For decades, the face of prehistoric Europe—at least the one taught in classrooms and shown in documentaries—was fair-skinned, straight-nosed, and light-eyed. A sort of ancient cousin to modern northern Europeans. But science, especially the kind that digs deep into ancient bones, is flipping that image on its head.
Thanks to ancient DNA research, we now know something that once seemed unlikely: early Europeans had dark skin. For tens of thousands of years, blue eyes appeared sometimes but pale skin didn’t come standard.
Spain’s Surprising Discovery: Dark Skin, Blue Eyes
In 2006, archaeologists in La Braña, Spain uncovered the remains of a Mesolithic man buried deep in a cave. The bones were about 7,000 years old. Nothing out of the ordinary—until scientists looked closer.
Years later, in 2014, a team led by Professor Carles Lalueza-Fox at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona managed to extract and sequence the DNA. What they found sent shockwaves through the scientific community.
“La Braña 1,” as he came to be known, had dark skin and blue eyes.
“The biggest surprise was to discover that this individual possessed African versions in the genes that determine the light pigmentation of the current Europeans,” Lalueza-Fox told El País. “Which indicates that he had dark skin, although we cannot know the exact shade.”
This single person—light-eyed, dark-skinned—defied centuries of assumptions. He was genetically closer to modern Finns or Swedes than to anyone currently living in Spain. But his skin tone was far from pale.
It was a revelation: the two traits—light skin and blue eyes—didn’t evolve hand in hand. They came from different places, at different times.
Then Came Cheddar Man
A few years later, the UK made a discovery of its own. “Cheddar Man,” a 10,000-year-old skeleton found in Gough’s Cave in Somerset, had long been a fixture in British archaeology. But in 2018, when scientists at the Natural History Museum and University College London decoded his DNA, they found a familiar pattern.
According to Dr. Tom Booth, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, Cheddar Man “had dark to black skin, curly hair, and blue eyes.”
The idea that prehistoric Britons looked like modern white Europeans? It didn’t hold up.
“People assume that because modern Britons are white, that’s how it always was,” Booth said in a BBC documentary. “But that’s not the case.”
Cheddar Man’s genes painted a picture of a very different Britain and it wasn’t an isolated case.
So What Changed?
Let’s rewind. Humans first left Africa around 60,000 years ago, carrying with them dark skin—a natural protection against intense UV rays. When they migrated into Europe around 45,000 years ago, they still had that dark pigmentation.
At first, there wasn’t much reason for it to change. Even in less sunny Europe, early hunter-gatherers ate fish and meat rich in vitamin D, which helped their bones stay healthy. They didn’t need lighter skin to survive.
That changed around 8,000 years ago, when farming took off. Diets shifted—fish became less common, grains more dominant. Grains, it turns out, don’t provide much vitamin D. In northern climates with less sunlight, that mattered. Now lighter skin had an advantage: it absorbed more sunlight, helping the body produce vitamin D more efficiently.
That’s when the genes for lighter skin—like SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—started to spread. But it wasn’t a fast switch. It took thousands of years, and the shift wasn’t even.
A 2021 study led by Italian geneticist Guido Barbujani and evolutionary biologist Silvia Ghirotto showed just how slow it was. Even during the Copper and Iron Ages—roughly 5,000 to 3,000 years ago—most Europeans didn’t have light skin.
In fact, only about 8% of the ancient DNA samples had the full set of genes for light skin. About 63% still carried genes associated with dark pigmentation.
“The process was much slower than we thought,” Barbujani said in La Repubblica. “It wasn’t until relatively recent times that light skin became dominant.”
What This Tells Us About Us
All of this adds up to a simple, but powerful idea: the first Europeans didn’t look like modern Europeans. Not in skin color, not in hair texture, and not always in eye color. Evolution is messy, gradual, and influenced by everything from diet to sunlight.
It’s also a reminder that our appearance is just a snapshot in time—one version of human adaptation among many. If you went back 10,000 years and walked across ancient Europe, you’d likely meet people with dark skin, some with blue eyes, others with brown. They hunted, fished, built fires, raised children—and looked nothing like the stone-faced statues in old museums.
Thanks to DNA, we’re seeing their world more clearly than ever before. And it’s nothing like the one we thought we knew.
