A new report presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists suggests that Europeans' light skin and height may be genetic traits that developed much more recently than scientists previously thought.
Dr. Iain Mathieson from Harvard University led the research, which included the study of 83 samples from Holocene Europe. The researchers discovered that for most of the time humans inhabited Europe, they had dark skin, and genes carrying light skin traits only appeared in Europe in the last 8,000 years. The study is published in the journal BioRxiv.
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