Nina Jablonski
EVAN PUGH PROFESSOR, Anthropology | Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA, UNITED STATES
Nina Jablonski is an expert on skin pigmentation.
Media
Publications:
Documents:
Videos:
Audio/Podcasts:
Industry Expertise (2)
Research
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (3)
mammalian paleoecology in the late tertiary and quaternary and evolution of hominid bipedalism
Evolution of human skin and skin pigmentation
Primate Evolution
Biography
Nina Jablonski is an Evan Pugh Professor of anthropology. She is an expert on skin pigmentation. She studies the evolution of human skin and the relationship between pigmentation and vitamin D production.
Education (4)
University of Washington: Ph.D., Anthropology 1981
University of Washington: Ph.C., Anthropology 1978
Stellenbosch University: D.Phil. 2010
Bryn Mawr College: A.B., Biology 1975
Links (8)
Media Appearances (3)
what is hair?
i-D online
2017-06-22
This week we're celebrating hair, but we'd be remiss if we didn't pause for a second to consider what it actually is, and what it's for. Luckily, we can explain! And it might even give you a new appreciation for how strange and beautiful a thing human hair can be.
Dear Science: Why aren't apes evolving into humans?
Chicago Tribune online
2016-06-27
Dear Science: Why are there no hominins left on Earth? If evolution is ongoing and species are always changing and adapting, shouldn't we see new human-like species evolving from apes, even if the old ones died out?
Why humans lost their body hair: to stop their brains from overheating as we evolved
Independent online
2013-02-17
The need to keep a cool head is why man became a naked ape according to scientists who believe they can finally explain why humans are the only primate to lose their body fur.
Event Appearances (1)
Human Skin Color is an Evolutionary Adaptation, Not a Racial Characteristic
ALLELE Seminar Series Biology Building Auditorium (Room 127)
2017-09-15
Research Focus (1)
Evolution of Human Skin Pigmentation
Research on the evolution of skin color in humans was avoided by scientists for many years. Skin color is worthy of scientific investigation, however, because it is the product of over five million years of evolution in the human lineage, it the most obvious characteristic in which people vary in their appearance, and it is of great social importance. My research on the evolution of human skin and skin color, done mostly in collaboration with George Chaplin, has demonstrated that skin color is the product of natural selection acting to regulate levels of melanin pigment in the skin relative to levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in the environment. Melanin is a natural sunscreen that prevents the breakdown of certain essential biomolecules (in particular, the B vitamin folate, and DNA), while permitting enough UVR to enter the skin to promote the production of essential vitamin D.
Courses (3)
Primatology
ANTH 405, Fall 2013
Bio-Cultural Evolution
ANTH 040H, Spring 2014
Skin
ANTH 497, Fall 2014
Articles (4)
The biology of color
Science
Innes C Cuthill, William L Allen, Kevin Arbuckle, Barbara Caspers, George Chaplin, Mark E Hauber, Geoffrey E Hill, Nina G Jablonski, Chris D Jiggins, Almut Kelber, Johanna Mappes, Justin Marshall, Richard Merrill, Daniel Osorio, Richard Prum, Nicholas W Roberts, Alexandre Roulin, Hannah M Rowland, Thomas N Sherratt, John Skelhorn, Michael P Speed, Martin Stevens, Mary Caswell Stoddard, Devi Stuart-Fox, Laszlo Talas, Elizabeth Tibbetts, Tim Caro
2017 The interdisciplinary field of animal coloration is growing rapidly, spanning questions about the diverse ways that animals use pigments and structures to generate color, the underlying genetics and epigenetics, the perception of color, how color information is integrated with information from other senses, and general principles underlying color’s evolution and function. People working in the field appreciate linkages between these parallel lines of enquiry, but outsiders need the easily navigable roadmap that we provide here.
The colours of humanity: the evolution of pigmentation in the human lineage
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Nina G Jablonski, George Chaplin
2017 Humans are a colourful species of primate, with human skin, hair and eye coloration having been influenced by a great variety of evolutionary forces throughout prehistory. Functionally naked skin has been the physical interface between the physical environment and the human body for most of the history of the genus Homo, and hence skin coloration has been under intense natural selection. From an original condition of protective, dark, eumelanin-enriched coloration in early tropical-dwelling Homo and Homo sapiens, loss of melanin pigmentation occurred under natural selection as Homo sapiens dispersed into non-tropical latitudes of Africa and Eurasia. Genes responsible for skin, hair and eye coloration appear to have been affected significantly by population bottlenecks in the course of Homo sapiens dispersals. Because specific skin colour phenotypes can be created by different combinations of skin colour–associated genetic markers, loss of genetic variability due to genetic drift appears to have had negligible effects on the highly redundant genetic ‘palette’ for the skin colour. This does not appear to have been the case for hair and eye coloration, however, and these traits appear to have been more strongly influenced by genetic drift and, possibly, sexual selection.
UV-associated decline in systemic folate: implications for human nutrigenetics, health, and evolutionary processes
American Journal of Human Biology
Mark Lucock, Emma Beckett, Charlotte Martin, Patrice Jones, John Furst, Zoe Yates, Nina G Jablonski, George Chaplin, Martin Veysey
2016 The purpose of this study was to examine whether UV exposure alters folate status according to C677T-MTHFR genotype, and to consider the relevance of this to human health and the evolutionary model of skin pigmentation.
Divergent Ah Receptor Ligand Selectivity during Hominin Evolution
Molecular Biology and Evolution
Troy D. Hubbard, Iain A. Murray, William H. Bisson, Alexis P. Sullivan, Aswathy Sebastian, George H. Perry, Nina G. Jablonski, Gary H. Perdew
2016 We have identified a fixed nonsynonymous sequence difference between humans (Val381; derived variant) and Neandertals (Ala381; ancestral variant) in the ligand-binding domain of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) gene. In an exome sequence analysis of four Neandertal and Denisovan individuals compared with nine modern humans, there are only 90 total nucleotide sites genome-wide for which archaic hominins are fixed for the ancestral nonsynonymous variant and the modern humans are fixed for the derived variant. Of those sites, only 27, including Val381 in the AHR, also have no reported variability in the human dbSNP database, further suggesting that this highly conserved functional variant is a rare event. Functional analysis of the amino acid variant Ala381 within the AHR carried by Neandertals and nonhuman primates indicate enhanced polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) binding, DNA binding capacity, and AHR mediated transcriptional activity compared with the human AHR. Also relative to human AHR, the Neandertal AHR exhibited 150–1000 times greater sensitivity to induction of Cyp1a1 and Cyp1b1 expression by PAHs (e.g., benzo(a)pyrene). The resulting CYP1A1/CYP1B1 enzymes are responsible for PAH first pass metabolism, which can result in the generation of toxic intermediates and perhaps AHR-associated toxicities. In contrast, the human AHR retains the ancestral sensitivity observed in primates to nontoxic endogenous AHR ligands (e.g., indole, indoxyl sulfate). Our findings reveal that a functionally significant change in the AHR occurred uniquely in humans, relative to other primates, that would attenuate the response to many environmental pollutants, including chemicals present in smoke from fire use during cooking.
Social