Europeans got white skin 7,000 years ago!
28 Jan 2014 5:58 AM IST
Debunking the theory that lighter skin gradually arose in Europeans nearly 40,000 years ago, new research has revealed that it evolved much recently, only 7,000 years ago. An ancient male European hunter-gatherer, who lived in modern-day Spain only about 7,000 years ago, had dark skin and blue eyes, the researchers said.
‘The findings also hint that light skin evolved not to adjust to the lower-light conditions in Europe as compared to Africa, but instead to the new diet that emerged after the agricultural revolution,’ said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogenomics researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain. ‘It was assumed that the lighter skin was something needed in high latitudes, to synthesise vitamin D in places where UV light is lower than found in the tropics,’ Lalueza-Fox was quoted as saying.
The new discovery, however, shows that latitude alone did not drive the evolution of Europeans’ light skin, said the study published in the journal Nature. Analysing two male skeletons found in a labyrinthine cave in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain in 2006, researchers found the skeletons were about 7,000 years old.
‘The findings also hint that light skin evolved not to adjust to the lower-light conditions in Europe as compared to Africa, but instead to the new diet that emerged after the agricultural revolution,’ said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogenomics researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain. ‘It was assumed that the lighter skin was something needed in high latitudes, to synthesise vitamin D in places where UV light is lower than found in the tropics,’ Lalueza-Fox was quoted as saying.
The new discovery, however, shows that latitude alone did not drive the evolution of Europeans’ light skin, said the study published in the journal Nature. Analysing two male skeletons found in a labyrinthine cave in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain in 2006, researchers found the skeletons were about 7,000 years old.
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