Genetics: the first inhabitant of Britain was blue-eyed and dark-skinned
Scientists from the University College of London and the Museum of Natural History of Britain decoded the DNA of the so-called "man from Cheddar," the oldest resident of Britain. It turned out that he looked like other Europeans of that time and had blue eyes and incredibly dark skin, according to Phys.org
It is extremely surprising that a Briton who lived on the islands 10 thousand years ago had such an unusual combination of piercing blue eyes and very dark skin. Such a person would be a "black sheep" today, but at the time, such a combination of traits could be a rarity, keeping up with the normal order of things, "says Christ Stinger of the Museum of Natural History of Britain, whose words are quoted by the newspaper Telegraph.
All people, as scientists believe today, looked like modern Africans before our ancestors began to leave the "cradle of mankind", east or south Africa, which happened about 200-300 thousand years ago. When people entered the northern regions of Europe and Asia, they had to adapt to radically new living conditions, which markedly changed their appearance.
For some time these first inhabitants of Europe, as shown by the DNA analysis of the first inhabitants of Spain, conducted by European scientists four years ago, had an extremely unusual appearance: they had dark, almost black skin, but they had blue eyes and were carriers of genes that helped them digest milk and carry a lack of light.
Similarly, as paleogenetics from the University College of London found out, looked like one of the first inhabitants of Britain, known today as "a man from Cheddar." His remains were found in the cave of Gotha in the south-west of England at the beginning of the last century, where they were, as a radiocarbon analysis later showed, about 10-9 thousand years ago.
The remains of a man from Cheddar have long attracted the attention of scientists for two simple reasons - they are the oldest traces of human presence on the British Isles, and they have survived to this day in almost untouched form. This allowed the anthropologists to restore the unusual story of the death and life of this man. As the researchers believe today, a man from Cheddar died because of severe wounds that he received in the course of some conflict with neighbors, and his body could dig up and eat cannibals.
Today, British scientists said that they were able to decipher the complete genome of the "first Briton," and to discover several unusual features that relate it to ancient Europeans and distinguish them from modern natives of Britain with their typical fair skin, red or blond hair and blue eyes .
As the researchers noted, the man from Cheddar was a close relative of other ancient people who lived in Spain, Hungary and Luxembourg, whose genomes were deciphered recently. Like them, he had bright blue eyes, dark skin and hair, and a similar anatomy of the face and other parts of the body.
The presence of people with similar appearance in different parts of Europe, including in the relatively cold Britain, according to scientists, suggests that the skin of residents has become light not so quickly, as previously believed by geneticists, based on data on the rate of accumulation of mutations in our DNA.![1x.jpg]