Europeans' white skin may have developed as recently as 8,000 years ago

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.

"The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes," Science magazine explains. "And the new data confirm that about 8,500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes — SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 — that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today."

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The researchers believe that when Near East farmers arrived in Europe, they interbred with the indigenous people, passing on their genes for light skin. SLC45A2 gained frequency about 5,800 years ago, Science notes.

The findings are of particular importance because natural selection doesn't normally happen so quickly, Ancient Origins explains. Having light skin would have helped Europeans living in regions with less sunlight, and the gene variants spread in a relatively short amount of time.