Challenging the long-held beliefs about the skin colour of Europeans, a recent study, published in the preprint bioRxiv database, has revealed that the majority of them had dark skin as recently as 3,000 years ago.
Summarising these studies, Hanel and Carlberg (2020) decided that the alleles of the two genes SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 which are most associated with lighter skin colour in modern Europeans originated in West Asia about 22,000 to 28,000 years ago and these two mutations each arose in a single carrier.
A cutting-edge scientific analysis shows that a Briton from 10,000 years ago had dark brown skin and blue eyes. Researchers from London's Natural History Museum extracted DNA from Cheddar Man, Britain's oldest complete skeleton, which was discovered in 1903.
The mitochondrial DNA of skeletons in early Roman London showed that Greeks, Syrians and North Africans were among the first Londoners. Africans reached this remotest corner of the Empire. Many Romans were dark-skinned. Yet for moderns, this seems surprising and an assertion that requires justification.
I read that early humans around 1.2-1.8 million years ago probably had pale skin, and that dark skin evolved along with the loss of body hair.
Dark skin. All modern humans share a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa. Comparisons between known skin pigmentation genes in chimpanzees and modern Africans show that dark skin evolved along with the loss of body hair about 1.2 million years ago and that this common ancestor had dark skin.
Answer and Explanation: Yes, the first humans were almost certainly black. The human species evolved in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. Black skin was necessary for survival in this hot and sunny climate.
What they looked like, however, is difficult to determine, but many of the artistic representations show them to be broadly similar to a large cross-section of the Greek population today, namely dark-haired, brown-eyed, and with fair to olive skin.
In truth, it is anachronistic to think of the ancient Greeks and Romans as White; after all, contemporary racial categorizations, especially the concepts of “Whiteness” and “Blackness,” are fundamentally products of the modern era.
Now, ancient DNA suggests that living Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, with only a small proportion of DNA from later migrations to Greece.
Professor of Population Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, Dan Bradley, said that researchers have compiled data from two individuals from over 6000 years ago that provide similar results as the Cheddar Man. The conclusion is that earliest Irish settlers would have had darker skin than we have today.
Cheddar Man was a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer (fully modern human) with dark skin and blue eyes. He was about 166 centimetres tall and died in his twenties.
A study of ancient DNA from people who lived in Europe between 1700 and 45,000 years ago suggests that 63 per cent of them had dark skin and 8 per cent had pale skin, with the rest somewhere in between. It was only around 3000 years ago that individuals with intermediate or pale skin started to become a majority.
Scientists are sure that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa, and we know that every person alive today can trace their genetic ancestry to there. It has long been thought that we began in one single east or south African population, which eventually spread into Asia and Europe.
The most northern Neandertals in central Asia and Europe probably had less melanin in their skin, resulting in lighter pigmentation, than the other ancient people who lived closer to the equator. It stands to reason that lighter pigmentation would be adaptive for them, for the same reason it is in recent people.
The team has confirmed that genes associated with East Asian and Native American ancestry, rather than the genes underpinning lighter skin in people with European ancestry, explain the lighter skin of people of East Asian and Native American descent.
"The ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin color was not a sign of inferiority. Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration in society. An ancient society was one that for all its faults and failures never made color the basis for judging a man."
Genetic distances are closer between Greeks and Ethiopian/sub-Saharan groups than to any other Mediterranean group and finally Greeks cluster with Ethiopians/sub-Saharans in both neighbour joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses.
Born of Roman and Punic stock around 145 in the city of Lepcis Magna in North Africa, Lucius Septimius Severus is sometimes referred to as the African Emperor.
Romans had a great variety of skin tones within their Mediterranean world. Frescoes, mosaics and painted ceramics from both the Greek and Roman periods reveal a fascination with black Africans and particularly Ethiopians, but did not employ what W.E.B. Du Bois would call a “color prejudice.”
[1] When I use 'Black' and 'White' with reference to ancient Greece I refer to people whose physical features would place them in those categories today – there was no 'Black' race in ancient Greece and the ancient Greeks were not themselves 'White'.
Like Ancient, like modern
There are of course exceptions, with the odd blond-haired, blue-eyed Greek thrown into the mix, as well as other colorations, sometimes described in the ancient texts.
Many scientists have believed that lighter skin gradually arose in Europeans starting around 40,000 years ago, soon after people left tropical Africa for Europe's higher latitudes.
It seems that one population group that migrated from the Tower of Babel suffered a greater loss of the genetic information required to produce the melanin and became the Caucasians. The bottom line is that Adam was not white or black but a good middle brown.
Look into a mirror in natural light. Artificial lighting can alter the appearance of your natural skin colour. Notice the colour of the skin along your jawline or behind your ear. These areas typically tend to show your skin tone in its purest form, without any redness or discolouration that could get in the way.