Stone Age Spaniard had blue eyes, dark skin
Genetics of 7,000-year-old skeleton suggests pale skin came later
Blue eyes may have evolved before blond hair and pale skin, a genetic analysis of a 7,000-year-old Spanish skeleton suggests.
The Stone Age skeleton of a hunter-gatherer was found in 2006 in a cave at the La Braña-Arintero archaeological site in northwestern Spain. DNA from one of the skeleton’s teeth shows that the man, called La Braña 1, is genetically different from most present-day Europeans, Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona and colleagues report January 26 in Nature.