Skull
of Cheddar Man (Wikicommons)
The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had "dark to black" skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain's oldest complete skeleton has revealed.
The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough's Cave in Somerset. [...] It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.
The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought. (Devlin 2018)
An ancient DNA study has made a big splash in the news. Its authors took the unusual step of releasing their findings to the media before presenting them at a scientific conference or in an academic journal. Not until more than a week later did they provide a paper describing their methods and their results. This paper was made available on BioRxiv, a preprint online repository, and it has yet to be accepted by a peer-reviewed journal.
Not
surprisingly, these findings have been discussed in an atmosphere of Gotcha!
journalism and trite moralizing. One of the authors, Yoan Diekmann, opined in an
interview that the connection between Britishness and whiteness is "not an
immutable truth. It has always changed and will change" (Devlin 2018).
Well,
obviously. If I could travel back in time, I would encounter people who look less
and less like me the farther back I go, and this would be true for any people anywhere
in the world. We think of the Amerindians as being native to the Americas, yet
their ancestors had earlier replaced a people with very dark skin and frizzy
hair, similar in appearance to the natives of Papua New Guinea (Frost 2018). In
Europe, the first modern humans to arrive some 45,000 years ago would have
looked very African—not only in their skin color but also in their hair form,
face shape, and body proportions.
This
is what evolution is about, perhaps more so with our species. Human evolution
is like a logarithmic curve. More genetic change has happened over the past
10,000 years than over the previous 100,000. And more has happened during those
100,000 years than over the previous one million. Our species is unique in
having to adapt not only to a slowly changing natural environment but also to a
faster-changing and increasingly diverse range of cultural and social
environments (Hawks et al. 2007).
Another
point: the Cheddar Man finding wasn't unexpected. We've already examined the
DNA of two other Mesolithic humans, one from Loschbour in Luxembourg, dated to
8,000 years ago, and the other from La Braña in Spain, dated to 7,000 years
ago. Both show the same combination of dark skin and blue/green eyes (Lazaridis
et al. 2013; Olalde et al. 2014). How dark is 'dark'? They would have been much
darker than a normal native European. The alleles in question are now so rare
in native Europeans that anyone with them today most likely has a recent
African ancestor.
Yes,
this study has been criticized for inferring skin color from alleles at 16
genes. Although this number is adequate for European and Asian individuals, it
isn't for Africans—among whom skin color is determined by alleles at many more
genes (Barras 2018). This is the case with most genetically influenced traits:
Europeans and Asians have much less genomic variability than do Africans
because their ancestors left Africa as small 'founder' groups that took with
them only a fraction of the original variability. But Cheddar Man, despite his skin
color, was European; he was descended from humans who went through the
Out-of-Africa bottleneck. Therefore, the study's methodology should work.
So
Western Europe was once home to hunter-gatherers who, other than their blue
eyes, were still largely African in appearance. Again, this is to be expected.
If we go far enough back in time, we come to ancestors who didn't look like us.
Perhaps less expectedly, we don't have to go very far back. The dark-skinned
Mesolithic individual from Spain lived some 7,000 years ago, and there is no
reason to believe he was the last of his kind. Indeed, dark skin seems to have
persisted into the early Neolithic in some parts of Western Europe, like a
Neolithic individual from England nicknamed 'Sven' and dated to 4,000-5,000 BP:
"Sven most likely had intermediate to dark skin pigmentation, brown eyes
and black possibly dark brown hair" (Brace et al. 2018). That last date
puts us within the realm of recorded history—almost the time of Hammurabi.
All
of this is consistent with earlier findings. Palaeontologists Marcellin Boule
and Henri V. Vallois noted the African-like appearance of many Neolithic
remains from Western Europe:
'In Brittany, as well as in Switzerland and in the north of Italy, there lived in the Polished Stone period, in the Bronze Age and during the early Iron Age, a certain number of individuals who differed in certain characters from their contemporaries', in particular in the dolichocephalic character of their skull, in possessing a prognathism that was sometimes extreme, and a large grooved nose. This is a matter of partial atavism which in certain cases, as in the Neolithic Breton skull from Conguel, may attain to complete atavism. Two Neolithic individuals from Chamblandes in Switzerland are Negroid not only as regards their skulls but also in the proportions of their limbs. Several Ligurian and Lombard tombs of the Metal Ages have also yielded evidences of a Negroid element.
Since the publication of Verneau's memoir, discoveries of other Negroid skeletons in Neolithic levels in Illyria and the Balkans have been announced. The prehistoric statues, dating from the Copper Age, from Sultan Selo in Bulgaria are also thought to portray Negroids. In 1928 René Bailly found in one of the caverns of Moniat, near Dinant in Belgium, a human skeleton of whose age it is difficult to be certain, but which seems definitely prehistoric. It is remarkable for its Negroid characters, which give it a resemblance to the skeletons from both Grimaldi and Asselar.
It is not only in prehistoric times that the Grimaldi race seems to have made its influence felt. Verneau has been able to see, now in modern skulls and now in living subjects, in the Italian areas of Piedmont, Lombardy, Emilia, Tuscany, and the Rhone Valley, numerous characters of the old fossil race (Boule & Vallois 1957: 291-292).
So
the Western European hunter-gatherers didn't die out completely. They represent
about 25% of the ancestry of Neolithic British individuals and about 10% of the
ancestry of present-day white British (Brace et al. 2018). Nonetheless, they
were largely replaced by people from elsewhere, perhaps beginning in the late
Mesolithic—as suggested by the more intermediate skin color of the Loschbour
individual (Brace et al. 2018).
How, then, did Western Europeans become white? When ancient DNA was first being
retrieved, the answer seemed simple: the last hunter-gatherers in Western
Europe were dark-skinned and the first farmers in Central Europe were
light-skinned. Therefore, the modern European phenotype must have been brought
to Europe by those farmers, who had apparently come from Anatolia (present-day
Turkey).
This
picture changed with retrieval of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherer sites in
northeastern Europe, specifically Motala in Sweden (8,000 BP), Karelia in
Russia (7500-7000 BP), and Samara in Russia (7,500-7000 BP). Those individuals
had a fully modern European phenotype: pale skin with diverse hair colors (red,
blond, black) and diverse eye colors (blue, brown) (Anthrogenica 2015; Eupedia
2015; Frost 2014; Frost et al. 2017; Mathieson et al. 2018). The modern
European phenotype must have emerged even earlier, most likely during the last
ice age of the Upper Paleolithic within an area stretching from the Baltic to
mid-Siberia. To date, the earliest known individual with the derived allele for
blond hair is from Afontova Gora (c. 18,000 BP) (Mathieson et al. 2018).
But
what about the Neolithic farmers? How did they get to be white-skinned? Most
likely through introgression. As they advanced into Europe, they intermixed
with the native population.
Agriculture in a region may have been introduced by immigrants, but that does not mean that the immigrants carried mainly Near Eastern genes (Richards 2003; Rowley-Conwy 2004b; Zvelebil 2005). The LBK, for example, originated in the Carpathian Basin; the population that moved westward emerged there carrying a complex mix of European and Near Eastern mtDNA and no doubt picking up more as it moved. (Rowley-Conwy 2011: S434)
In some cases, farming communities took in hunter-gatherer individuals, especially women. In other cases, replacement was followed by reverse replacement, as with Neolithic culture in northwestern France: "After a couple of centuries it disappeared, replaced by a more widespread local Neolithic. Agriculturalized foragers appear to have absorbed the immigrants" (Rowley-Conwy 2011: S439).
In
Western Europe, hunter-gatherers made a smaller contribution to the Neolithic
gene pool (~25%) because of their low population density. The situation was
like that of European settlers and native Amerindians in North America.
Introgression was greater during the long time (7500-6000 BP) when the advance
of Neolithic farmers stalled along a line stretching from the Low Countries in
the West to the Black Sea in the East. To the north, along the shores of the
Baltic and the North Sea, were hunter-fisher-gatherers with a relatively high
population density (Frost 2017; Price 1991).
So
to what degree are Europeans today descended from native Mesolithic
hunter-gatherers and to what degree are they descended from Neolithic farmers
of Anatolian origin? This question still has no reliable answer. On the basis
of mtDNA, Skoglund et al. (2012) estimated Anatolian admixture at 95% in
Sardinians, 52% in northwest Europeans, 31-41% in Swedes, and 11% in Russians.
This methodology has a major flaw, however: if a group is a mixture of two
other groups, its allele frequencies are assumed to be determined solely by the
degree of intermixture. No allowance is made for differences in natural
selection.
If
we compare late hunter-gatherers with present-day Europeans, we see that the
main change to mtDNA has been the loss of haplogroup U. Today, this haplogroup
reaches high levels only among the Saami of Finland and the Mansi of
northwestern Siberia, both of whom were hunter-gatherers until recently
(Derbeneva et al 2002). Does the hunting-gathering lifestyle somehow favor this
haplogroup? Balloux et al. (2009) argued that trade-offs between thermogenesis
and ATP synthesis favor some haplogroups over others. In particular, haplogroup
U is associated with reduced sperm motility—an indication that the energy
balance is shifted from producing ATP to producing heat. Being nomadic,
hunter-gatherers spend more time in the cold, especially when sleeping in
temporary shelters. In contrast, farming makes possible a more sedentary
lifestyle, including a warmer sleeping environment, and would therefore select
against genetic variants, like haplogroup U, that increase body temperature at
the expense of ATP production.
This
hypothesis is testable. If haplogroup U disappeared because Anatolian farmers
partially replaced native hunter-gatherers, this genetic change should coincide
with the time boundary between late hunter-gatherers and early farmers. If this
haplogroup disappeared through natural selection, the change should have
occurred gradually over a longer period. The second scenario seems closer to
the truth. In a study of 92 Danish human remains from the Mesolithic to the
Middle Ages, Melchior et al. (2010) found that high incidences of haplogroup U
persisted long after the advent of farming and apparently as late as the Early
Iron Age.
Haplogroup
U was likewise found to persist across the Mesolithic/Neolithic boundary when
Jones et al. (2011) compared ancient DNA from Latvia and Ukraine. They also
used nuclear DNA to compare the Mesolithic and Neolithic samples, as opposed to
the mtDNA methodology of Skoglund et al. (2012). This time there was no
evidence of Anatolian admixture in any of the Neolithic samples.
This
is not to say that Anatolian farmers didn’t contribute to the European gene
pool. They did, but researchers have overestimated this contribution by
attributing all of the genetic differences between farmers and hunter-gatherers
to population replacement. This is particularly the case with haplogroup U—the
mtDNA marker that most sharply distinguishes farmers from hunter-gatherers. If
mtDNA shows that Russians are 11% Anatolian, while nuclear DNA shows that
Ukrainians are 0% Anatolian, the discrepancy is probably due to differences in
methodology rather than a real difference between Russians and Ukrainians.
Conclusion
With
the end of the last ice age, Europe had three major populations:
Western
Hunter-Gatherers - attested from sites in Spain, Luxembourg, and England
-
African appearance except for blue eyes (dark skin, dark curly hair)
Anatolian
Farmers - attested from sites in central and southern Europe
-
Spread into Europe from the southeast and intermixed with native
hunter-gatherers as they advanced northward
-
White skin, dark hair, dark eyes
Eastern
Hunter-Gatherers - attested from sites in Sweden and Russia
-
Fully modern European phenotype: white skin with a diverse palette of hair and
eye colors
-
By the late Mesolithic, high population densities along the Baltic and the
North Sea
The
Western Hunter-Gatherers went extinct after 7,000 BP, being replaced by
Anatolian Farmers who by then had become heavily intermixed with native
hunter-gatherers. After a relatively rapid expansion into southern, central,
and western Europe, their wave of advance came to a halt around 7500 BP along a
line stretching from the Low Countries to the Black Sea.
Meanwhile,
Eastern Hunter-Gatherers along the Baltic and the North Sea had increased their
numbers by exploiting marine resources (fish, shellfish, seals). As
fisher-hunters they were able to create semi-sedentary societies with
relatively large populations and high social complexity, thus forming a
demographic barrier to the advance of farming until around 6,000 BP. They then
adopted farming through cultural diffusion rather than population replacement.
As farmer-fishers, they now expanded westward and southward, an expansion that
continued into the historical period.
In
this prehistoric drama, we like to see Mesolithic hunter-gatherers as beautiful
losers who were steamrolled out of existence by savvier and more numerous
farming peoples. This was true for the Western Hunter-Gatherers. There was
another Mesolithic population, however: the hunter-fisher-gatherers along the
shores of the Baltic and the North Sea. They achieved levels of population
density and social complexity not only on a par with Neolithic societies but
also rich in possibilities for future advancement. Of the three major populations
in prehistoric Europe, they were the ones who would ultimately have the greatest
demographic impact and lead the way to behavioral modernity, i.e.,
individualism, reduced emphasis on kinship, and the market as the main
organizing principle of social and economic life. They not only survived but
also went on to create what we call the Western World. Not bad for a bunch of
losers.
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17 comments:
Peter, you forgot about the Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers (a mix of WHG and EHG) and the Caucasus Hunter Gatherers.
You didn't touch in the point of the Yamnaya/Corded Ware/IE expansions either, idk why.
Forgot to add, this site here https://genetiker.wordpress.com/
Has huge databases of Admixture, yDNA and Phenotype SNPs directly from the papers.
I would argue that the SHGs and the EHGs were the same population, at least until the late Mesolithic (by which time the people along the Baltic and North Sea coasts had become semi-sedentary with large populations).
The Yamna expansion took place later in time, in the final Neolithic, and probably corresponds to the spread of Indo-European languages across Europe. As with the Anatolian farmers, there is a tendency to over-estimate the degree of population replacement, and for the same reasons. I also feel that the contribution of Caucasus hunter-gatherers to the Yamna culture has been exaggerated, but I could be wrong.
Thanks for the tour! There towards the end, is that the new Aryan, I mean Nordic, hypothesis? The blond blue-eyed fishermen, Vikings, Normans, and all that? I'm not trying to be snarky, just curious.
Well your original Ice Age theory would seem to be correct as an explanation of where SLC24A5 SLC45A2 and TYRP1 ect came from, but whether these alleles took over Britain by an expansion of coastal population out of the Mesolithic coast (and earlier Doggerland) shellfish harvesting populations seems less certain. Only some of the Motola group had the full suite for light skin hair and eyes, and they all had the Edar allele that gives big jaws and other aspects of Asian appearance, which is not found in Europeans today.
Sven's coloration would seem to indicate that the average hue of Britons in the Neolithic was noticeably darker than would be called typically indigenous English skin today. I have never understood how the mixing of farmers with hunter gathers and Indo Europeans could have produced north European type white skin light eyes and hair colour.
"How the builders of Stonehenge 5,000 years ago were almost completely wiped out by mysterious 'Beaker people'The genes of these ancient people provide enough clues to determine that Beakers travelled here from Holland and took over in a few centuries. They replaced 90 per cent of the Neolithic farmers. The creators of Stonehenge appeared Mediterranean, with olive-hued skin, dark hair and eyes. Professor Ian Barnes, a co-senior author of the study from the Natural History Museum, said: 'We found that the skeletal remains of individuals from Britain who lived shortly after the first Beaker pottery appears have a very different DNA profile to those who came before. [...] 'Over several hundred years, at least 90 per cent of the ancestry of ancient British populations was replaced by a group from the continent. Following the Beaker spread, there was a population in Britain that for the first time had ancestry and skin and eye pigmentation similar to the majority of Britons today.'." Nature says the Bell Beakers "had lighter-coloured skin and eyes than the people they replaced." . From what I can gather these Bell Beakers continued coming to Britain for many centuries (one later Bell Beaker man found in England was found to have grown up in Switzerland) but they were a NOT fully white population. The original Bell Beaker invaders of Britain were whiter than farmers, but still rather swarthy by modern standards it seems. I think actual selection for white skin must have been operating quite powerfully in Britain after the Bell beakers arrived. What do you think of Indo European hierarchy and primogeniture as a factor? I am suggesting that the oldest son post Bell beaker invasion was in a position where, due to his having more resources he attract numerous women and could choose a wife whose first male child was inherit the same ability to choose a wife. Lighter skinned women being chosen by the heir and the higher reproductive success of the heir and his light- skinned wife over many generation could lighten skin of the whole population. I believe studies have found such selection in Britain down into modern times.
The Grimald race was a myth because the supposedly Negroid skull was pathological.
A dolichocephalic skull is plesiomorphic and widespread among the white race, and Anglo-Saxon and other Migration Age skulls may be unexpectedly prognathous for Europeans. It doesn't mean they were negroids.
Populations within Europe might have changed but ever since the aDNA from Markhina Gora, and Zubova's re-evaluation of human remains from that site, it appears Europeans have been Homo sapiens europaeus since the EUP, directly replacing/intergrading with the neanderthals.
Luke,
No, I'm not implying that the evolution of outward physical characteristics is somehow linked to the evolution of inward mental predispositions. For one thing, the time periods are different. The modern European phenotype was probably fully developed by the end of the Upper Paleolithic (c. 10,000 years ago). The Northwest European mindset developed much later, in the late Mesolithic (between 8500 and 6,000 years ago). The geographical areas are also different. The former developed in northeastern Europe (and apparently, according to the latest ancient DNA evidence, as far east as mid-Siberia). The latter developed along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea.
For more info, read:
Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology, 7, 154-174.
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf
Sean,
Old anthropological textbooks refer to an "Old Black Breed" that once inhabited the British Isles. It looks like there was a process of population replacement that began not long before the beginning of recorded history and extended into historic times.
Anon,
The first Europeans probably looked like scaled-up Khoisans. I wouldn't use the term 'negroid' because we're talking about an earlier phenotype that differed in some ways from what we now see in most of sub-Saharan Africa.
We may be talking past each other. The aDNA from Kostenki (Markina Gora) reveals a person with very dark skin and dark eyes. Yes, he was European and related to present-day Europeans, but his phenotype was still largely African.
Of the three major populations in prehistoric Europe, they were the ones who would ultimately have the greatest demographic impact and lead the way to behavioral modernity, i.e., individualism, reduced emphasis on kinship, and the market as the main organizing principle of social and economic life. They not only survived but also went on to create what we call the Western World. Not bad for a bunch of losers.
You seem to ignore completely the Bronze Age Indo-European invasions from the steppe. It's hard to believe that the Indo-Europeans had less of an impact in creating the West given the dominance and influence of IE language, culture, myth, religion, etc. Have you read Richardo Duchesne's The Uniqueness of Western Civilization? You also contend that the IEs did not effect much demographic replacement despite recent genetic data, don't you?
Hi, Peter,
I'm really happy to see you are blogging again. I just checked out "Evo" on a whim, and see I have a lot of reading to catch up on! I thought you had given up on blogging after some concern about legal changes in Canada and you lost your ability to moderate comments at Unz Review.
Maybe you could make an announcement there that you are blogging on your own again. I imagine there are others like me who enjoyed your blog and don't know you've restarted it.
Anon,
Personally, I think the Indo-European expansion is overrated. If we look at those European peoples who were unaffected by this expansion, such as the Finnish peoples, we don't see major differences in outward appearance or psychological traits (regardless of whether the latter are genetically or culturally determined).
The evidence for demographic replacement in this case suffers from the same methodological flaws that I pointed out in this post. All differences in allele frequencies are attributed to demographic replacement, to the exclusion of natural selection and genetic drift. Estimates of demographic replacement are thus greatly inflated.
Yes, I'm familiar with Duchesne's work. Nobody is 100% right, including me.
Wanda,
There are unresolved issues between myself and Ron. The underlying problem, I believe, is that Ron sees The Unz Review as a means to push the Alt Right in a certain direction:
- a more sympathetic attitude toward Hispanic immigration
- a more `agnostic` attitude toward HBD, and an overall reduced emphasis on HBD
- a more anti-Jewish and anti-Israel attitude
I disagree fundamentally with the above roadmap. I think it promotes a distorted view of reality, and like Razib I no longer wanted to be associated with it.
I never lost my ability to moderate comments because I never fully had that power. When I started deleting off-topic anti-Jewish comments, some of the offended commenters complained to Ron, who then came down hard on me.
The issue here is not simply Canadian jurisprudence (which considers the comments section to be an extension of my column). If I allow off-topic comments, especially long essay-style ones, people will rightly wonder why I`m not deleting them. And it`s no defence, either morally or legally, to say I don`t delete them because I don`t have the power to do so, since I freely consented to a situation where I wouldn`t have that power.
The underlying problem, I believe, is that Ron sees The Unz Review as a means to push the Alt Right in a certain direction:
- a more sympathetic attitude toward Hispanic immigration
- a more `agnostic` attitude toward HBD, and an overall reduced emphasis on HBD
- a more anti-Jewish and anti-Israel attitude
I don't know that Unz is sympathetic toward Hispanic immigration. I haven't seen him argue in favor of Hispanic immigration or oppose restrictions on Hispanic immigration. Nor has he censored articles and comments critical of Hispanic immigration. Most of the anti-immigration content on The Unz Review, of which there is a lot, is critical of Hispanic immigration, either directly or indirectly, if only because Hispanics have comprised a large percentage of recent immigrants. What Ron has been critical of are claims about Hispanic crime rates. I don't think that makes him necessarily sympathetic toward Hispanic immigration, unless one thinks that casting it in anything but the most extremely negative terms makes one sympathetic.
At any rate, if you follow the alt-right, you'll know that Unz doesn't have to push the alt-right in the direction you outline above because it's already there.
Well, over at Eurogenes Blog a recent paper is being cited that claims a 90% replacement of the British population by the Indo-European immigrants:
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/
Those would be the Celts, who came to dominate the British Isles.
Also, Nicholas Ostler, in "Empires of the Word" around p. 310, notes that Briton is the only Roman province not to produce a Romance language. He speculates that the native Britons were largely decimated from central and eastern Britain by the bubonic plague epidemic that ravaged the Roman world in the 6th Century. The invading Anglo-Saxons presumable escaped the plague, because they were not connected to the Roman world economy, and they replaced the Britons throughout much of the island.
The aDNA from Kostenki (Markina Gora) reveals a person with very dark skin and dark eyes, but the phenotype of Kostenki-14 was not largely African. That was an artifact of his low nasal height alone, and as we know, one individual might not represent the whole population, and one region of an individual's face cannot outweigh the total signal of his entire anatomy.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S1019331617010099
Alveolar prognathism is, of course, not especially SSA.
Peter,
Thanks for the explanation. Having read through your recent blog posts, I see that you already addressed the issue on Sept. 21, so I appreciate your patience in explaining it again.
I started reading the Unz Review when you moved your blog there and was delighted to find Razib Khan also present. Before that, I didn't know the Unz Review existed. Since Ron Unz has political ambitions, I assume his Review is a tool to further those aims.
I look forward to reading more of your blog posts in the day to come!
Sykes, no it's the Bell Beaker folk that study is about, and they were quite different to the Celts in appearance and a bit darker in skin colour although the mixing of Beaker and Anatolian Farmers is supposed to have resulted in people whose remains looked like the Celt invaders who came later. The Celts were definitely the lightest skinned of all the invaders of Britain (including Anglo Saxons) look at the average Scottish or Irish skin tone.
Peter, I have three points/questions:
Surely the WHG for all their (probable) dark complexion and wavy/curly hair were -- more or less -- Caucasian in facial appearance ? And why light eyes but not light skin ? And were these the same 'Reindeer Age' people who did all the cave paintings ?
Thanks
"But what about the Neolithic farmers? How did they get to be white-skinned? Most likely through introgression. As they advanced into Europe, they intermixed with the native population."
That ignores the fact that Anatolian farmes seem to have been whiter-skinned compared to the local WHG and indeed darkened as they mixed more with them.
"heir wave of advance came to a halt around 7500 BP along a line stretching from the Low Countries to the Black Sea"
You must have missed that they were present all the way up in Scandinavia and Poland.
"There was another Mesolithic population, however: the hunter-fisher-gatherers along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea"
What are you even talking about? North Sea and Baltic hunter-gatherers were WHG. The relevant area is the steppe and forest steppe.
Your hypothesis was basically wrong and you'll keep trying to save it no matter what.
"The Northwest European mindset developed much later, in the late Mesolithic (between 8500 and 6,000 years ago). The geographical areas are also different. The former developed in northeastern Europe (and apparently, according to the latest ancient DNA evidence, as far east as mid-Siberia). The latter developed along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea"
Are you still not getting that those mixed steppe and forest steppe populations replaced most of the local ancestry in the Baltic and the North Sea area? Stop trying to save your theory, man, it's over. Even if part of the ancestry of those steppe/forest steppe populations ultimately came from "Northwest" (via post-Swiderian), it still doesn't change what happened later. Northwest Europe and the Baltic aren't that special after all.
"If we look at those European peoples who were unaffected by this expansion, such as the Finnish peoples, we don't see major differences in outward appearance or psychological traits (regardless of whether the latter are genetically or culturally determined)."
That's because Finns are mostly the descendants of forest steppe populations, themselves mixed, with some other admixture.
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