Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Davide Piffer: how Europeans became white
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Jan 30, 2026 Davide Piffer, an independent researcher and Substack author who analyzes ancient DNA and polygenic scores. He explains technical challenges of scoring ancient genomes and imputation. He traces how modern European light pigmentation emerged from admixture plus selection. He highlights a marked acceleration toward lighter skin, hair and eyes beginning around the Iron Age.
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Early Inspiration From Cavalli-Sforza
- Davide Piffer traced his interest to reading Cavalli-Sforza's History and Geography of Human Genes in high school.
- That early fascination with maps and genetic variation shaped his focus on population differences.
What Polygenic Scores Do
- Polygenic scores sum GWAS effect sizes across many variants to predict traits like height and pigmentation.
- Predictive accuracy varies by trait, reaching ~50% for height and much lower for others.
Data Scale Enabled New Analyses
- Modern SNP arrays and whole-genome sequencing vastly increased variant counts compared with historical studies, enabling polygenic approaches.
- This data scale change underpins modern ability to score complex traits from ancient DNA.
