Ancient Europeans were Dark

New research finds that most prehistoric Europeans had dark skin, hair, and eyes until about 3,000 years ago.

The genes that cause lighter skin, hair and eyes emerged among early Europeans only about 14,000 years ago, during the Old Stone Age. But light features appeared only sporadically until relatively recently. If I had to guess, I would say that the genes for lighter features are recessive, and a person would have had to get the recessive genes from both mother and father, which wouldn’t have happened that often.

Lighter skin may have had an evolutionary advantage for Europeans because it enabled people to synthesize more vitamin D in Europe’s weaker sunlight. But lighter eye color, like blue or green, does not seem to have any major evolutionary advantages, so its eventual emergence may have been driven by chance or sexual selection.

Scientists analyzed 348 samples of ancient DNA from archaeological sites in 34 countries in Western Europe and Asia. The oldest, from 45,000 years ago, was from western Siberia, and another high-quality DNA sample came from a 9,000-year-old individual from Sweden. But many of the older samples were badly degraded, in which case the researchers estimated their pigmentation using “probabilistic phenotype inference” and the HlrisPlex-S system, which can predict eye, hair, and skin color from an incomplete DNA sample.

Palaeoanthropologists think the first Homo sapiens arrived permanently in Europe between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, which meant they weren’t far removed from African modern human ancestors. Therefore, early Europeans initially only had genetics for dark skin, hair, and eyes. This coloring relies on hundreds of interconnected genes.

The study showed that the frequency of people dark skin was still high in parts of Europe until the Copper Age, about 5,000 years ago. In some areas, dark skin appeared frequently until even later.

Researchers found that light eyes emerged in Northern and Western Europe between 14,000 and 4,000 years ago, even though dark hair and skin were still dominant at that time. There were those who bucked the trend; as a 1-year-old boy living in Europe about 17,000 years ago had dark hair and skin, but blue eyes.

The genetic basis for lighter skin seems to have emerged in Sweden at about the same time as lighter eyes but initially remained relatively rare. The research also showed a statistical “spike” in the incidence of light eyes color at this time, which suggests that blue or green eyes were more prevalent at that time than earlier or later.

So it looks like the Nazis were wrong. Instead of blond hair and blue eyes proving the owners were “pure”, these traits actually proved these individuals were descended from “mutants”.

But then, all of us are, because that’s how evolution works.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/most-ancient-europeans-had-dark-skin-eyes-and-hair-up-until-3-000-years-ago-new-research-finds/ar-AA1AN5EZ?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=92b66b3d61ca48d8deba7416e37ab7fb&ei=36

The Eyes Have It

Eyes are complicated, right? You’ve got the ball full of fluid, with a pupil and an iris in the front and photoreceptors in the back, which feed information into the optic nerve and send it to the brain.

In very simple terms, I have just described human eyes. Or the eyes of a wolf, bird, or any other vertebrate on Earth. Are there any other kinds of eyes?

You bet. However, there are a surprisingly few types of eyes, given the variety of animal life on our planet.

Eyes started on Earth as very simple organs, and those super-simple organs are still around today. They consist of a few photoreceptor cells connected to an optic nerve. This allows that creature to know the difference between light and shadow, although they don’t know from which direction the light is coming from. And that allows the creature to regulate circadian rhythms and respond to shadows. That is the eye found in an earthworm, sea urchin larva, sea star larva... The earthworm, for example, doesn’t want to bake in hot sunlight, so if its eyes say it’s bright, it will wriggle around until it senses shade.

The next step in the development of eyes was that the photoreceptor cells were joined by pigmented cells, which allowed this creature to tell the direction of the light. These creatures - like the box jellyfish larva - could now determine which direction to move to get out of the sunlight (or into it) and could respond if a predator’s shadow moved across them.

The third step was actually a split. Not of the eyes, of the types of eyes that evolved, but this step in both types is called Low-Resolution Vision. Some animals developed a ‘cupped’ eye; an eyeball with photoreceptors lining all but the front opening. Other creatures developed compound eyes. Having Low-resolution vision meant the creatures could detect their own motion, avoid objects and find preferred habitats because they saw crude images of objects in the world around them.

Both types of eyes took one more evolutionary step - to High-Resolution Vision - by adding a lens, cornea and iris at the front of each eye to focus the light. With this higher resolution, a creature is able to identify their mate, a co-worker, an approaching predator or something they could eat.

Humans have High-Resolution cupped eyes. They might not stay ‘high-resolution’, and some just don’t work at all, but as a species, that is the type of eye we have. Of course, our high-resolution vision can’t really be compared to the high-resolution vision of eagles. But then, we don’t rely on seeing prey from miles away to keep our belly full.

Eyes are there to fill a need for the owner. If the creature only needs to know if it’s in sun or shadow, then that’s all the eyes will tell it. That species has no need for eyes any more complex than that.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thankful my eyes are so complex.