Scientists have taken DNA from the tooth of a European hunter-gatherer and have found out what modern humans looked like before they started farming. The Mesolithic man, who lived in Spain about 7,000 years ago, had an unusual mix of blue eyes, black or brown hair and dark skin.
He was probably lactose intolerant and could not digest starchy foods easily.
The invention of farming brought humans and animals much closer and humans probably developed stronger immune systems to ﬁght infections from the animals. But the change to humans’ immue systems may not be as big as scientists thought – tests on the hunter-gatherer ’s DNA found that he already had genes that made his immune system strong. Some of these genes still exist in modern Europeans today. “Before we started this work, I had some ideas of what we were going to ﬁnd,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, who led the study at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. “Most of those ideas turned out to be completely wrong.”
The Spanish team started their work after a group of cave explorers found two skeletons in a deep cave high up in the Cantabrian Mountains of northwest Spain in 2006. The skeletons, which belonged to two men in their early 30s, had been very well preserved in the cool cave.
Carbon dating showed the skeletons are around 7,000 years old, from the time before farming arrived in Europe from the Middle East. Other things were found in the cave, including reindeer teeth that were hung from the people’s clothing.
The DNA brought some surprises. When Lalueza-Fox looked at it, he found that the man had genes for dark skin. “This guy was darker than any modern European, but we don’t know how dark,” the scientist said. Another surprise was that the man had blue eyes. The results suggest that blue eyes came ﬁrst in Europe and that the change to lighter skin happened later in Mesolithic times.
This discovery is important for science. It is also important to artists who will have to draw Mesolithic people in a new way. “You see a lot of pictures of these people hunting and gathering and they look like modern Europeans with light skin. You never see a picture of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer with dark skin and blue eyes,” Lalueza-Fox said.
The Spanish team compared the hunter-gatherer to modern Europeans from different regions to see how they might be related. They found that the ancient DNA was most closely related to the DNA of people living in northern Europe, in particular Sweden and Finland.