Early Europeans had Dark Skin and Blue Eyes

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Interesting article at i09 regarding the DNA sequencing of an 8,000 year old skeleton found in Spain.


Excerpts:

One surprise is that the La Braña man had dark skin and blue eyes, a combination rarely seen in modern Europeans. Although today's southern Europeans tend to be somewhat darker than their northern counterparts, they are still relatively light-skinned compared with Africans, an adaptation often linked to the need to absorb more sunlight and so produce adequate amounts of vitamin D. That this feature of the La Braña skeleton might have been widely shared and not just a one-off is also suggested by recent findings, as yet unpublished but posted online in preliminary form, that other European hunter-gatherers also had dark skin and blue eyes.

And news sure to drive posters on MyFitnessPal into frothing ranting kerfuffles:

The genes involved in breaking down starch (the key nutrient in domesticated plants) were in an "ancestral" form, the team reports, meaning that hunter-gatherers were not good at digesting these foods.