Europeans Got Fair Skin Only 7,000 Years Ago: Study

LONDON – Debunking thetheory that lighter skin graduallyarose in Europeans nearly40,000 years ago, new researchhas revealed that it evolvedmuch recently — only 7,000years ago.An ancient male Europeanhunter-gatherer, who lived inmodern-day Spain only about7,000 years ago, had dark skinand blue eyes, the researcherssaid.”The findings also hint thatlight skin evolved not to adjustto the lower-light conditions inEurope as compared to Africa,but instead to the new diet thatemerged after the agriculturalrevolution,” said CarlesLalueza-Fox, a paleogenomicsresearcher at the Pompeu FabraUniversity in Spain.”It was assumed that the lighterskin was something needed inhigh latitudes, to synthesisevitamin D in places where UVlight is lower than found in thetropics,” Lalueza-Fox was quotedas saying.The new discovery, however,shows that latitude alone didnot drive the evolution ofEuropeans’ light skin, said thestudy published in the journalNature.Analyzing two male skeletonsfound in a labyrinthine cave inthe Cantabrian Mountains ofSpain in 2006, researchersfound the skeletons were about7,000 years old.The bodies were covered withred soil, characteristic ofPaleolithic burial sites, Lalueza-Fox said.Several years later, the teamrevisited the skeletons andextracted DNA from a molartooth in one of them.The DNA analysis shows theman had the gene mutation forblue eyes but not the Europeanmutations for lighter skin.The DNA also shows that theman was more closely related tomodern-day northernEuropeans than to southernEuropeans.