Markers / Gene
OCA2
One position in this gene is readable from a home DNA test.
Lighter skin, the East Asian route
rs1800414 · chr15:28,197,037 · T/C · evidence: established
Europe and East Asia both evolved lighter skin after moving away from the tropics, and they did it with different genes. This is the East Asian one. It is a clean demonstration that the same environmental problem was solved twice, independently.
| If you carry | What it means |
|---|---|
| No copies | You do not carry the East Asian lightening variant |
| One copy | You carry one copy |
| Two copies | You carry two copies |
| Ancestry group | C (the effect version) | |
|---|---|---|
| African | 0.1% | |
| American | 0.0% | |
| East Asian | 59.6% | |
| European | 0.0% | |
| South Asian | 0.4% |
1000 Genomes Project phase 3, via Ensembl, retrieved 2026-09-23. These groupings are coarse and flatten a great deal of internal diversity, particularly within Africa. A variant being common somewhere tells you where a piece of your ancestry probably comes from, and nothing else.
Where this gene fits
If you have taken a home DNA test, these positions are already in your file.
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