{"id":35638,"date":"2014-01-27T03:10:15","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T03:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35638"},"modified":"2015-05-06T16:52:12","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T16:52:12","slug":"dark-skin-blue-eyes-genes-paint-a-picture-of-7000-year-old-european","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35638","title":{"rendered":"Dark skin, blue eyes: Genes paint a picture of 7,000-year-old European"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dark skin, blue eyes: Genes paint a picture of 7,000-year-old European<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

NBC News<\/a>
\n2014-01-26<\/p>\n

Alan Boyle<\/a><\/strong>, Science Editor<\/p>\n

A 7,000-year-old man whose bones were left behind in a Spanish cave had the dark skin of an African, but the blue eyes of a Scandinavian. He was a hunter-gatherer who ate a low-starch diet and couldn’t digest milk well \u2014 which meshes with the lifestyle that predated the rise of agriculture. But his immune system was already starting to adapt to a new lifestyle.<\/p>\n

Researchers found all this out not from medical records, or from a study of the man’s actual skin or eyes, but from an analysis of the DNA extracted from his tooth.<\/p>\n

The study, published online Sunday by the journal Nature<\/em><\/a>, lays out what’s said to be the first recovered genome of a European hunter-gatherer from a transitional time known as the Mesolithic Period<\/a>, which lasted from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago. It’s a time when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was starting to give way to a more settled existence, with farms, livestock and urban settlements.<\/p>\n

The remains of the Mesolithic male, dubbed La Bra\u00f1a 1, were found in 2006 in the La Bra\u00f1a-Arintero cave complex in northwest Spain<\/a>. In the Nature<\/em> paper, the researchers describe how they isolated the ancient DNA, sequenced the genome and looked at key regions linked to physical traits \u2014 including lactose intolerance, starch digestion and immune response.<\/p>\n

The biggest surprise was that the genes linked to skin pigmentation reflected African rather than modern European variations.<\/strong> That indicates that the man had dark skin, “although we cannot know the exact shade,” Carles Lalueza-Fox<\/a>, a member of the research team from the Spanish National Research Council, said in a news release<\/a>. At the same time, the man possessed the genetic variations that produce blue eyes in current Europeans…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dark skin, blue eyes: Genes paint a picture of 7,000-year-old European NBC News 2014-01-26 Alan Boyle, Science Editor A 7,000-year-old man whose bones were left behind in a Spanish cave had the dark skin of an African, but the blue eyes of a Scandinavian. He was a hunter-gatherer who ate a low-starch diet and couldn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,28,2039,8],"tags":[16855,16856,15127,892],"class_list":["post-35638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-europe","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-alan-boyle","tag-carles-lalueza-fox","tag-nbc-news","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}