On Jan 26, a paper in Nature detailed the results of sequencing a 7000-year-old skeleton of an ancient hunter-gatherer from Spain.
And the DNA revealed that this man probably had very dark skin and blue eyes – a striking combination to be sure.
There was one point where both the journal Science and even more so the news site Livescience got confusing. Both stories explain that scientists used to think that light skin is an adaptation to the need to get more vitamin D from sunlight. People get less sun exposure in northern and extreme southern latitudes, and lighter skin absorbs UV more readily. But now we find that people were still dark-skinned after living in Europe for thousands of years.
Read the full, original story: Intriguing Stories on Genome of 7000-Year-Old Dark-Skinned, Blue-Eyed Hunter
