When you think of dark skin, it can seem like an unattractive thing to have.
It makes you look less European.
But in fact, it has been linked to lower rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease, and it’s linked to lighter skin tone.
And now a Danish scientist is making the connection between dark skin and the dark European population, in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Our study shows that European countries are becoming more dark,” said Jakob Løkke Rasmussen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.
Dark skin is found in both Europeans and Asians, and is associated, at least in part, with a darker genetic makeup. “
Darkness is associated with a more complicated pattern of genetics, and genetic factors are very important for the evolution of human physiology.”
Dark skin is found in both Europeans and Asians, and is associated, at least in part, with a darker genetic makeup.
And while European nations are currently the ones with the highest rates of dark hair, Rasmussen and his colleagues believe that the continent’s dark skin is a consequence of the darker genes they carry.
European populations tend to have lower levels of the gene for melanin, which helps absorb light and make our skin appear more red and brown, than populations in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
In fact, dark skin in Europeans is typically lighter than dark skin elsewhere in Europe.
So, in light of this genetic variation, Rasmussen says, the darker skin of Europeans may have evolved to make them look more European, and to make themselves more attractive to Europeans.
But when Rasmussen and co-author Kjerstin Kjersten are looking for other genetic variants that may contribute to the evolution and distribution of darker skin, they want to look at genes that might be more strongly linked to the dark.
“It’s like we are asking people to identify the most important gene in their skin,” said Rasmussen.
“If we look at the genetic variant, we see it has a strong genetic influence on their skin tone, and that’s why it is so important to look for these genes that have a strong influence on the dark skin of European people.”
For their study, the scientists looked at DNA samples from more than 300 people in the U.K. who were descended from people who were between 10 and 30 years old.
They also took samples from nearly 800 people from different ethnicities in Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark, and looked at the genes that may be linked to their dark skin.
“We know that the darker the skin of the European, the higher the risk of developing dark skin,” Rasmussen said.
“The genes we are looking at are the genes involved in the skin pigmentation, so the dark is one of the most prominent features of our skin.”
And when the researchers looked at how the genes related to darker skin color changed with age, they found that genes related with melanin pigmentation were more strongly related to the genes responsible for dark skin pigments.
“So if the dark genes are linked to dark skin color, then dark skin could have evolved as a response to dark pigmentation in Europeans, and so dark skin pigment could have contributed to the evolutionary development of dark in Europeans,” Rasmussen added.
The researchers found that a gene called CpG islands, which are located in the region of the DNA responsible for regulating melanin production, were linked to more dark skin than CpGs that were not linked to melanin.
“CpGs are the most abundant and conserved genes in the human genome, so we wanted to see if we could see if there was any influence of Cpgs in dark skin or dark pigment,” Rasmussen told ABC News.
“And we found that there was an influence of the Cpg island region on the CpuC gene, which is linked to Cp G island color.”
The scientists then tested the C.T. gene in people who had dark skin to see whether they had a correlation with the melanin gene, and they found it was indeed associated with darker skin.
But that was not what the scientists expected.
“There is no relationship between the CsG and the C-T genes in dark and dark-skinned individuals,” Rasmussen explained.
“These results do not mean that dark skin originates from genes that are linked with dark skin.”
It’s not the first study to suggest that dark-colored people are genetically more similar to other races, but it is the first to link dark skin with genes that could potentially influence the genetic makeup of people.
“This study is the beginning of a larger investigation,” said Kjerstad, who noted that this study is not limited to Europeans or Asians.
“In the future, we hope to look more closely at genes related specifically to the melanosomes, which affect dark skin