The DNA of a hunter-gatherer who lived in Spain some 7,000 years ago suggests that Europeans were dark-skinned until much more recently than previously thought, researchers said Sunday.
Genetic material recovered from a tooth of La Brana 1, an ancient man whose skeleton was dug up in a deep cave system in Spain in 2006, revealed a strange combination of dark skin and blue eyes, according to a study in the journal Nature.
Europeans from the Mesolithic Period between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, when La Brana lived, were thought to have already been fair-skinned due to low ultraviolet radiation levels at these high latitudes.
\”Until now, it was assumed that light skin colour evolved quite early in Europe, (during) the Upper Palaeolithic… But this is clearly not the case,\” study co-author Carles Lalueza-Fox from Spain\’s Evolutionary Biology Institute, told AFP.
\”This individual had the African variants for the pigmentation genes.\”
via Dark skin and blue eyes: How Europeans once looked | News , Science | THE DAILY STAR.
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