Tag: Neolithic

Evolution of pigmentation in anatomically modern humans of Europe: a new paradigm?

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The colours of human skin, eyes and hair in living people across the world are determined by variants of genes (alleles) found at the same place on a chromosome. Since chromosomes are inherited from both mother and father, an individual may have the same two alleles (homozygous), or one of each (heterozygous). A dominant allele is always expressed, even if a single copy is present. A recessive allele is only expressed if the individual inherits two copies of it. Most characteristics of individuals result from the interaction of multiple genes, rather than a single gene. A commonly cited example is the coloration of eyes. If we had a single gene for eye colour – that of the iris – that had alleles just for blue (recessive or ‘b’) and one for brown (dominant or ‘B) pigmentation, brown-eyed individuals would have one or two ‘B’ alleles (bB or BB), whereas those with blue eyes would have to have two ‘blue’ alleles (bb). But inheritance is more complicated than that: there are people with green, hazel or grey eyes and even left- and right eyes of different colour. Such examples suggest that there are more than two genes affecting human eye colour, and each must have evolved as a result of mutations. Much the same goes for hair and skin coloration.

A group of scientists from the University of Ferrara in Italy have analysed highly detailed ancient DNA in anatomically modern human remains from Russia (Palaeolithic), Sweden (Mesolithic) and Croatia (Neolithic) to tease out the complexities of pigmentation inheritance. Then they applied a statistical approach learned from that study to predict the likely skin-, eye- and hair pigmentation in 348 less detailed genomes of ancient individuals whose remains date back to 45 Ma ( Silvia Perretti et al, 2025. Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihood. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, v. 122, article e2502158122; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2502158122).

An artist’s impression of a Mesolithic woman from southern Denmark (credit: Tom Bjorklund)

All the hunter-gatherer Palaeolithic individuals (12 samples between 45 and 13 ka old) bar one, showed clear signs of dark pigmentation in skin, eyes and hair – the outlier from Russia was probably lighter. Those from the Mesolithic (14 to 4 ka) showed that 11 out of 35 had a light eye colour (Northern Europe, France, and Serbia), but most retained the dark skin and hair expected in descendants of migrants from Africa. Only one 12 ka hunter-gatherer from Sweden had inferred blue eyes, blonde hair, and light skin.  The retention of dark pigmentation by European hunter-gatherers who migrated there from Africa has been noted before, using DNA from Mesolithic human remains and in one case from birch resin chewed by a Mesolithic woman. This called into question the hypothesis that high levels of melatonin in skin, which protects indigenous people in Africa from cancers, would result in their producing insufficient vitamin D for good health. That notion supposed that out-of-Africa migrants would quickly evolve paler skin coloration at higher latitudes. It is now known that diets rich in meat, nuts and fungi – staple for hunter-gatherers – provide sufficient vitamin-D for health at high latitudes. A more recent hypothesis is that pale skins may have evolved only after the widespread Neolithic adoption of farming when people came to rely on a diet dominated by cereals that are a poor source of vitamin-D.

However, 132 Neolithic farmers (10 to 4 ka ago) individuals studied by Perretti et al. showed increased diversity in pigmentation, with more frequent light skin tones, yet dark individuals persisted, particularly in southern and eastern Europe. Hair and eye colour showed considerable variability, the earliest sign of red hair showing up in Turkey. Even Copper- and Bronze Age samples ( 113 from 7 to 3 ka) and those from Iron Age Europeans (25 from 3 to 1.7 ka ago) still indicate common retention of dark skin, eyes and hair, although the proportion of lighter pigmentation increased in some regions of Europe. Other analyses of ancient DNA have shown that the Palaeo- and Mesolithic populations of Europe were quickly outnumbered by influx of early farmers, probably from the Anatolian region of modern Turkey, during the Neolithic. The farming lifestyle seems likely to have allowed the numbers of those who practised it to rise beyond the natural environment’s ‘carrying capacity’ for hunter-gatherers. The former inhabitants of Europe may simply have been genetically absorbed within the growing population of farmers. Much the same absorption of earlier groups seems to have happened with the westward migration from the Ukrainian and Russia steppes of the Yamnaya people and culture, culminating in the start of the European Bronze Age that reached western Europe around 2.1 ka, The Yamnaya introduced metal culture, horse-drawn wheeled vehicles and possibly Indo-European language.

So the novel probabilistic approach to ancient DNA by Perretti et al. also casts doubt on the diet-based evolution of light pigmentation at high latitudes. Instead, pulses of large population movements and thus changes in European population genetics probably account for the persistence of abundant evidence for dark pigmentation throughout Europe until historic times. The ‘lightening’ of Europeans’ physiognomy seems to have been vastly more complex than previously believed. Early Europe seems to have been almost bewilderingly diverse, which make a complete mockery of modern chauvinism and racism. The present European genetic ‘melting pot’ is surprisingly similar to that of Europe’s ancient past.

Provenance of the Stonehenge Altar Stone: a puzzling development

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 Curiously, two weeks after my previous post about Stonehenge, a wider geochemical study of the Devonian sandstones and a number of Neolithic megaliths in Orkney seems to have ruled out the Stonehenge Altar Stone having been transported from there (Bevins, R.E. et al. 2024. Was the Stonehenge Altar Stone from Orkney? Investigating the mineralogy and geochemistry of Orcadian Old Red sandstones and Neolithic circle monuments. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, v. 58, article 104738;   DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104738). Since two of the authors of Clarke et al. (2024) were involved in the newly published study, it is puzzling at first sight why no mention was made in that paper of the newer results. The fact that the topic is, arguably, the most famous prehistoric site in the world may have generated a visceral need for getting an academic scoop, only for it to be dampened a fortnight later. In other words, was there too much of a rush?

The manuscript for Clarke et al. (2024) was received by Nature in December 2023 and accepted for publication on 3 June 2024; a six-month turnaround and plenty of time for peer review. On the other hand, Bevins et al. (2024) was received by the Journal of Archaeological Science on 23 July 2024, accepted a month later and then hit the website a week after that: near light speed in academic publishing. And it does not refer to the earlier paper at all, despite two of its authors’ having contributed to it. Clarke et al. (2024) was ‘in press’ before Bevins et al. (2024) had even hit the editor’s desk. The work that culminated in both papers was done in the UK, Australia, Canada and Sweden, with some potential for poor communication within the two teams. Whatever, the first paper dangled the carrot that Orkney might have been the Altar Stone’s source, on the basis of geochemical evidence that the grains that make up the sandstone could not have been derived from Wales but were from the crystalline basement of NE Scotland. The second shows that this ‘most popular’ Scottish source may be ruled out. To Orcadians and the archaeologists who worked there, long in the shade of vast outpourings from Salisbury Plain, this might come as a great disappointment.

Cyclical sediments of the Devonian Stromness Flagstones. (Credit Mike Norton, Wikimedia)

The latest paper examines 13 samples from 8 outcrops of the Middle Devonian Stromness Flagstones strata in the south of the main island of Orkney close to the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness, and the individual monoliths in each. On the main island, however, there is a 500 m sequence of Stromness Flagstones in which can be seen 50 cycles of sedimentation. Each cycle contains sandstone beds of various thicknesses and textures. They are fluviatile, lacustrine or aeolian in origin. So the Neolithic builders of Orkney had a wide choice, depending on where they erected monumental structures. Almost certainly they chose monolithic stones where they were most easy to find: close to the coast where exposure can be 100 %. The Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness are not on the coast, so the enormous stones would have to be dragged there. There is an ancient pile of stones (Vestra Fiold) about 20 km to the NW where some of the mmegaliths may have been extracted, but ancient Orcadians would have been spoilt for choice if they had their hearts set on erecting monoliths!

In a nutshell, the geological case made by Bevins et al. (2024) for rejecting Orkney as the source for the Stonehenge Altar Stone (AS) is as follows: 1. Grains of the mineral baryte (BaSO4­) present in the AS are only found in two of the Orkney rock samples. 2. All the Orcadian sandstone samples contain lots of grains of K-feldspar (KAlSi3O8) – common in the basement rocks of northern Scotland – but the AS contains very little. 3. A particular clay mineral (tosudite) is plentiful in the AS, but was not detected in the rock samples from Orkney. Does that rule out a source in Orkney altogether? Well, no: only the outcrops and megalith samples involved in the study are rejected.

To definitely negate an Orcadian source would require a monumental geochemical and mineralogical study across Orkney; covering every sedimentary cycle. Searching the rest of the Old Red Sandstone elsewhere in NE Scotland – and there is a lot of it – would be even more likely to be fruitless. Tracking down the source for the basaltic bluestones at Stonehenge was easy by comparison, because they crystallised from a particular magma over a narrow time span and underwent a specific degree of later metamorphism. They were easily matched visually and under the microscope with outcrops in West Wales in the 1920s and later by geochemical features common to both.

But all that does not detract from the greater importance of the earlier paper (Clarke et al., 2024), which enhanced the idea of Neolithic cultural coherence and cooperation across the whole of Britain. The building of Stonehenge drew people from the far north of Scotland together with those of what are now Wales and England. Since then it hasn’t always been such an amicable relationship …

See also:  Addley, E. 2024. Stonehenge tale gets ‘weirder’ as Orkney is ruled out as altar stone origin. The Guardian 5 September 2024.

Geology cracks Stonehenge mysteries

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High resolution vertical aerial photograph of Stonehenge. (Credit: Gavin Hellier/robertharding/Getty)

During the later parts of the Neolithic the archipelago now known as the British Isles and Ireland was a landscape on which large stone buildings with ritual and astronomical uses were richly scattered. The early British agricultural societies also built innumerable monuments beneath which people of the time were buried, presumably so that they remained in popular memory as revered ancestors. Best known among these constructions is the circular Stonehenge complex of dressed megaliths set in the riot of earlier, contemporary and later human-crafted features of the Chalk downs known as Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge itself is now known to have been first constructed some five thousand years ago (~3000 BCE) as an enclosure surrounded by a circular ditch and bank, together with what seems to have been a circular wooden palisade. This was repeatedly modified during the following two millennia. Around 2600 BCE the wooden circle was replaced by one of stone pillars, each weighing about 2 t. These ‘bluestones’ are of mainly basaltic igneous origin unknown in the Stonehenge area itself. The iconic circle of huge, 4 m monoliths linked by 3 m lintel stones that enclose five even larger trilithons arranged in a horseshoe dates to the following two-centuries to 2400 BCE coinciding with the Early Bronze Age when newcomers from mainland Europe – perhaps as far away as the steppe of western Russia – began to replace or assimilate the local farming communities. This phase included several major modifications of the earlier bluestones.

It might seem that the penchant for circular monuments began with the Neolithic people of Salisbury Plain, and then spread far and wide across the archipelago in a variety of sizes. However, it seems that building of sophisticated monuments, including stone circles, began some two centuries earlier than in southern England in the Orkney Islands 750 km further north and, even more remote, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. A variety of archaeological and geochemical evidence, such as the isotopic composition of the bones of livestock brought to the vicinity of Stonehenge during its period of development and use, strongly suggests that people from far afield participated. Remarkably, a macehead made of gneiss from the Outer Hebrides turned up in an early Stonehenge cremation burial. Ideas can only have spread during the Neolithic through the spoken word. As it happens, the very stones themselves came from far afield. The earliest set into the circular structure, the much tinkered-with bluestones, were recognised to be exotic over a century ago. They match late Precambrian dolerites exposed in western Wales, first confirmed in the 1980s through detailed geochemical analyses by the late Richard Thorpe and his wife Olwen Williams-Thorpe of the Open University. Some suggested that they had been glacially transported to Salisbury Plain, despite complete lack of any geological evidence. Subsequently their exact source in the Preseli Hills was found, including a breakage in the quarry that exactly matched the base of one of the Stonehenge bluestones. They had been transported 230 km to the east by Neolithic people, using perhaps several means of transport. The gigantic monoliths, made of ‘sarsen’ – a form of silica-cemented sandy soil or silcrete – were sourced from some 25 km away where Salisbury Plain is still liberally scattered with them. Until recently, that seemed to be that as regards provenance, apart from a flat, 5 x 1 m slab of sandstone weighing about 6 t that two fallen trilithon pillars had partly hidden. At the very centre of the complex, this had been dubbed the ‘Altar Stone’, originally supposed to have been brought with the bluestones from west Wales.

The stones of Stonehenge colour-coded by lithology. The sandstone ‘Altar Stone’ lies beneath fallen blocks of a trilithon at the centre of the circle. (Credit: Clarke et al. 2024, Fig 1a)

A group of geologists from Australia and the UK, some of whom have long been engaged with Stonehenge, recently decided to apply sophisticated geochemistry at two fragments broken from the Altar Stone, presumably when the trilithons fell on it (Clarke, A. J. I. et al.2024.  A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge. Nature v.632, p. 570–575; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07652-1). In particular they examined various isotopes and trace-elements in sedimentary grains of zircon, apatite and rutile that weathering of igneous rocks had contributed to the sandstone, along with quartz, feldspar, micas and clay minerals. It turned out that the zircon grains had been derived from Mesoproterozoic and Archaean sources beneath the depositional site of the sediment (the basement). The apatite and rutile grains show clear signs of derivation from 460 Ma old (mid-Ordovician) granites. The basement beneath west Wales is by no stretch of the imagination a repository of any such geology. That of northern Scotland certainly does have such components, and it also has sedimentary rocks derived from such sources: the Devonian of Orkney and mainland Scotland surrounding the Moray Firth. Unlike the lithologically unique bluestones, the sandstone is from a thick and widespread sequence of terrestrial sediments colloquially known as the ‘Old Red Sandstone’. The ORS of NE Scotland was deposited mainly during the Devonian Period (419 to 369 Ma) as a cyclical sequence in a vast, intermontane lake basin. Much the same kinds of rock occur throughout the sequence, so it is unlikely that the actual site where the ‘Alter Stone’ was selected will ever be known.

To get the ‘Alter Stone’ (if indeed that is what it once was) to Stonehenge demanded transport from its source over a far more rugged route, three times longer than the journey that brought the bluestones from west Wales: at least 750 km. It would probably have been dragged overland. Many Neolithic experts believe that transport of such a large block by boat is highly unlikely; it could easily have been lost at sea and, perhaps more important, few would have seen it. An overland route, however arduous, would have drawn the attention of everyone en route, some of whom might have been given the honour of helping drag such a burden for part of the way. The procession would certainly have aroused great interest across the full extent of Britain. Its organisers must have known its destination and what it signified, and the task would have demanded fervent commitment. In many respects it would have been a project that deeply unified most of the population. That could explain why people from near and far visited the Stonehenge site, herding livestock for communal feasting on arrival. Evidence is now pointing to the construction and use of the ritual landscape of Salisbury Plain as an all-encompassing joint venture of most of Neolithic Britain’s population. It would come as no surprise if objects whose provenance is even further afield come to light. It remained in use and was repeatedly modified during the succeeding Bronze Age up to 1600 BCE. By that time, the genetic group whose idea it was had been assimilated, so that only traces of its DNA remain in modern British people. This seems to have resulted from waves of immigrants from Central Europe, the Yamnaya, who brought new technology and the use of metals and horses.

See also: Gaind, N. & Smith, R. 2024. Stonehenge’s enigmatic centre stone was hauled 800 kilometres from Scotland. Nature, v. 632, p. 484-485; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-024-02584-2; Addley, E. 2024. Stonehenge megalith came from Scotland, not Wales, ‘jaw-dropping’ study finds. The Guardian, 14 August 2024.

Holocene migrations of people into Britain

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People assigned to a variety of human species: Homo sapiens – H. neanderthalensis (Swanscombe, 400 ka and several later times ) H heidelbergensis (Boxgrove, ca 500 ka, )H. antecessor (Happisburgh, ca 950 ka) – have left signs of their presence in Britain. Human occupancy has largely depended on climate. Around 9 times since the first known human presence here, much of Britain was repeatedly buried by glacial ice to become a frigid desert for tens of thousands of years. Between 180 and 60 ka only a couple of flint artefacts found in road excavations in Kent hint at Neanderthal visitors. For most of the Late Pleistocene the archipelago seems to have been devoid of humans. Arguably, Europe’s first known anatomically modern humans occupied several caves in Devon, Derbyshire and South Wales as early as around 43 ka, while climate was cooling, only to abandon Britain during the Last Glacial Maximum (24 to 18 ka ago). As climate warmed again thereafter, sporadic occupation by Late Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers occurred up to the sudden onset of the frigid Younger Dryas (12.9 ka). Once warming returned quickly 11,700 years ago, sea level was low enough for game and hunter gatherers to migrate to Britain; this time for permanent occupancy. Bones of the earliest known of these Mesolithic people have yielded DNA and a surprise: they were dark skinned and so far as we can tell remained so until the beginning of Neolithic farming in Britain around 6100 years ago. The DNA of most living Britons with pale skins retains up to 10% of inheritance from these original hunter gatherers.  Much the same is known from elsewhere in NW Europe. In the early Holocene it was possible to walk across what is now the southern North Sea thanks to Doggerland. Following a tsunami at around 8.2 ka this rich area of wetland vanished, so that all later migration demanded sea journeys.  

Mesolithic people remained in occupation of the British Isles for another two millennia. A wealth of evidence, summarised nicely in Ray, K. & Thomas, J. 2018, Neolithic Britain, Oxford University Press, suggests that there was a lengthy period of overlap between Mesolithic and Neolithic occupation around 4100 BCE. The main difference between the two groups was that Neolithic communities subsisted on domesticated grains and animals, while those of the Mesolithic consumed wild resources. Cultural clues in archaeological finds, however, suggest a lot in common, such as the erection of various kinds of monuments. Posts of tree trunks, sometimes arranged in lines, were raised in the Mesolithic and lines of probably ritual pits were dug. Both ‘traditions’ continued into the Neolithic and evolved to stone monuments, to which were added burials of different kinds. It is worth noting that Stonehenge was developed on a site that held much earlier, large totem-pole like posts, with a nearby spring that had hosted regular gatherings of Mesolithic people. Signs of Mesolithic occupation in Britain extend just as widely as do those of Neolithic practices. A study of DNA from 7 Mesolithic skeletons and 67 of early Neolithic age (Brace, S. and 20 others 2019. Population Replacement in Early Neolithic Britain. Nature Ecology & Evolution, v. 3, p. 765-771; DOI: 10.1038/s41559-019-0871-9) revealed that early Neolithic people did not wipe out the genetic make-up (either by complete displacement or annihilation) of their predecessors. About 20 to 30% of Neolithic DNA was inherited from them; as would be expected from assimilation of a probably much smaller number of hunter-gatherers into a larger population  of  immigrants who brought farming and herding from Asian Turkey (Anatolia). Such ‘hybrid’ genetics was widespread in Europe and they are referred to as the Early European Farmers (EEF). As Ray and Thomas suggest, aspects of Mesolithic culture may have been adopted by the newcomers across the British Isles from Orkney to Wiltshire.

Around 2400 BCE the earliest Neolithic ceremonial site at Brodgar on Orkney was destroyed to the accompaniment of an enormous feast that consumed several hundred cattle. At about the same time several men, whose tooth geochemistry indicated an origin in the European Alps, were buried on Salisbury Plain together with the earliest metal artefacts known from Britain (copper knives), the accoutrements of archery and distinctive, bell-shaped pottery beakers. Stonehenge was ‘remodelled’ shortly afterwards, with the addition of its giant trilithons, four of which were later adorned with carvings of metal axes and daggers. The Early Bronze (or Chalcolithic) Age had arrived! A 2018 study of ancient DNA from Bronze Age burials in Europe suggested a far more drastic swamping of Neolithic genetic heritage by the ‘Beaker people’ (Olalde, I. and a great many others 2018. The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe. Nature, v. 555, p. 190-196; DOI: 10.1038/nature25738). The skeletons from Britain analysed by Olalde et al. apparently suggested that, within a few hundred years, up to 90% of the Neolithic gene pool had been removed from the British population. Who were these people who used metals and the distinctive Bell Beakers, where did they come from and what did they do?

The closest match to the British and western European Bronze Age DNA was that associated with the Yamnaya people from the steppes of SE Ukraine and Southern Russia who had developed a culture centred on herding. They had also adopted the wheel from people of the Mesopotamian plains and had domesticated the horse for riding and pulling carts: ideal for their semi-nomadic lifestyle and for moving en masse. After 3000 BCE they spread into Europe, as widely recorded by their distinctive beakers and the presence of their DNA in the genomes of later Europeans. Their burials – in ‘kurgans’ – resembled the round barrows that appeared on Salisbury Plain and elsewhere during the Bronze Age. The DNA replacement data from 2018 were limited and held few clues to how it happened. One possibility for such a dramatic change could be a violent takeover that drove down the population of British Neolithic people. To address the broader influence of migration in more detail and over a loner time span, a team led by the Universities of York and Vienna, and Harvard Medical School (Patterson, N. and a great many others 2021. Large-scale migration into Britain during the Middle to Late Bronze Age. Nature, early online release; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04287-4) used ancient DNA from 793 individuals excavated in Britain (416 individuals) and continental Europe (377) from Bronze- to Iron Age sites (2300 to ~100 BCE).

The proportion of Early European Farmers DNA in British individuals from the Bronze Age (2400 BCE) to the Iron Age (750 BCE to 43 CE). Note the ‘fuzzy’ nature of the data, and that the decline in EEF in British individuals was not as great as earlier analyses had shown. Remarkably, the ‘Amesbury Archer’, who brought the first metals to Britain, had a higher proportion of EEF ancestry than the Early Bronze-Age average. (Credit: Patterson et al. Fig. 3)

The new data from Britain suggest that the migrants, who crossed the Channel later in the Bronze Age, were of mixed ethnicity, but most carried EEF genes. The influence of earlier migrants from the Yamnaya heartlands is present, but so too are relics of Mesolithic ancestry. Interestingly, the British data show a much larger increase in the genes associated with lactase persistence, which marks the ability of adults to digest milk, than was apparent in the wider European population (50% compared with about 7% in Eastern Europeans of the time). Whatever the impact of the first influx of metal-using people – it may have been culturally decisive in Britain – by the end of the Bronze Age the EEF ‘signature’ had increased in peoples’ genomes. Rather than some kind of invasion, the influx was more likely to have been a sustained movement of people to Britain over several hundred years By the Iron Age, almost half the ancestry of Britain, particularly in England and Wales, was once again predominantly of EEF origin (around 40% of the mixture), but culture had become completely different. There are even suggestions that the influx brought with it the beginnings of Celtic languages. Yet the data leave a great deal of further analysis to be undertaken.

See also: Drury, S.A. 2019. Genetics and the peopling of Britain: We are all hybrids, People and Nature; Ancient DNA Analysis Reveals Large Scale Migrations Into Bronze Age Britain, SciTechDaily, 28 December 2021.

Chewing gum and the genetics of an ancient human

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The sequencing of DNA has advanced to such a degree of precision and accuracy that minute traces of tissue, hair, saliva, sweat, semen and other bodily solids and fluids found at crime scenes are able to point to whomever was present. That is, provided that those persons’ DNA is known either from samples taken from suspects or resides in police records. In the case of individuals unknown to the authorities, archived DNA sequences from members of almost all ethnic groups can be used to ‘profile’ those present at a crime. Likely skin and hair pigmentation, and even eye colour, emerge from segments that contain the genes responsible.

One of the oddest demonstrations of the efficacy of DNA sequencing from minute samples used a wad of chewed birch resin. Such gums are still chewed widely for a number of reasons: to stave off thirst or hunger; to benefit from antiseptic compounds in the resin and to soften a useful gluing material – resin derived by heating birch bark is a particularly good natural adhesive . Today we are most familiar with chicle resin from Central America, the base for most commercial chewing gum, but a whole range of such mastics are chewed on every inhabited continent, birch gum still being used by Native North Americans: it happens to be quite sweet. The chewed wad in this case was from a Neolithic site at Syltholm on the Baltic coast of southern Denmark (Jensen, T.Z.T. and 21 others 2019. A 5700 year-old human genome and oral microbiome from chewed birch pitch. Nature Communications v. 10, Article 5520; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13549-9). The sample contained enough ancient human DNA to reconstruct a full genome, and also yielded fragments from a recent meal – duck with hazelnuts – and from several oral bacteria and viruses, including a herpes variety that is a cause of glandular fever. The sample also shows that the carrier did not have the gene associated with lactase persistence that allows adults to digest milk.

An artist’s impression of the gum chewing young woman from southern Denmark (credit: Tom Bjorklund)

The chewer was female and had both dark skin and hair, together with blue eyes; similar to a Mesolithic male found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in SW England whose petrous ear bone yielded DNA. By no means all fossil human bones still carry enough DNA for full sequencing, and are in any case rare. Chewed resin is much more commonly found and its potential awaits wider exploitation, particularly as much older wads have been found. Specifically, the Danish woman’s DNA reveals that she did not carry any ancestry from European Neolithic farmers whose DNA is well known from numerous burials. It was previously thought that farmers migrating westward from Anatolia in modern Turkey either replaced or absorbed the earlier Europeans. By 5700 years ago farming communities were widespread in western Europe, having arrived almost two thousand years earlier. The blue-eyed, dark Danish woman was probably a member of a surviving group of earlier hunter gatherers who followed the retreat of glacial conditions at the end of the Younger Dryas ice re-advance about 11,500 years ago. The Syltholm site seems to have been occupied for hundreds of generations. Clearly, the community had not evolved pale skin since its arrival, as suggested by a once popular theory that dark skin at high latitudes is unable to produce sufficient vitamin-D for good health. That notion has been superseded by knowledge that diets rich in meat, nuts and fungi provide sufficient vitamin-D. Pale skins may have evolved more recently as people came to rely on a diet dominated by cereals that are a poor source of vitamin-D.