I’ve read that East Asians developed slanted eyes or Epicanthic Folds as a way to adapt to snow blindness in the more snowy and colder regions of Asia, and I was wondering why Northern Europeans, specifically Germanic and Nordic people that lived in the colder regions of Northern Europe, didn’t develop the same genetic trait or at least something similar to it.
In: 973
I can think of two reasons:
1. Scandinavia (and even most of germany/central europe) is really far north, much further north than most people think (look at a world map and compare to east asia – most of east asia is parallel to northern africa/southern europe) so there are very few hours of sunlight in winter, and what little sunlight there is, is faint and no reason for evolution to select for protection against. Norway for example has 0 hours of sun in the north and about 6 in the south in december.
2. In addition to the few hours of faint sunlight, it is also very cloudy during winter in northern europe, further reducing the already scarce sunlight.
As far as I’ve read, what has instead been selected for, is almost the opposite; very low pigment pale skin to let the tiny amounts of sunlight in to produce vitamin D.
East Asians did not develop epicanthic folds (slanted eyes).
Archaic humans aka homo sapiens left Africa approx. 1 million years before Humans aka homo sapiens sapiens. Some Archaic Humans went to Europe, some went east Asia. Those who went to Europe are now called Neanderthals. Those who went to east Asia are still unknown. We know some of them are called Denisovans. The Archaic Humans who settled in the cold areas of east Asia developed the epicanthic folds over many, many years, whereas the Archaic Humans who settled in Europe, Neanderthals, did not, because they did not live in Scandinavia or other very cold regions of North Europe.
Approx. 100,000 years ago anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa. Approx. 50,000 years ago they left Africa, and interbred with the Archaic Humans of Europe and east Asia. The modern humans who interbred with the Neanderthals and other European archaic humans adopted their traits and became what we call Caucasian people. The humans who interbred with the east Asian archaic humans adopted their traits, one of which was the epicanthic fold, and became what we today call Mongoloid.
The Eskimo people that live in Scandinavia and Canada are not Caucasian, they’re descendants of the humans who interbred with the archaic humans of east Asia.
So, North Europeans do not have epicanthic folds because Neanderthals did not develop epicanthic folds because they did not live in the cold areas of north Europe. They mainly lived in central, west, south and east Europe. East Asians have them, because the archaic people they interbred with lived in the cold areas of east Asia.
its because coccyx is not an english word its ancient greek (κοκκυξ, κοκκυγας). and means, guess what, the tail bone. or a bird I think. the plural of coccyx in greek is κοκκυγες which if you translate letter for letter in english is coccyges.
Even if epicanthic folds developed to help with snow blindness, just because an adaptation might be beneficial, doesn’t mean it will develop. An example someone else told me is, “if we put thousands of mice in a snowy environment, we might expect to be able to time travel to the future and find a bunch of cute mice with extra furry coats, but it’s equally as likely that we’ll just find a bunch of dead mice”. Evolution isn’t so much a process of improvement as it is a process of change.
The best explanation I have ever heard is that evolution cares who your ancestors were, or rather it matters who your ancestors were.
Bats have wings with fingers and membranes because their ancestors were probably gliding and had long fingers. Birds did it differently, because manuraptorid dinosaurs had those weirdly folding wrist bones and hands that wouldn’t pronate well.
Why DON’T some people have pronounced epicanthic folds? Because their ancestors didn’t, and not having them didn’t kill enough of them to matter, at least not enough so that the one weird kid who DID have them had to repopulate an entire area.
It can also be an accident. Maybe one large clan, who all happened to have epicanthic folds survived some famine or disease that devastated surrounding populations for reasons other than their eyelids.
the sami have epicanthic folds, they are the last remaining indigenous group in continental europe 🙂
I know that they’re pretty common in Irish folks. My dad has jet black hair and epicanthic folds. When he was a kid he looked like a very pale Asian boy. We used to suspect that my grandmother was part Asian, as she was adopted as a baby from the hospital. She recently did a DNA test and it came back overwhelmingly European, almost entirely Scottish and Irish.
Maybe more genetic diversity in the european group makes this feature less likely to emerge as a typical trait. Also maybe more time would be required in the european group for the benefits of such a mutation to accrue in the population. Maybe conditions in europe were more variable…
I swear I’ve seen a lot of Europeans with eye folds similar to people we consider Asian. I’ve always assumed it was more of a spectrum of features found in people from throughout Eurasia and the Americas. And that socially we tell each other it’s an east Asian thing
Does ghengis Kahn genes have anything to do with this perhaps?
Latest Answers