Mr. Yakub & the Origin of the ‘White Race’: The DNA Evidence

“I’m the little boy that challenged the world of science to disprove just one word I said. If you are able to condemn me as false on one word that I teach, I’ll give you $10,000 dollars out of my brother’s vest pocket and then I’ll pay with my life for lying to you.”

—The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad 

 

“He’s a Scientist. We are now dealing with science. We are not dealing with emotion. We’re dealing with actual facts and science.”

—The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan on Yakub

Patmos is a 13-square-mile island in the Aegean Sea about 40 miles off the west coast of Turkey.[1] It is the destination of many religious tourists who believe it to be a sacred island, the place where an exiled “John the Apostle”—“Saint John the Divine”—heard the voice of God and wrote the apocalyptic prophecies of The Revelation. That ominous vision has earned Patmos Island the moniker “the place where the end of the world began.”[2] And that may be an apt description for the very place in Nation of Islam Teachings where the white man—“Yakub’s grafted devil”—is reputed to have found his origin 6,600 years ago.

In his landmark book Message to the Blackman in America, The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad (The Messenger) has proclaimed that God in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad taught him that the white man first appeared on earth 6,000 years ago on Patmos, the end result of a 600-year process of selective breeding called grafting.[3] To this moment that startling declaration has been ridiculed by whites and many Blacks as a malevolent myth or legend, a hateful and racist fantasy that only serves to undermine the unity of man.

Certainly, The Messenger’s Teaching represents an unsettling departure from two of the most prominent theories on the origin of the world’s races: namely, that climate and diet are responsible for a gradual variation in human skin color, and that the Bible accounted for this race variation through the story of Noah in the tenth chapter of Genesis.

First-century Jewish sages reinterpreted the Genesis story of Noah in their “holy book” Talmud, making it a bizarre, homosexual- and incest-based race theory that has come to be known as the Hamitic Myth, or the Curse of Ham. Through this hateful text Talmudic rabbis promulgated to the world the belief that black skin had been the result of a curse prophetically applied—not by God, but by His servant Noah. The rabbis claim the biblical patriarch awakened from a drunken stupor after having been sexually buggered by his own son Ham, and in retribution for that offense an angry Noah declared that Ham’s children and their descendants would be born with black skin. This profoundly racist rabbinical invention infected many religions and served as the gospel truth of the genesis of races for thousands of years.

On the scientific side, those trained in anthropology have commonly theorized that the first humanoid, the so-called Homo erectus (meaning “upright man”), migrated out of Africa two million years ago. They say that the more evolved homo sapiens came roughly 300,000 years ago, and the most recent outflow of “anatomically modern humans” occurred 70,000 years ago, eventually spreading across Europe. During that migration, the scholars claim, the black skin of the new Europeans gradually lightened, their dark eyes became blue, and their thick black hair turned a wavy blonde, thus becoming that subset accounting for about nine percent of humanity we know today as the Caucasian.

That evolutionary narrative held sway in the field of anthropology until only very recently when scientists studying DNA,[4] the genetic building block of life, made an astonishing declaration that placed the dismissed and discounted NOI Teaching of Mr. Yakub and Patmos back into consideration. They had affirmed that a previously unrecognized major genetic transition had occurred and that white-skinned, blue-eyed Europeans were actually much younger than had been previously believed. Operating independently, teams of geneticists reduced the age of the Caucasian by more than 50,000 years. In 2013, Dr. Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, analyzed the DNA in ancient skeletons and found that the genetic makeup of the modern European “was established around 4,500 b.c. in the mid-Neolithic—or 6,500 years ago…”

Evolutionary biologist Dr. Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago led a team that isolated five genes[5] responsible for skin color and concluded that these genes “started to become more common” in the Asian and European populations 6,600 years ago. A New York Times article reported that Dr. Pritchard’s work “impl[ied] that Europeans acquired their pale skin much more recently.”[6]

Incredibly, the findings of Drs. Pritchard and Cooper correspond precisely with the Teachings of The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. But these scientists are mystified about what exactly caused the drastic alteration in the human genome at that moment in history. Said Dr. Cooper:

“The genetics show that something around that point caused the genetic signatures of previous populations to disappear. However, we don’t know what happened or why.”[7]

 

Mutants and Mutations

Molecular biologist Dr. Keith Cheng, of Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, led a study that, in his words, shows that Europeans “lightened up quite recently, perhaps only 6,000 to 12,000 years ago.” Dr. Cheng shared his personal reaction to the emerging data:

“There was a magic moment in this research….[when] I began to sweat. Not only did white-skinned people evolve from black-skinned people, but lighter-skinned people, whether they are Europeans, or Asians, like me, were actually mutants of the dark-skinned people.”[8]

Dr. Cheng’s use of the word mutant has scientific significance in the fields of biology and genetics, wherein it is defined as an organism or a new genetic character arising or resulting from an instance of mutation. Webster’s further defines a mutant as “an animal or plant with inheritable characteristics that differ from those of the parents.” Dr. Cheng found that Europeans and Asians fit that scientific definition.[9]

Stanford paleoanthropologist Dr. Richard G. Klein confirms that before six to seven thousand years ago, skeletons similar in form to modern Chinese are hard to find.[10]

Similarly, geneticist Dr. Hans Eiberg of the University of Copenhagen confirmed that “Originally, we all had brown eyes,” and that all blue-eyed humans have a “genetic mutation” that he says occurred six to ten thousand years ago in “the northwest part of the Black Sea region.” His team targeted a specific gene, known as the OCA2 gene, which if altered would result in human beings without melanin in their hair, eyes, or skin—a condition known as albinism. Thus, they speculate that this OCA2 gene—what might be called the Yakub gene—seems to have been targeted and manipulated by some unknown force or event about 6,000-plus years ago.[11]

In 2018 a team of scientists at Tel Aviv University studied the DNA of the human remains found in the Peqi’in Cave in northern Palestine. They found a genetic mutation causing blue eyes and fair skin[12] that had not been seen in earlier Levantine human remains. According to the study’s director Dr. Hila May, they track this “abrupt” appearance of those people to exactly 6,500 years ago and target the area Anatolia and the Zagros mountains, an area just east of Patmos island.[13] Other scientists have pinpointed what they call the “mutation epicenter” as somewhere in the Balkans or near the Black Sea.[14]

A 2017 study published in the journal Science analyzed the variations of skin tone and melanin content among African populations. Scientists looked at the SLC24A5 gene, which they say “is known to play a role in light skin color in European and some southern Asian populations.” And even though they found a rainbow of shades of blackness among the Africans, the researchers nevertheless found that “light pigmentation…was introduced into East Africa more than five thousand years ago…”[15] This timeframe, again, corresponds exactly with the expected timeline and migration route of Patmos’s new man into the middle eastern/north African region.[16]

A 2014 study published by the National Academy of Sciences focused on the “depigmentation” of the hair, skin, and eyes and targets the time period of “6,500–4,000 years ago”:

“Our results provide direct evidence that strong selection favoring lighter skin, hair, and eye pigmentation has been operating in European populations over the last 5,000 years [but] the actual nature of the selection pressure remains unknown.” (emphasis ours) [17]

The term “strong selection” means that these specific physical traits—light skin, hair, and eyes—became intensely desirable for mating in this specific moment in time, yet the force that triggered that desire is yet unknown to scientists.

Two University of Arizona scientists found that the evolution of light skin “occurred long after the arrival of modern humans in Europe.” They say that the data suggest that the mutation occurred “5,300 to 6,000 years ago,” though they say that given the imprecision of method, “the real date could be as far back as 12,000 years ago.”[18]

Again, the scientists acknowledge that something occurred but a scientifically sound explanation for this puzzling light-skin mutation seems to evade them. The celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin concluded that without some form of sexual selection, such skin color differences simply “cannot be accounted for in a satisfactory manner”:

“We have thus far been baffled in all our attempts to account for the differences between the races of man; but there remains one important agency, namely, Sexual Selection, which appears to have acted as powerfully on man as on many other animals.”[19]

The Hardy–Weinberg principle states that genetic coding in a population will remain constant from generation to generation in the absence of other evolutionary influences. So such a sudden and widespread mutation, which is known as a “hard sweep,” is almost unknown, for it requires an almost instantaneous behavioral change among the population. As with Darwin over a century ago, scientists today are still “baffled” about what may have caused such a sudden and intensified preference for lighter-skinned mates, a preference that occurred only in this one isolated region in remarkably close vicinity to Patmos island.[20]

 

The Vitamin D Theory

Anthropologist Nina Jablonski admits that in her studies “The overall picture that has emerged is one in which lighter skin evolved in Europe relatively recently.”[21] But she is among those scientists that hypothesize that skin lightening occurred as the body responded to the changes in sunlight intensity between tropical Africa and the colder climate of Europe, changes which, they theorize, affected the body’s vitamin D production and may have triggered the skin lightening.[22]

But other studies indicate that black skin can produce adequate levels of vitamin D as far north as the arctic circle—as with the Eskimo people (left)—even if only a portion as small as ten percent of the body’s surface is exposed.[23] Thus, the dark-skinned humans throughout Europe and even in the polar regions for many millennia prior to the 6,600-year “hard sweep” point show no detectable graduation into a whiter appearance. And, even if one were to accept the “vitamin D hypothesis,” there is yet no other physical advantage to the bodily changes that occurred with this sudden 6,600-year-old mutation. The body form of the whitened man actually suffers from weaker bones[24] and higher rates of skin-related cancers.[25]

Researchers at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Spain studied a skeleton of a hunter-gatherer who lived in Europe about 7,000 years ago and who had “the unusual combination of dark skin and hair and blue eyes.” Harvard Medical School geneticist Dr. David Reich commented that

“[t]he dark skin is a very interesting finding, as light skin is nearly universal across Europe today. These results suggest that the light skin seen across Europe today is a development of the last at least 7,000 years.”

The lead researcher, Dr. Carles Lalueza-Fox, said that the skeleton’s DNA debunks the vitamin D absorption theory: “It is obvious that this is not the case, because this guy has been in Europe for 40,000 years and he still has dark skin.”[26]

Drs. Andrea Hanel and Carsten Carlberg are more definitive:

“[T]here is no convincing evidence of a direct evolutionary effect of vitamin D on skin lightening of Europeans….[A]rcheogenomic data indicated that Europeans got pale as predominant skin colour just some 5000 years ago through interbreeding with migrating populations originating from Anatolia and the Russian steppe.”[27]

To date, the abrupt and sweeping demand for light skin, blue eyes, blonde hair, and weaker bones has no natural explanation that geneticists can offer. These scientists know when and where, but not how.

Drs. Cooper, Eiberg, Cheng, Pritchard, and others have scientifically zeroed in on a date in time and a geographical location that precisely correspond to the Teachings of the Nation of Islam. But the scientists are yet unable to account for the reason for this dramatic genetic convulsion in the human family. Prof. Cooper said, “This population moves in around 4,000 to 5,000 [bce, or 6,000 to 7,000 years ago], but where it came from remains a mystery, as we can’t see anything like it in the areas surrounding Europe.”[28]

The venerable National Geographic Society was equally mystified:

“About 5,400 years ago, everything changed. All across Europe, thriving Neolithic settlements shrank or disappeared altogether. The dramatic decline has puzzled archaeologists for decades. ‘There’s less stuff, less material, less people, less sites,’ [Geneticist Dr. Johannes] Krause says. ‘Without some major event, it’s hard to explain. But there’s no sign of mass conflict or war.’”[29]

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[1] Now in Greek possession. Coordinates: 37°19.5′N 26°32.5′E. Manhattan is about twice as big as Patmos.

[2] John Malathronas, “Patmos: The Greek island where the end of the world began,” CNN, Sept. 28, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/patmos-island-greece/index.html. The Most Hon. Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America, 126: “The revelation is claimed by the Christians to have been given to a Saint John Divine who was a follower of Jesus, but this is erroneous and wrong. It is by the father of the white race (Mr. Yakub or Jacob).” See also The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, in part 13 of his 52-week lecture series “The Time and What Must Be Done,” and published April 9, 2013, in The Final Call, https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Minister_Louis_Farrakhan_9/article_9746.shtml: “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that ‘John The Revelator’ is Yakub: The Father of this present world, and The Maker of the Caucasian race of people from the brown germ of the Original Black Man.”

[3] The Most Hon. Elijah Muhammad, Our Saviour Has Arrived, 120. See also Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a, which establishes that “The world is to exist six thousand years.”

[4] DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid, contains the genetic material found in all living organisms. Scientists completed the mapping of the human genome in April of 2003.

[5] The five genes are SLC24A5, OCA2, MYO5A, DTNBP1, and TYRP1.

[6] Nicholas Wade, “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story,” New York Times, March 7, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html; Benjamin F. Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli, Xiaoquan Wen, and Jonathan K. Pritchard, “A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome,” PLoS Biology 4, no. 3, e72 (March 2006): 0446–0659, esp. p. 0451, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040072; “Evolution Persisted in Agricultural Era,” Science News 169, no. 11 (March 18, 2006): 174.

[7] Emphasis ours. Ker Than, “Modern Europe’s Genetic History Starts in Stone Age: Scientists create the first detailed genetic history of modern Europe,” National Geographic News, April 25, 2013, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130423-european-genetic-history-dna-archaeology-science/. See Paul Brotherton et al., “Neolithic mitochondrial haplogroup H genomes and the genetic origins of Europeans,” Nature Communications 4, no. 1764 (April 2013), https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2656:

[p. 2.] “The exact nature and genetic context of the transformative changes that took place over these four millennia remain unclear, although current genetic patterns of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup (hg) distribution suggest a complex series of events in European prehistory and hint at multiple inputs from outside Central Europe.”

[8] See “Penn State College of Medicine researcher Keith Cheng on ‘mutants of the dark-skinned people,’” video recording, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIVm-PVDJYc. Dr. Cheng describes “when and where this mutation arose” in “Molecular phylogeography of a human autosomal skin color locus under natural selection,” G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics 3, no. 11 (2013): 2059–2067, https://doi.org/10.1534/g3.113.007484. He asserts that the mutation “occurred between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent…” Also, Keith C. Cheng, “Skin Color in Fish and Humans: Impacts on Science and Society,” Zebrafish 5, no. 4 (2008): 237–42, doi:10.1089/zeb.2008.0577; Stephen C. Ekker, David M. Parichy, Keith C. Cheng, “Research Implications of Pigment Biology in Zebrafish,” Zebrafish 5, no. 4 (2008): 233–35, doi:10.1089/zeb.2008.9981; M. Balter, “GENETICS: Zebrafish Researchers Hook Gene for Human Skin Color,” Science 310, no. 5755 (2005): 1754a–1755a, doi:10.1126/science.310.5755.1754a.

[9] Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged, second ed. (1970), s.v. “mutant.” See Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 2d ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), s.v. “mutant”: “any organism that has arisen by or has undergone mutation.”

[10] Nicholas Wade, “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story,” New York Times, March 7, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.htm. Klein said that there are few European skeletons older than 10,000 years that look like modern Europeans.

[11] Hans Eiberg et al., “Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression,” Human Genetics123, no. 2 (March 2008): 177–87, doi: 10.1007/s00439-007-0460-x; University of Copenhagen, “Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor,” ScienceDaily, Jan. 31, 2008, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130170343.htm; Melissa Edwards et al., “Association of the OCA2 Polymorphism His615Arg with Melanin Content in East Asian Populations: Further Evidence of Convergent Evolution of Skin Pigmentation,” PLoS Genetics 6, no. 3, e1000867 (March 2010): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000867. Page 4:

“Our study indicates that the OCA2 gene was independently involved in the evolution of light pigmentation in Europe and East Asia, and in combination with previous findings for other genes (SLC24A5 and SLC45A2), strongly suggests that there was convergent evolution towards light pigmentation in Europe and East Asia” [emphasis ours].

[12] The etymology of fair, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “Cognate with Old Saxon fagar beautiful, pretty, peaceful (Middle Low German fagher beautiful), Old High German fagar, fagari shining, bright, beautiful, splendid, pretty, pleasant…”

[13] “DNA analysis of 6,500-year-old human remains with blue eye mutation,” ScienceDaily, Aug. 20, 2018, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180820104204.htm.

[14] Elizabeth Weise, “More than Meets the Blue Eye: You May Be Kin,” USA Today, Feb. 10, 2008, https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-05-blue-eyes_N.htm.

[15] Nicholas G. Crawford et al., “Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations,” Science 358, no. 6365 (Nov. 17, 2017). See also the erratum for the research article “Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations,” in Science 358, no. 6369 (Dec. 15 2017), doi: 10.1126/science.aar7002; and Science 367, no. 6475 (Jan. 17, 2020), doi: 10.1126/science.aba7178.

[16] Message to the Blackman in America, 116ff: Yakub said to his people: “When you become unalike (white), you may return to the Holy Land and people, from whom you were exiled.” He taught them what to do “when you go back to the holy black nation.”

[17] Emphasis ours. Sandra Wilde et al., “Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in Europeans during the last 5,000 years,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 13 (April 2014): 4832–4837, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1316513111. Wilde speculates (p. 4834) that in this specific time period of 6,500–4,000 years ago “a new selective environment had arisen in which depigmentation was favored for a different reason.” See also Cristina Gamba et al., “Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory,” Nature Communications 5, no. 5257 (Oct. 2014): 1–9, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6257; Ann Gibbons, “European Skin Turned Pale Only Recently, Gene Suggests,” Science 316, no. 5823 (April 20, 2007): 364, doi: 10.1126/science.316.5823.364a; and Ann Gibbons, “How Europeans evolved white skin,” Science, April 2, 2015, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin.

[18] “European Skin Turned Pale Only Recently, Gene Suggests,” Science, April 20, 2007, 364; archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20101103171424/.

[19] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1 (New York, 1871), 239, 240–41. Darwin introduced what he called “methodical selection,” which was analogous to evolution occurring in a “confined area”—as with Patmos Island. See Stephen Alter, “Darwin’s artificial selection analogy and the generic character of ‘Phyletic’ evolution,” History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences 29, no. 1 (Feb. 2007): 57–81.

[20] Obviously, this phenomenon predates by many thousands of years the advent of mass communications, thus rendering impossible the kind of mass marketing that influences ideas and lifestyle choices of large and widespread populations. It also predates the emergence of racist ideologies, which were first detected in the writings of rabbinical Judaism 4,000 years after this “hard sweep” point.

[21] See “Shades of complexity: New perspectives on the evolution and genetic architecture of human skin,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 168, suppl 67 (Nov. 2018): 1–23, doi:10.1002/ajpa.23737.

[22] Dr. Jablonski advances this theory in several works, including Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2013); Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin, “Human skin pigmentation, migration and disease susceptibility,” Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society, Series B, Biological Sciences, vol. 367 (March 2012); and Nina G. Jablonski, “Human Skin Pigmentation as an Example of Adaptive Evolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 156, no. 1 (March 2012). See also Charles S. Finch, “The Evolution of the Caucasoid,” in African Presence in Early Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1985), ed. Ivan Van Sertima; and Charles S. Finch, “Race and Evolution in Prehistory,” in African Presence in Early Europe.

[23] See Bernie Douglas, “Dark Skin Is Very Good For You! A Scientific Review,” Jan. 8, 2008, AfricaResource, https://www.africaresource.com/sci-tech-a-business/genetics/479-dark-skin-is-very-good-for-you-a-scientific-review.

[24] Marc C. Hochberg, “Racial Differences in Bone Strength,” Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, vol. 118 (2007): 305-315, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1863580/; “Difference in Bone Mass between Black and White American Children: Attributable to Body Build, Sex Hormone Levels, or Bone Turnover?” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 88, no. 2 (Feb. 1, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2002-020653.

[25] Khizar Abbas, Muhammad Imran Qadir, and Sidra Anwar, “The Role of Melanin in Skin Cancer,” Critical Reviews in Eukaryotic Gene Expression 29, no. 1 (2019): 17–24, doi: 10.1615/CritRevEukaryotGeneExpr.2018024980; R.A. Sturm, “Skin colour and skin cancer—MC1R, the genetic link,” Melanoma Research 12, no. 5 (Sept. 2002): 405–416.

[26] Rebecca Morelle, “Hunter-gatherer European had blue eyes and dark skin,” BBC World Service, Jan. 27, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25885519.

[27] Andrea Hanel and Carsten Carlberg, “Skin colour and Vitamin D: An Update,” Experimental Dermatology (June 2020): 868, 871–72, https://doi.org/10.1111/exd.14142.

[28] Than, “Modern Europe’s Genetic History.” The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, “Can Black and White Live Together in Peace?” Final Call, last updated June 23, 2020, https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Minister_Louis_Farrakhan_9/Can-Black-and-White-Live-Together-in-Peace.shtml: “[O]f course, it’s not a ‘mystery’ today!”

[29] “The first Europeans weren’t who you might think,” National Geographic, July 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/07/first-europeans-immigrants-genetic-testing-feature/. Johannes Krause is a founding director of Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, where he is head of the Dept. of Archaeo- and Paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen.

^^