A recent study has revealed that the majority of Europeans living 5,000 years ago, including the ancient builders of Stonehenge in Britain, likely had dark skin tones.

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Previous genetic research had already suggested that Stone Age inhabitants, such as Cheddar Man, who lived around 10,000 years ago, had distinctive physical characteristics, including blue eyes and "dark brown to black" skin.

New research suggests that the paler skin tones in Western and Northern Europe may have emerged later than previously believed, with darker skin tones remaining prevalent for many centuries.

Researchers analysed genetic data from 348 genomes, spanning from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, including samples from individuals who lived in Britain.

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What did the study find?

Analysis of ancient genomes from the Paleolithic period, which spanned between 13,000 and 35,000 years ago, revealed that approximately 92 per cent of individuals had dark skin, 8 per cent had "intermediate" skin tones, and remarkably, none had pale skin.

Fast-forwarding to the Iron Age, which occurred between 1,700 and 3,000 years ago, the genetic data showed a shift in skin tone distribution: 55 per cent of individuals still had dark skin, 27 per cent had intermediate skin tones, and 18 per cent had pale skin, marking a gradual increase in lighter skin tones.

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“The shift towards lighter pigmentations turned out to be … slower than expected, with half of the individuals showing dark or intermediate skin colours well into the Copper and Iron Ages”, according to the study, published as a pre-print paper on the open-access BioRxiv site.

Research identified at least 26 genes linked to melanin production, which is responsible for determining skin, hair, and eye colour. Two primary types of melanin, eumelanin and pheomelanin, play a crucial role in shaping these physical characteristics.

“By a probabilistic approach, we showed that eye, hair, and skin colour changed substantially through time in Eurasia. It was reasonable to imagine that the first hunting-gathering settlers, who came from warmer climates, had mostly dark pigmentation," the study noted.

“What was less expected was the long persistence of their phenotypes … Things changed afterwards, but very slowly, so that only in the Iron Age did the frequency of light skins equal that of dark skins; during much of prehistory, most Europeans were dark-skinned.”

According to the study, the influx of lighter-skinned farmers from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) contributed significantly to the shift towards a lighter-skinned population in Europe.

“For decades it was assumed that our species rapidly acquired light skin pigmentation once we moved into Europe from Africa about 60,000 years ago,” Silvia Ghirotto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Ferrara in Italy, told The Telegraph. 

“I would say that, given that Stonehenge was built during the transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age, and given the high frequency of dark-skinned samples we inferred for that period even in northern Europe, it is likely that Britons who built Stonehenge displayed dark features.”