First Modern Humans in Europe

Cro-Magnon Man

Modern humans are believed to have reached Europe around 45,000 years ago. It was originally thought they arrived via the Middle East or North Africa possibly crossed a lang bridge between Tunisia, Sicily and Italy or the Strait of Gibralter but genetic evidence indicates that more likely they came from Asia. The DNA of western Eurasians is more like people from India than those from Africa. The conclusion that one draws is that Europe was populated by people who migrated across western Asia and the Balkans into Europe between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago.

The earliest remains of modern humans in Europe is a 40,000-year-old skull of a teenage boy found in a cave in Romania In a January 2007 article in Science, scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Colorado, reported that they found human teeth, tools, carved ivory and other artifacts , dated to 40,000 to 42,000 years ago, at an archaeological site on the Dom River 400 kilometers south of Moscow. This finding shows that early modern humans migrated further north than previously thought.

The second earliest fossils remains of modern humans in Europe are a jaw and part of skull found in 2002 (and announced in September 2003) in Pestera cu Oasem a cave in the southwestern Carpathian mountains in Romania. Dated to 34,000 to 36,000 years ago, the specimen has a somewhat primitive jaw bone and large developed molars, leading some scientists to speculate the fossils had come from a cross breed between modern humans and Neanderthal man.

It is widely assumed that cold, inhospitable weather prevented modern humans from entering Europe earlier than they did. By 35,000 years they were well established and quickly dominated and replaced Neanderthals that began declining about the same time modern humans arrived. The population shrank a great deal during the Ice Age 20,000 years ago then rebounded. The Ice Age nearly wiped out humans.

DNA studies indicate that 6 percent of Europeans arose from the first people who arrived about 45,000 years ago. These people are more numerous in certain places like the Basque region and remote parts of Scandinavia. Another 80 percent arrived 30,000 to 20,000 years ago before the peak of glaciation. The remaining 10 percent arrived about 10,000 years ago.

Websites and Resources on Hominins and Human Origins: Smithsonian Human Origins Program humanorigins.si.edu ; Institute of Human Origins iho.asu.edu ; Becoming Human University of Arizona site becominghuman.org ; Hall of Human Origins American Museum of Natural History amnh.org/exhibitions ; The Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com ; Britannica Human Evolution britannica.com ; Human Evolution handprint.com ; University of California Museum of Anthropology ucmp.berkeley.edu; John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog johnhawks.net/ ; New Scientist: Human Evolution newscientist.com/article-topic/human-evolution

Earliest Evidence of Modern Humans in Europe

Mount Parnassus in Greece

Greece — 45,000 years before present — Mount Parnassus — Geneticist Bryan Sykes identifies 'Ursula' as the first of The Seven Daughters of Eve, and the carrier of the mitochondrial haplogroup U. This hypothetical woman moved between the mountain caves and the coast of Greece, and based on genetic research represent the first human settlement of Europe.
Italy — 43,000–45,000 years before present — Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia — Two baby teeth discovered in Apulia in 1964 are the earliest modern human remains yet found in Europe.
United Kingdom — 41,500–44,200 years before present — Kents Cavern — Human jaw fragment found in Torquay, Devon in 1927 [Source: Wikipedia +]

Germany — 42,000–43,000 years before present — Geißenklösterle, Baden-Württemberg — Three Paleolithic flutes belonging to the early Aurignacian, which is associated with the assumed earliest presence of Homo sapiens in Europe (Cro-Magnon). It is the oldest example of prehistoric music.
Lithuania — 41,000–43,000 years before present — Šnaukštai (lt) near Gargždai — A hammer made from reindeer horn similar to those used by the Bromme culture was found in 2016. The discovery pushed back the earliest evidence of human presence in Lithuania by 30,000 years, i.e. to before the last glacial period.
Romania — 37,800–42,000 years before present — Pe tera cu Oase — Bones dated as 38–42,000 years old are among the oldest human remains found in Europe. +

France — 32,000 years before present — Chauvet Cave — The cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave in southern France have been called the earliest known cave art, though the dating is uncertain.
Czech Republic — 31,000 years before present — Mladeč caves — Oldest human bones that clearly represent a human settlement in Europe.
Poland — 30,000 years before present — Obłazowa Cave — A boomerang made from mammoth tusk
Russia — 28,000-30,000 years before present — Sungir — Burial site
Portugal — 24,500 years before present — Abrigo do Lagar Velho — Possible Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon hybrid, the Lapedo child
Sicily — 20,000 years before present — San Teodoro cave — Human cranium dated by gamma-ray spectrometry +

Ice Ages

land covered by ice and land bridges during the last ice age

Neanderthals and early modern humans lived at a time when Ice Ages were shaping the climate and landscape of the places they lived in Europe and elsewhere. I Ice Ages are periods of time when huge continental glaciers (sheets of ice) have crept down from the Arctic and covered much of North America and Europe. The Pleistocene Age, which lasted from 2.6-2.3 million to 11,700 years ago, is regarded as an ice age, within which there were glacial periods, which many people think of ice ages, when glaciers grew and shrunk during different periods. The first Ice Age glaciers began appearing long ago. Large glaciers have covered landmasses for millions of years at different times before the Pleistocene Age.

There has been at least five major ice ages. The first one occurred about 2 billion years ago and lasted about 300 million years. The most recent one started about 2.6 million years ago, and technically is still going on. Denise Su wrote: When most people talk about the “ice age,” they are usually referring to the last glacial period, which began about 115,000 years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago with the start of the current interglacial period. During that time, the planet was much cooler than it is now. At its peak, when ice sheets covered most of North America, the average global temperature was about 46 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius). That’s 11 degrees F (6 degrees C) cooler than the global annual average today. That difference might not sound like a lot, but it resulted in most of North America and Eurasia being covered in ice sheets. Earth was also much drier, and sea level was much lower, since most of the Earth’s water was trapped in the ice sheets. Steppes, or dry grassy plains, were common. So were savannas, or warmer grassy plains, and deserts. [Source: Denise Su, Associate Professor, Arizona State University, The Conversation, June 27, 2022]

The four main glacial periods ("ice ages") are (the names refer to the southern limit of the glaciers in Europe and, in parentheses, the United States): 1) the Günz (known in the U.S. as the Nebraskan) occurred around 2 million years ago); 2) the Mindel (known in the U.S. as the Kansan) occurred around 1.25 million years ago); 3) the Riss (known in the U.S. as the Illinoisian) occurred around 500,000 years ago); and 4) the Würm (known in the U.S. as the Wisconsin) occurred around 100,000 years ago).

Last Glacial Period (Ice Age)

Europe's 4th Ice Age
Around 125,000 years ago, in the middle of major warm, interglacial period, sea levels were 20 to 30 feet higher than they are today. Areas of Africa, the Middle East and West Asia that are desert today were covered by tropical deciduous forests and savanna dotted with numerous lakes.

After that the climate began getting colder. By around 100,000 years a new Ice Age had begun. About 65,000 years, in the middle of the ice age, glaciers covered nearly 17 million square miles, including much of northern Europe and Canada, and sea levels were more than 400 feet lower that they are today. Many islands and land masses that are now separated by ocean water were connected by land bridges. Among the land masses that were connected were Australia and Indonesia, and Alaska and Siberia.

Around 40,000 years ago glaciers began to melt. At that time they still covered most of Britain and extended into Europe as far south as Germany. By around 17,000 years ago they had retreated from Germany. Around 13,000 they had retreated from Sweden. The Ice Age officially ended about 10,000 years ago.

The landscape of Europe was covered by ice. But it was also altered in other ways not directly related to the ice. As the glaciers moved southward, for example, forests were replaced with tundra and steppe.

During the last ice age Europe was covered mostly by open steppe which is an ideal habitat for grazing animals like horses, rhinos, deer, mammoth, reindeer and bison. Vast herds of these animals, fed on steppe grasses, roamed across Europe and Asia. As the Ice Ages ended and the climate warmed up, the habitant for the large animals herds declined as the grasslands were replaced by birch and evergreen forests.

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker: “Among ecologists, the prevailing view of Europe in its natural, which is to say pre-agrarian, state is that it was heavily forested. (The continent’s last stands of old-growth forest are found on the border of Poland and Belarus, in the Bialowieza Forest, which the author Alan Weisman has described as a “relic of what once stretched east to Siberia and west to Ireland.”)” An ecologist named Frans “Vera argues that, even before Europeans figured out how to farm, the continent was more of a parklike landscape, with large expanses of open meadow. It was kept this way, he maintains, by large herds of herbivores—aurochs, red deer, tarpans, and European bison. (The bison, also known as wisents, were hunted nearly to extinction by the late eighteen-hundreds.) [Source: Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker , December 24 & 31, 2012 ||*||]

“Vera has written up his argument in a dense, five-hundred-page treatise that has received a good deal of attention from European naturalists, not all of it favorable. A botany professor at Dublin’s Trinity College, Fraser Mitchell, has written that an analysis of ancient pollen “forces the rejection of Vera’s hypothesis.” Vera, for his part, rejects the rejection, arguing that, precisely because they ate so much grass, the aurochs and the wisents skewed the pollen record. “That is a scientific debate that is still going on,” he told me.”

“Special Places” in Northern Europe Chosen Based on Food Availability

Research led by the University of Southampton has found that early humans were driven by a need for nutrient-rich food to select ‘special places’ in northern Europe as their main habitat. Evidence of their activity at these sites comes in the form of hundreds of stone tools, including handaxes. According to the University of Southampton: “A study led by physical geographer at Southampton Professor Tony Brown, in collaboration with archaeologist Dr Laura Basell at Queen’s University Belfast, has found that sites popular with our early human ancestors, were abundant in foods containing nutrients vital for a balanced diet. The most important sites, dating between 500,000 to 100,000 years ago were based at the lower end of river valleys, providing ideal bases for early hominins – early humans who lived before Homo sapiens (us). [Source: University of Southampton, December 10, 2013]

“Professor Brown says: “Our research suggests that floodplain zones closer to the mouth of a river provided the ideal place for hominin activity, rather than forested slopes, plateaus or estuaries. The landscape in these locations tended to be richer in the nutrients critical for maintaining population health and maximising reproductive success.”

“The researchers began by identifying Palaeolithic sites in southern England and northern France where high concentrations of handaxes had been excavated –for example at Dunbridge in Hampshire, Swanscombe near Dartford and the Somme Valley in France. They found there were fewer than 25 sites where 500 handaxes or more were discovered. The high concentration of these artefacts suggests significant activity at the sites and that they were regularly used by early hominins.

“Professor Brown and his colleagues then compiled a database of plants and animals known to exist in the Pleistocene epoch (a period between 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) to establish a potential list of nutrient resources in the landscape and an estimation of the possible diet. This showed that an abundance of nutritious foods were available and suggests this was likely to have been the dominant factor driving early humans to focus on these sites in the lower reaches of river valleys, close to the upper tidal limit of rivers.

“Over 50 nutrients are needed to sustain human life. In particular, it would have been essential for early humans to find sources of protein, fats, carbohydrates, folic acid and vitamin C. The researchers suggest vitamins and protein may have come from sources such as raw liver, eggs, fish and plants, including watercress (which grows year round). Fats in particular, may have come from bone marrow, beaver tails and highly nutritious eels.

“The nutritional diversity of these sites allowed hominins to colonise the Atlantic fringe of north west Europe during warm periods of the Pleistocene. These sites permitted the repeated occupation of this marginal area from warmer climate zones further south. Professor Brown comments: “We can speculate that these types of locations were seen as ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ places to live which hominins revisited on a regular basis. If this is the case, the sites may have provided ‘nodal points’ or base camps along nutrient-rich route-ways through the Palaeolithic landscape, allowing early humans to explore northwards to more challenging environments.”“

Early human sites in Europe

Earliest Europeans, 45,000 Years Ago from Italy and England

The earliest evidence of modern humans in Europe is Italy — 43,000–45,000 years before present —Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia — Two baby teeth discovered in Apulia in 1964 are the earliest modern human remains yet found in Europe. Earliest evidence of modern humans in United Kingdom — 41,500–44,200 years before present — Kents Cavern — Human jaw fragment found in Torquay, Devon in 1927. [Source: Wikipedia]

Two baby teeth from the Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, Italy and a jaw fragment from Kents Cavern, Devon, England are earliest known remains of Homo sapiens in Europe. Careful dating reported in an article in the journal Nature suggests they are more than 41,000 years old, with the Italian "baby teeth" being maybe 45,000 years old. [Source: Jonathan Amos, BBC News, November 2, 2011]

Jonathan Amos of BBC News wrote: “The results fit with stone tool discoveries that had suggested modern people were in Europe more than 40,000 years ago. Now, scientists have the direct physical remains of Homo sapiens to prove it. It confirms also that modern people overlapped in Europe with their evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, for an extended period. These humans went extinct shortly afterwards, and the latest discoveries will raise once again the questions over Homo sapiens' possible role in their relatives' demise. "What's significant about this work is that it increases the overlap and contemporaneity with Neanderthals," explained Dr Tom Higham, from Oxford University, who led the study on the British specimen found at Kents Cavern, Torquay. "We estimate that probably three to five thousand years of time is the amount of the overlap between moderns and Neanderthals in this part of the world," he told the BBC Science in Action programme.

“The new results indicate, too, that modern humans swept across Europe via a number of different routes, as they populated the world after leaving Africa some 60,000 years ago. Media captionFinding suggest humans were living in England as long as 44,000 years ago “Both the teeth and the jaw fragment have been known about for decades. “In the case of the jaw from Kents Cavern, this was first identified in 1927. “The two Italian baby teeth were found in the Grotta del Cavallo in southern Italy in 1964.

“Scientists have long pondered the specimens' age and origin. Many thought they were more likely to be Neanderthal remains. It is only with the application of the very latest analytical techniques that the specimens' true status can be established. Because of their concerns about modern contamination in the jaw, Higham and colleagues went back to animal fossils found above and below the object in the Torquay cave and re-dated those with greater precision. This produced a likely age for the human remains of between 41,500 and 44,200 years ago.

“The team also re-examined the shape of the jaw's three teeth, including their internal structure, to remove doubts that the jaw could be Neanderthal. "We've done a new reconstruction, and we've actually found that one of the teeth was in the wrong place. That's for starters," said co-author Prof Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum. “"But we've also done a really detailed comparison, right down to the shape of the roots and internal pulp cavities. We've gone to microscopic details to show this really is a modern human. You would never find a Neanderthal fossil that had this many modern human features."

“Likewise for the Italian baby teeth, Dr Stefano Benazzi and colleagues performed a morphological analysis, comparing the features of their specimens with a wide database of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal remains. Again, this approach indicated the Grotta del Cavallo specimens were from a modern person. The Benazzi team also resorted to advanced radio-carbon dating technology to reassess the age. This was applied to ornamental shell beads found in the same layer as the teeth. "The new dating shows that the teeth must be between 43,000 and 45,000 years ago," said Dr Benazzi from the University of Vienna, Austria. "That makes them the oldest European modern-human currently known," he told BBC News.

“The re-assessments have further importance because palaeoanthropologists can now put modern humans in the caves at the same time as the stone and bone tool technologies discovered there. “There has been some doubt over who created the so-called Aurignacian artefacts at Kents Cavern and the slightly older Uluzzian technologies at Grotta del Cavallo. It could have been Neanderthals, but there is now an obvious association in time with Homo sapiens.

Pe tera cu Oase in Romania

Peteracu Oase skull from Romania

Earliest evidence of modern humans in Romania — 37,800–42,000 years before present —Pe tera cu Oase — Bones dated as 38–42,000 years old are among the oldest human remains found in Europe. They were once regarded as THE oldest. [Source: Wikipedia +]

Peteracu Oase (meaning "The Cave with Bones") is a system of 12 karstic galleries and chambers located near the city Anina, in the Cara -Severin county, southwestern Romania, where some of the oldest European early modern human (EEMH) remains, between 37,000 42,000 years old, have been found. In 2015 genetics research revealed that the Oase 1 fossil had a recent Neanderthal ancestor, with an estimated 5-11 percent Neanderthal autosomal DNA. The specimen's 12th chromosome was also 50 percent Neanderthal. +

In February 2002, a speleological team exploring the karstic system of Mini Valley, in the southwestern Carpathian Mountains near Anina, revealed a previously unknown chamber with a profusion of mammalian skeletal remains. The cave, which seemed to have served primarily as hibernation room for the Late Pleistocene cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), presented unusual arrangements such as the placement of some remains on raised rocks, suggesting a certain human involvement in the accumulated deposits. Speleologists Stefan Milota, Adrian Bîlgăr and Lauren iu Sarcina discovered a complete human mandible on the paleosurface. The karstic chamber was designated as "Pe tera cu Oase" (The Cave with Bones) and the human mandible as "Oase 1",. The latest radiocarbon dates of the Oase fossils give an age of 37,800 years before present. + "Oase 1" is the lower jaw of fully mature male. It exhibits morphological traits from early modern humans and archaic humans, including Neanderthal features. DNA analysis of Oase 1 since 2015 has revealed a number of significant findings. About 6-9% of the genome is Neanderthal in origin. This is the highest percentage of archaic introgression found in an anatomically modern human and together with the linkage disequilibrium patterns indicates that Oase 1 had a relatively-recent Neanderthal ancestor – about four to six generations earlier. The autosomal DNA of Oase 1 by Fu et al. (2015) indicates that he may have shared more alleles with modern East Asian populations than with modern Europeans. However, Oase shared equal alleles with Mesolithic Europeans and East Eurasians suggesting non pre LGM-European admixture in modern Europeans. +

"Oase 2" is the facial skeleton of an adolescent. "Oase 3" is the left temporal bone of an adolescent or versus mature female, designated as "Oase 3". Additional finds and work have shown that the temporal bone derives from the same cranium as the "Oase 2" facial and parietal bones. The "Oase 2" and "Oase 3" confirm a pattern already known from the probably contemporaneous "Oase 1" mandible, indicating a mixture of archaic, early modern human and Neanderthal morphological features. Thus, the specimens exhibit a suite of derived "modern human" features like projecting chin, no brow ridge, a high and rounded brain case. Yet, these features are associated with several archaic aspects of the cranium and dentition that place them outside the range of variation for modern humans, like a large face, a large crest of bone behind the ear and big teeth that get even larger toward the back. This mosaic of Neanderthal and modern human resembles similar traits found in a 25,000 years old fossil of a child in Abrigo do Lagar Velho or in the 31,000 years old site of Mladeč, by Cidália Duarte, et al. (1999). +

People in Higher Latitudes Evolved Bigger Eyes and Brains to Deal with Poor Light?

According to an Oxford study, humans living at higher latitudes may have evolved bigger eyes and brains to cope with poorer lighting conditions. Alok Jha wrote in The Guardian: “ “On average, the eyeballs of people whose ancestors lived within the Arctic circle are 20 percent bigger than those whose ancestors lived near the equator. "As you move away from the equator, there's less and less light available, so humans have had to evolve bigger and bigger eyes," said Eiluned Pearce from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, a lead author on the study. "Their brains also need to be bigger to deal with the extra visual input. Having bigger brains doesn't mean that higher-latitude humans are smarter, it just means they need bigger brains to be able to see well where they live." [Source: Alok Jha, The Guardian, July 27, 2011 |=|]

“This suggests that someone from Greenland and someone from Kenya will have the same ability to discern detail, but the person from the higher latitude needs more brainpower and bigger eyes to deal with the lower light levels. “Professor Robin Dunbar, director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University and a co-author of the study, said that people whose ancestors have lived within the Arctic circle, have eyeballs 20 percent bigger than people whose ancestors lived near the equator. They have an associated increase in the size of the brain's visual cortex, which previous studies have shown correlates with the size of the eyeball. |=| “Brain volume is known to increase with latitude: people living at high latitudes north and south of the equator have bigger brains than people living near the equator and . Dunbar said that scientists have wondered whether these inherited differences in total brain volume were driven by the pressure to adapt to low light levels at high latitudes. The researchers measured the brain volumes and eye sockets of 55 skulls kept at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History dating from the 19th century. The skulls represented 12 different populations from around the world, including indigenous people from England, Australia, China, Kenya, Micronesia and Scandinavia. |=|

“The results, published in the journal Biology Letters, showed that the biggest brains, averaging 1,484 millilitres, were from Scandinavia, while the smallest brains, around 1,200 millilitres, came from Micronesia. Average eye socket size was 27 millilitres in Scandinavia and 22 millilitres in Micronesia. Dunbar said the increase in brain volume must have evolved relatively recently in human history. "It's only within the last 10,000 years or so that modern humans have occupied all latitudes right up to the Arctic circle. This is, I guess, an adaptation that's happened within the last 10,000 years." |=|

“The researchers controlled for possible confounding variables influencing their data, such as the fact that people who live at higher latitudes are physically bigger and the possibility that the size of a person's eye socket in colder climates might be bigger to allow for a thicker layer of insulating fat. The results for human eyes mirror those found in birds and non-human primates. Bird species that sing earlier in the dawn chorus at high latitudes have bigger eyes than those that sing later, and nocturnal primates have bigger eyeballs than species that are awake during the day. |=|

Nose Shape Influenced by Local Climate

Will Dunham, Reuters The human nose, in all its glorious forms, is one of our most distinctive characteristics, whether big, little, broad, narrow or somewhere in between. Scientists are now sniffing out some of the factors that drove the evolution of the human proboscis. Researchers said on Thursday a study using three-dimensional images of hundreds of people of East Asian, South Asian, West African and Northern European ancestry indicated local climate, specifically temperature and humidity, played a key role in determining the nose’s shape. [Source:Will Dunham, Reuters, March 17, 2017 ::/]

“Wider noses were more common in people from warm and humid climates, they found. Narrower noses were more common in those from cold and dry climates. The nose’s primary functions are breathing and smelling. It has mucous and blood capillaries inside that help warm and humidify inhaled air before it reaches more sensitive parts of the respiratory tract. Having narrower nasal airways might help increase contact between inhaled air and tissues inside the nose carrying moisture and heat, said Penn State University geneticist Arslan Zaidi, lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS Genetics. “This might have offered an advantage in colder climates. In warmer climates, the flip side was probably true,” Zaidi said. ::/

“Our species appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago and later migrated to other parts of the world. The researchers said people with narrower nostrils may have done better and produced more offspring than those with wider nostrils in colder, drier locales, driving a gradual decline in nose width. The finding generally supports what’s called Thomson’s rule, formulated by British anatomist and anthropologist Arthur Thomson (1858-1935), that people from cold, dry climates tend to have longer and thinner noses than people from warm, humid climates. ::/

“Zaidi said most previous evidence regarding Thomson’s rule came from skull measurements, while this study expanded on that by analyzing external nose shape. The researchers studied nose width, nostril width, nose height, length of the nose ridge, nose tip protrusion, external surface area and total nostril area. “What we have tested is a very simple hypothesis about the nose, which likely had a very complex evolutionary history. There’s a lot we don’t know,” Zaidi said, citing the need to probe genes underlying nose shape. One can imagine how cultural differences in attractiveness could have led to some of the differences in nose shape between populations. For example, were wider noses considered more attractive in some populations relative to others?” ::/

Evolution of Light Skin

It had long been thought that lighter skin evolved gradually in Europeans starting around 40,000 years ago, soon after people left tropical Africa and settled in Europe's higher latitudes. But the discovery that a 7,000-year-old hunter-gatherer found in Spain appears to have had dark skin because he lacked the DNA pushes this date forward to only 7,000 years ago, suggesting that at least some humans lived considerably longer than thought in Europe before losing the dark pigmentation that evolved under Africa's sun. "It was assumed that the lighter skin was something needed in high latitudes, to synthesize vitamin D in places where UV light is lower than in the tropics," Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogenomics researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, told LiveScience. [Source: Tia Ghose, Live Science, January 26, 2014 ^^^]

Tia Ghose wrote in Live Science: “Scientists had assumed this was true because people need vitamin D for healthy bones, and can synthesize it in the skin with energy from the sun's UV rays, but darker skin, like that of the hunter-gatherer man, prevents UV-ray absorption. But a new discovery (See Below) shows that latitude alone didn't drive the evolution of Europeans' light skin. If it had, light skin would have become widespread in Europeans millennia earlier, Lalueza-Fox said. ^^^

“The finding implies that for most of their evolutionary history, Europeans were not what many people today would call 'Caucasian', said Guido Barbujani, president of the Associazione Genetica Italiana in Ferrara, Italy, who was not involved in the study. Instead, "what seems likely, then, is that the dietary changes accompanying the so-called Neolithic revolution, or the transition from food collection to food production, might have caused, or contributed to cause, this change," Barbujani said. ^^^

“The findings, which were detailed in the January 26, 2014 issue of the journal Nature, “also hint that light skin evolved not to adjust to the lower-light conditions in Europe compared with Africa, but instead to the new diet that emerged after the agricultural revolution, said study co-author Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogenomics researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain. “In the food-production theory, the cereal-rich diet of Neolithic farmers lacked vitamin D, so Europeans rapidly lost their dark-skin pigmentation only once they switched to agriculture, because it was only at that point that they had to synthesize vitamin D from the sun more readily.” ^^^

7,000-Year-Old Spaniard Had Dark Skin and Blue Eyes

DNA analysis of a 7000-year-old hunter-gatherer man found in Spain appears to indicate he had dark skin and blue eyes. Tia Ghose wrote in Live Science: “In 2006, hikers discovered two male skeletons buried in a labyrinthine cave known as La Braña-Arintero, in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain. At first, officials thought the skeletons may have been recent murder victims. But then, an analysis revealed the skeletons were about 7,000 years old, and had no signs of trauma. The bodies were covered with red soil, characteristic of Paleolithic burial sites, Lalueza-Fox said. At the time of the discovery, genetic techniques weren't advanced enough to analyze the skeletons. Several years later, the team revisited the skeletons and extracted DNA from a molar tooth in one skeleton. [Source: Tia Ghose, Live Science, January 26, 2014 ^^^]

“The new analysis of that DNA now shows the man had the gene mutation for blue eyes, but not the European mutations for lighter skin. The DNA also shows that the man was more closely related to modern-day northern Europeans than to southern Europeans. The discovery may explain why baby blues are more common in Scandinavia. It's been thought that poor conditions in northern Europe delayed the agricultural revolution there, so Scandinavians may have more genetic traces of their hunter-gatherer past — including a random blue-eye mutation that emerged in the small population of ancient hunter-gatherers, Lalueza-Fox said.” ^^^

Mariette Le Roux of AFP wrote: “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, 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 color 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." [Source: Mariette Le Roux, AFP, Published January 27, 2014 [Source: Mariette Le Roux, AFP, Published January 27, 2014 ~]

“Lalueza-Fox said light-skinned Europeans emerged "much later" than once believed — possibly only in the Neolithic era when erstwhile hunter-gatherers became farmers. The cause, he said, may have been a change in diet and lower vitamin D intake associated with this lifestyle change. In the absence of natural vitamin D, the human skin can produce its own in contact with the Sun — but dark skins synthesize much less than fair ones — creating an evolutionary incentive for change. In La Brana 1, Lalueza-Fox and his team also found the genetic signature for blue eyes and dark hair. ~

“While the exact hue of skin cannot be determined, the scientists say its combination with blue eyes was not to be found in modern Europeans today. It is widely accepted that Man's oldest common forefather was dark skinned, and that people became more pale as they moved further north out of Africa into colder climates with less sunlight. Subsequent migrations and mixing created the wide range of hues we have today. La Brana's genome is the first of a European hunter-gatherer to be fully sequenced. When compared to today's humans, it was found to be most closely genetically related to northern Europeans like the Swedes or Fins. The probe also found that La Brana 1 had not yet acquired the genetic mutation that allowed later humans to digest milk and starch more easily — an adaptation that probably coincided with the birth of agriculture in the Neolithic age.” ~

10,000-Year-Old Britons Had Blue Eyes and Dark Skin

A DNA analysis of 10,000-year-old Cheddar Man, Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, suggests that he had blue eyes, dark skin and dark curly hair. Hannah Devlin wrote in The Guardian: “ The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population. [Source: Hannah Devlin, The Guardian February 7, 2018]

“It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair. |The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today. Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project, said: “It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all.” |=|

“Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed, saying the connection often drawn between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth. It has always changed and will change”. The findings were revealed ahead of a Channel 4 documentary. To perform the DNA analysis, museum scientists drilled a 2 millionm-diameter hole into the ancient skull to obtain a few milligrams of bone powder. From this, they were able to extract a full genome, which held clues about this ancient relative’s appearance and lifestyle. |=|

“The results pointed to a Middle Eastern origin for Cheddar Man, suggesting that his ancestors would have left Africa, moved into the Middle East and later headed west into Europe, before eventually crossing the ancient land bridge called Doggerland which connected Britain to continental Europe. Today, about 10 percent of white British ancestry can be linked to this ancient population. |=|

“Britain was periodically settled and then cleared during ice ages until the end of the last glacial period about 11,700 years ago, since when it has been continuously inhabited. Until now, though, it hasn’t been clear whether each wave of migrants was seeded from the same population in mainland Europe; the latest results suggest this was not the case. The team homed in on genes known to be linked to skin colour, hair colour and texture, and eye colour. For skin tone, there are a handful of genetic variants linked to reduced pigmentation, including some that are very widespread in European populations today. However, Cheddar Man had “ancestral” versions of all these genes, strongly suggesting he would have had “dark to black” skin tone, but combined with blue eyes. |=|

“Scientists believe that populations living in Europe became lighter-skinned over time because pale skin absorbs more sunlight, which is required to produce enough vitamin D. The latest findings suggest pale skin may have emerged later, possibly when the advent of farming meant people were obtaining less vitamin D though dietary sources like oily fish.” |=|

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, and various books and other publications.

Last updated April 2024