all-Back cast, has been given a 100 percent rating by critics (now dropping to 99 percent), making it the greatest movie ever produced in human cimematic history – according to the politically correct:
  https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/black_panther_2018/

     After all, if critics of the movie can be depicted as “racist,’” well, how can one lose:
  https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Alt-Right-Trolls-Try-to-Tank-Black-Panther-Score-on-Rotten-Tomatoes-20180202-0003.html 

     No doubt, like other movies such as the Fantastic Four reboot, and the reception of the new Star Wars movie in China, ticket sales will tell:
  http://comicbook.com/starwars/2018/01/12/star-wars-the-last-jedi-chinese-box-office-poor-disappointing/ 
  http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/02/10/twitter-freak-negative-black-panther-movie-review/

     However, the latest big news in the political correctness stakes comes this week with release of a study which has concluded that the first Britons had black skin and blue eyes:
  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/first-modern-britons-dark-black-skin-cheddar-man-dna-analysis-reveals
  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html?utm_source=tw-image-post-20180207-lh&utm_medium=social&utm 
  https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12960 

     Our political correctness meter should start screaming when we see statements like this attached to the “research”: 

“The historical perspective that you get just tells you that things change, things are in flux, and what may seem as a cemented truth that people who feel British should have white skin, through time is not at all something that is an immutable truth. It has always changed and will change.”

     Then we have: ““People will be surprised, and maybe it will make immigrants feel a bit more involved in the story. And, maybe it gets rid of the idea that you have to look a certain way to be from somewhere. We are all immigrants.” By this time our pc meter would have blown a fuse! Some media outlets, despite their joy in the claim that aboriginal Britons were Black, hence “justifying” unending immigration, did pause to note that there was a 76 percent probability that Cheddar man had “dark” skin, which is not to say “black” skin.

     These terms are vague and not scientific at all. The core argument is that there are some genetic markers linked to reduced pigmentation in the skin, but Cheddar Man had “ancestral” versions of these genes. From that premise it is concluded that Cheddar Man would have had “dark” skin, because of the “ancestral” markers.

     The reasoning here is clearly circular nd unjustified, because it is only by looking at existing populations that the conclusion has been reached that these markers are markers for lightish skin. But, for all we know today, that may not have been so in the past: the fine molecular pathways to skin colour are unknown. Thus, it may well be that instead of showing that Cheddar Man had black skin, the study was really a refutation of the accepted skin tone marker evidence.

     It is an assumption that the ancestral alleles generate black skin, rather than a health tan, or even light skin, because, of course there is a graduation in colours. There is an unnerving assumption that just because some crazy idea has alleged genetic backing that it must be true, where molecular genetic techniques are fallible as anything else in science, and also based on prior philosophical and methodological assumptions:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyfWZZ7uPuE&feature=youtube

     There have been comments about this alleged genetic discovery at various Alt Right sites:
  http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2018/02/07/science-discovers-that-original-brits-were-negroes-with-blue-eyes/ 
  https://alt-right-news.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/first-briton-revealed-to-have-mullet.html

     The best critique, in my opinion was at:
  http://www.amerika.org/science/blackwashing-english-history/ where, apart from putting the study in its overt politically correct context, it was noted that the claims have been made before, namely that Cheddar Man was  part of the Mesolithic Western hunter gatherers, who allegedly had darker skin that Europeans of today:
  http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/science-european-hunter-gatherers-01722.html

     Supposing that Cheddar Man had “African” versions of the genes determining lightish skin does not mean much, since Cheddar Man could have been, a “ breakaway from a more ancient population of hunter-gatherers. These breakaways, who went south and lived in warm climates, naturally developed darker skin because otherwise they would have all perished from skin cancer.” In other words, the research team has looked at their data with the bias of modern political correctness.

     The deeper question to be asked about this research finding is that they are assuming that Nordic features are atomistic and that black skin, an adaptation for hot sunny climates, can just be genetically slung together with features like blue eyes. But, blue eyes are not a random feature, but are associated with colder climates. Morgan Worthy in Eye Color, Sex and Race: Keys to Human and Animal Behavior, (Droke House, Anderson, 1974), presented a large amount of evidence to show the evolutionary significance of colour, and that eye colour is associated with various behavioural differences.

     By way of summary: “Dark-eyed animals, human and nonhuman, specialize in behaviors that require sensitivity, speed and reactive responses; light-eyed animals, human and nonhuman, specialize in behaviors that require hesitation, inhibition and self-paced responses.” (p. 11) Worthy examined sports performance, but there is extensive evidence for the behaviour differences associated with eye colour in animals. Hence, eye colour is not an arbitrary genetic atom that can be flung together with other incompatible characteristics such as black skin.

     The very environmental conditions that produced the evolutionary adaptation of black skin, would be contrary to the production of blue eyes. Individuals would be likely to get occular diseases which would have eliminated them by natural selection. As the hypothesis is inconsistent with a larger body of evidence and theory, the blue-eyed African Briton hypothesis, if it can be called that, should be rejected.

     In an earlier news cycle, another paper was advertised to have put the final nails into the races-exist coffin:
   http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/11/science.aan8433

     Here is the abstract:

“Despite the wide range of skin pigmentation in humans, little is known about its genetic basis in global populations. Examining ethnically diverse African genomes, we identify variants in or near SLC24A5, MFSD12, DDB1, TMEM138, OCA2 and HERC2 that are significantly associated with skin pigmentation. Genetic evidence indicates that the light pigmentation variant at SLC24A5 was introduced into East Africa by gene flow from non-Africans. At all other loci, variants associated with dark pigmentation in Africans are identical by descent in southern Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations. Functional analyses indicate that MFSD12encodes a lysosomal protein that affects melanogenesis in zebrafish and mice, and that mutations in melanocyte-specific regulatory regions near DDB1/TMEM138 correlate with expression of UV response genes under selection in Eurasians.”

     That this allegedly shows that races do not exist, was embraced by conservative “muh America” sites such as the otherwise good, Natural News.com:
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2017-11-27-its-all-bogus-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-black-person-or-a-white-person-all-racist-arguments-implode-under-weight-of-surprising-genetic-science.html
who echoed the same line taken by The New York Times:
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/skin-color-race.html

     The research is supposed to “dispel a biological concept of race,” because there are eight genetic variants in four regions of the human genome which influence pigmentation, making skin either lighter or darker, but these genes are scattered across the globe, so that there can be light skinned hunter-gatherers in Botswana, and Europe, hence colour is meaningless. This is just a bs argument, because variation does not prove non-existence, a clear logical fallacy. It does not show that native Nordics of Scandinavia are Africans, or that their skin colour is an arbitrary genetic feature.

     In fact, once one reads the article, it is still accepted that light skin is of evolutionary benefit in the colder northern climates, but probably arose from natural selection of the mixed genetic skin characteristics of our distant forebears. Thus, the dark skinned Australian Aborigines had an evolutionary advantage from having dark skin, but they did not get this skin colour from random genetic mutations in Australia, but rather because an original race of people with various skin colours populated the land, and those with dark skin had a selection advantage.

     This hardly shows that races do not exist, or that skin colour is irrelevant in race classification. There is simply more to the notion of race than skin colour precisely because there are variations, but this has been know for centuries. Only in a politically correct environment, where “white’ (read Nordic European) people are under attack, would these sorts of arguments surface. After all, the ideology is not being used to deconstruct blackness, and affirmative action programs because “blacks don’t exist.” Race hate laws will not be repealed because they suit the N.O.W agenda.

     The philosophical assumption made in these and similar articles, such as this one saying that there is no such thing as a “pure” European:
  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/theres-no-such-thing-pure-european-or-anyone-else is to apply a higher ontological standard to race than anything else, and to conclude because of vagueness that race does not exist, that there are no Europeans at all because of mixing in the past. But, apply this argument to everything: there are no material objects in existence because they too are vague:
  http://metaphysicist.com/articles/Unger_Why_No_People.pdf 
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/40040784

     There would be no water on earth because all water is “impure.” What is important is not any mystical notion of “purity,” but genetic consistency, as Brett Stevens rightly has noted:

“Whoever the Germans are, they are a consistent continuum of genetics, as are other Europeans, which we can see through genetic maps of the distances between European ethnic groups These maps also reveal where admixture has occurred, and it stands out in contrast to the native European. Then, we should revisit history. Europeans were wandering tribes who colonized many areas throughout Europe, Asia and the middle east. These were fundamentally the same people, but at some point, they migrated back into Europe, probably related to changes in climate and politics. We can tell the difference between a German and a Somali by looking, and now we can do so with genetic evidence. But this offends the Left, so they concocted an updated version of Lewontin’s fallacy, which argued that because there was no single gene for race, race did not exist.”
http://www.amerika.org/politics/you-should-know-what-white-is/

     In short, the racial nihilist studies do not show that races do not exist, and that skin colour is therefore irrelevant as one, among many characteristics of race, because, the studies are typically circular in their reasoning, and in any case presuppose that they set out to refute.