DNA-researcher: It’s not 'woke' to portray prehistoric Europeans with dark skin. It’s evolution.

OP: @kim_harding@mastodon.scot

Ancient DNA analyses suggest that prehistoric Europeans looked different from modern Europeans today, but some people find that hard to accept.

How do we know what Lola looked like?

Because the genes involved in pigmentation have been well studied, it is possible to predict the skin, eye and hair colour of an individual based on their genotype with a certain probability, something that is routinely done in forensic investigations.

In practice, this works by checking which variants of a gene are present and what phenotype they are associated with. The more genes we can include in this analysis, the more confident we can be that our prediction is correct.

In Lola’s case, we studied 41 gene variants across her genome that have been associated with skin, hair and eye colour in humans, and concluded that she likely had this unusual (at least for today) combination of dark skin, dark hair, and blue eyes.