Talk:Human skin color/Archives/2014/January

La Braña individual

The journalists now present this as a "discovery", correcting "scientists" which had "believed" that light skin emerged soon after 40 kya. This is of course not the case. As the article has already been well aware, there has been strong indication that light skin in Europeans emerged later than 20 kya, and the 2007 reference even cites 12kya to 6kya[1], Norton (2007) is even quoted with a 6,000 to 5,300 range, albeit with considerable uncertainty.

The La Braña article now in the news is simply compatible with this, and can at best be quoted as an independent confirmation of what has already emerged as the mainstream view.

"The La Braña individual carries ancestral alleles in several skin pigmentation genes, suggesting that the light skin of modern Europeans was not yet ubiquitous in Mesolithic time"

Note that this does not put a terminus post quem on the first emergence of light skin, it just puts one on the complete disappearance of "ancestral pigmentation" in all of Europe (including southern Europe). All sources cited taken together suggest a scenario where light skin first emerges about 19kya to 12kya, and, and then takes a couple of millennia to complete its "selective sweep" (in plain terms, light skinned individuals were more likely to survive winter famines in Europe), apparently dramatically reinforced by the new agricultural lifestyle, and became ubiquitous by about 5kya. --dab (𒁳) 11:02, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Yup; and now there's actual allelic evidence for the ~7,000 date. Soupforone (talk) 23:54, 28 January 2014 (UTC)