Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich

The fusion of these highly different populations into today’s West Eurasians is vividly evident in what might be considered the classic northern European look: blue eyes, light skin, and blond hair. Analysis of ancient DNA data shows that western European hunter-gatherers around eight thousand years ago had blue eyes but dark skin and dark hair, a combination that is rare today.33 The first farmers of Europe mostly had light skin but dark hair and brown eyes—thus light skin in Europe largely owes its origins to migrating farmers.34 The earliest known example of the classic European blond hair mutation is in an Ancient North Eurasian from the Lake Baikal region of eastern Siberia from seventeen thousand years ago.35 The hundreds of millions of copies of this mutation in central and western Europe today likely derive from a massive migration into the region of people bearing Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, an event that is related in the next chapter.