January
31
/ 2018
The popular image of the light-skinned European hunter-gatherer is not correct. DNA taken from a 7,000-year-old wisdom tooth found in Spain in 2006 shows a different story. A study of the tooth shows that the man who owned it had dark hair, blue eyes, and the dark-skinned genes of an African - though scientists don’t know what the person’s exact skin tone was. The blue-eyed gene is one of the most interesting finds because it was previously believed to have been a later arriving trait brought by farmers who entered the continent more than 5,000 years ago. The 2014 study was the first to analyze a pre-agricultural European genome. It was led by Inigo Olalde of the Institut de Biologia
