Miranda Cosgrove

passingtime85 says:

#1 I wouldn’t know what she is, I would guess not wholly European.

#2 Angles, focal lengths, and distance from subject/object can change the look of said object, so that may not be representative of what she looks like.

#3 Makeup/cosmetics can also alter appearance a great deal. Not to mention possible cosmetic surgery/procedures may have had a hand in her physiognomy.

#4 Her results were posted 4 years ago, there’s no telling which “chip” 23andme used to test her sample. More contemporary results could provide possibly different and possibly more accurate estimations.

#5 Admixture tests don’t account for ancient origins.

passingtime85 says:

European going back a few hundred years though.

How about further back? You can often tell when people look out of place in contrast with their regional/territorial cousins. There’s exceptions to everything but there’s also possible and plausible explanations that people tend to overlook.

Genotype, haplogroups, autosomal SNPs, whichever metrics you want to use, are still only as accurate, as the people that designate them.

If researchers think it’s unimportant to stress that certain SNPs are originally from one region, but have been in a newer location for several hundred years, they’ll relabel that group as being native to the area.

The Iberian peninsula is a good example, their genetic input ranges from 4-20% contribution from North Africa. But they score mostly if not all “European” on admixture tests. That’s because the change in their dna occurred one thousand years ago.

So researchers and testing companies don’t label them as
North African/MENA/Maghreb. Only if the person in question has family lines that frequently absorb people with recent significant admixture, into their gene pool, will a non-European designation be warranted. In contrast to families that water down the MENA results with each passing generation, only leaving the haplogroups to tell the tale of their family tree’s origins.

Origins that again, can be and/or, are obfuscated at the whim of researchers and commercialized results, that are more digestible by the general public.

Most people wouldn’t understand being called MENA, if their family had inhabited Spain for 1,000 years.

Yes, judging people by genotype is more accurate, but by which or by whom’s system and methodology are you using?

Judging by phenotype is much less expensive, less time consuming, less labor intensive, and can almost be done instantaneously and because human physiognomy is typically geographically representative, it’s a fair enough tool, unless you’re looking at a recently admixed individual.

Judging by physical attributes is the basis of taxonomy, and it can be backed up by DNA profiling, if there’s an established data set from which it can be compared and contrasted.

It’s just that it’s an area of study that is misunderstood and is a sensitive subject matter to most people, because it’s so closely tied to “race”, which is tied with memories of war bigotry, hate, fueds, war, and strife.

So researchers make concessions and try to handle the commercialization of this science, in a way to make it as appealing as it can seem, without stirring up memories of the schisms, that have plagued our species since the dawn of consciousness.

Even professional scientific researchers aren’t informed about deep roots. I once read about a professional anthropologist that couldn’t identify remains of “Latino” skeleton, because the skull didn’t fit what she thought of as “white”, “black”, or “asian”.

She unaware that Western Hemisphere indigenous people are descendants of East Asian/Siberian migrants. A dentist had to identify the remains for her, and easily identified did so, because most East Asians and their Western hemisphere cousins have shoveled incisors. This trickles down to all people that have “mongoloid” ancestry, it can disappear in a few generations if the descendants mix outside that group, but if individuals keep swapping that East Asian heritage, it stays as an identifiable characteristic.

You can find anomalies all you want, it doesn’t completely invalidate the concept, that the majority of the time, look commonly ties with geographically heritage/roots.

passingtime85 says:

Do they still have shoveled incisors? Many people from Scandinavia have Sami heritage and exhibit that feature still.

Sort of a joke, but it has a kernel of truth in it.

Yes even with ancient Siberian roots, you can be European, but it’s like the off brand type. Lapps are European, but also they’re a weird little subsection of the population, that kept some of their foreign characteristics. They weren’t completely watered down through cross breeding, they instead closed off influx of new DNA and kept swapping the DNA markers that keep them looking unique. Lapps are European and “whiter” than Yakuts, but they’re less European than Germans.

Scandinavian vikings had their hand in setting up some gene pools and family trees in/around Europe, it means it’s fairly possible they brought along Sami heritage, which means East Asia, which means atypical genetic links are everywhere the vikings spawned lines, that have survived to this day of course.

Mostly they should be watered down to the point you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but if you get a few lines that share similar heritage continuously interbreeding, you’ll inevitably get distinct subsection of phenotypical traits.

Europeans as a distinct geographic population is the youngest of all the old world peoples, of the mainland continents. Humans have been in Europe from anywhere from 45,000 years to all the way up 200,000 years ago. But they didn’t start sustaining large communities until herding/farming were utilized. So let’s fast forward.

Between 10-12,000 years ago Anatolian farmers started branching out deeper west into Europe. They mixed with nomadic hunter gathers that were already present. So are these what modern Europeans are, hybrids neither West Asian nor European?

Let’s jump ahead again.
Probably 4500 years ago the Sami experienced a large admixture event and were infused with East Asian DNA, that pretty much altered their physiognomy permanently. Turkic people swept west and southwest over 4200 years ago, leaving traces in Anatolia, ie West Asia. East European men went west and replaced Iberian men 4000 years ago. The Persian Empire reached the Balkans 2500 years ago. The Macedonian empire overthrew them and branched east. A few centuries later Romans swept north, south, east, and west into Europe and brought with them unique markers, that were rooted in Anatolia. Vikings that undoubtedly had Sami heritage, raped and pillaged through the British Isles and Normandy. Normans attacked and subjugated the English, the Angles and Saxons in part took over the isles and in a small part replaced the Picts/Celts/Britons. 1300 years ago North Africans took over Iberia and even tried to push into Gaul. 800 years ago Mongols swept west and left a sparse, but detectable, trace of DNA in their wake along the way, all the way into Russia, and on, and on, and on, all the while many many individuals taking foreign spouses, or victims as the case may be, and swapping DNA.

Migration ebbs and flows, floods and recesses, and backwashes. DNA, haplogroups, SNPS, phenotypes get altered, replaced, evolve, or go extinct.

These people were all effected by non-European DNA for at least the past 5,000 years. Probably one of the only groups unaffected overall, would be Basques, they’re as European as you can get with heritage stretching deeper than 5,000 into the history of Europe, probably being descendants of those original Anatolian/hunter-gatherer hybrids. Compared to Basque everyone else pretty much, at least partly, is of non-European heritage.

So whats the cut off point? Time your ancestors spent in a region, geographic location in relation to known roots, physical attributes, citizenship, a mix of those?

Idk maybe people should just asterisk/dog ear, areas in their mind. Southern Europeans have North African West Asian roots. Some North Europeans have a touch of East Asian Roots. West Europeans have some East Asian brought by Northern European marauders/vikings, but it’s more remote. South East Europeans might have some West Asian ties. East Europeans maybe related down the line with Mongolians.

Close proximity and invasion/occupation events, involving separate groups, blurs distinction and reconfigures attributes.