Early Europeans Had Dark Skin and Blue Eyes
In 2012, archaeologists made an amazing find in a Spanish cave: the intact, 8,000-year-old skeleton of a man who lived in the area. Now they’ve sequenced his genome, and discovered quite a bit about life among hunter-gatherers in southern Europe.
The La Braña man, as he’s called, was buried with another person, and they were both surrounded by the teeth of the red deer. These were probably of symbolic importance to his people, who hunted the red deer as one of their main sources of meat — indeed, red deer tooth ornaments have been found in ancient human settlements throughout Europe. La Braña man also lived at a crucial transitional time for humanity, at the moment when agriculture was spreading throughout his home continent.
Though people had been farming for centuries in the Middle East at this time, La Braña man was part of a group of hunter-gatherers who lived nomadically. Nevertheless, it’s clear from his genome that he was descended from peoples in the middle east. Those peoples immigrated into Europe, spreading out in nomadic bands which traded with each other over vast distances and appear to have shared the same culture. They also had some physical traits in common too, one of which was blue eyes and dark skin.