Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 06 May 2009 16:59 Post subject: The first European
Quote:
The first European: Created from fragments of fossil, the face of our forbears 35,000 years ago
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 2:47 PM on 05th May 2009
Dressed in a suit, this person would not look out of place in a busy street in a modern city.
The clay sculpture, however, portrays the face of the earliest known modern European - a man or woman who hunted deer and gathered fruit and herbs in ancient forests more than 35,000 years ago.
It was created by Richard Neave, one of Britain's leading forensic scientists, using fossilised fragments of skull and jawbone found in a cave seven years ago.
His recreation offers a tantalising glimpse into life before the dawn of civilisation. It also shows the close links between the first European settlers and their immediate African ancestors.
To sculpt the head, Mr Neave called on his years of experience recreating the appearance of murder victims as well as using careful measurements of bone.
It was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. This will follow the evolution of humans from the cradle of Africa to the waves of migrations that saw Homo sapiens colonise the globe.
The head has taken pride of place on the desk of Alice Roberts, an anthropologist at Bristol University, who presents the programme.
'It's really quite bizarre,' she told Radio Times. 'I'm a scientist and objective but I look at that face and think "Gosh, I'm looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago" and there's something weirdly moving about that.
'Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he's used to looking at differences between populations.
'He said the skull doesn't look European or Asian or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them.
'That's probably what you'd expect of someone among the earliest populations to come to Europe.'
The head is based on remains of one of the earliest known anatomically modern Europeans.
The lower jawbone was discovered by potholers in the Carpathian mountains in Romania in 2002. The rest of the fragments were found the following year.
The bones were carbon-dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago when Europe was occupied by two species of human.
They were the Neanderthals, who had arrived from Africa tens of thousands of years earlier, and the more recent modern humans, also known as Cro-Magnons.
Although the skull is similar to a modern human head, it has a larger cranium, is more robust and has larger molars. Although it is impossible to work out the skin colour of the prehistoric hunter, it is likely to have been darker than modern white Europeans.
Fossil experts are also unsure if the skull was male or female.
Many scientists believe that modern humans evolved in Africa 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors left Africa around 60,000 years ago and migrated around the world, replacing other branches of the family tree which had left the continent earlier.
The earliest modern Europeans were far from primitive. Living in huts and caves, they used stone tools and spears made from antlers, painted on the walls of their caves and made jewellery from shells.
The only question I have is about the skin color (well the other soft tissue formations are somewhat subjective, but) I have read is they made the person dark because genes for light skin in Europeans (or that control the majority of the light skin in Europeans) only existed 10-12,000 years ago (about the same time blond hair came about in Europe, in the Baltic area or somewhere in Eastern Europe further to the East).
Okay.
Well many people don't have these genes, like East Asians, who are often as light or lighter than many Europeans. The genes "for light skin" in Europeans do not account for 100% of skin coloring anyway...I forgot the actual % but I believe (please someone correct me if I'm wrong) it is only like 1/3 or so.
But remember they are hunter gathers who live their lives in the desert fully exposed to the sun all day long, if they did not live like that they would be lighter, they are obviously tanned.
They don't have genes for "light skin" either as found in Europeans anyway, but they are not as dark as most Bantu black Africans and definitely not as dark as Nilotic blacks from East Africa.
If this person lived at such a latitude as Romania and everyone around him was this dark he would not live very long. Wouldn't they have rickets. Dark skinned people need more solar radiation to produce vitamin D at high latitudes, so they can process calcium, it also aids in the immune system, etc. How could they live in Romania like that?
Europe was the last place modern man entered in Eurasia (or close to it) I would assume selection pressure for lighter skin would have started thousands of years before in the Middle East or Central Asia.
Joined: 07 Oct 2007 {Posts: 248 } Location: United States
Posted: Wed 06 May 2009 18:48 Post subject:
The person, imo, looks kind of like some native south americans I've seen. Especially from the side. Perhaps a tad like some Africans, but more like South Americans. Imagine the bowl shaped hair-cut of some south american tribes on that sculpture; perfect match!
Posted: Wed 06 May 2009 23:47 Post subject: Re: The first European
Dragon Horse wrote:
If this person lived at such a latitude as Romania and everyone around him was this dark he would not live very long. Wouldn't they have rickets. Dark skinned people need more solar radiation to produce vitamin D at high latitudes, so they can process calcium, it also aids in the immune system, etc. How could they live in Romania like that?
Vitamin D is not a problem for hunter/gatherers. There is plenty of vitamin D in animal flesh, especialy in fish, and in the flesh of animals that eat fish. It was only when people switched from meat to cereals that vitamin D deficiency became a problem. Consider today's Nganasans, Inuits, Sel'kups, Yukagirs, Chukchi, Aleuts, Evenks, Koryaks, Nivkhs, and Udegeys for instance. They are all much darker than Scandinavians and yet they all live above the Arctic Circle. They live on meat, not grain. Incidentally, the light skin of people in northern China also seems to be relatively recent, and also seems due to the same cause (the need to synthesize vitamin D after switching to cereal).
Before vitamin D synthesis became important (before the agricultural revolution), the most important selection pressure affecting skin tone was folic acid (folate) synthesis. Too little epidermal melanin for low latitudes allows intense UV to penetrate the skin, preventing or degrading folic acid synthesis, thus reducing folate levels. In pregnant females this produces neural tube defects in the fetus, causing such congenital abnormalities as craniorachischisis, anencephalus, and spina bifida. High levels of distributed epidermal melanin blocks UV and enables normal gestation at low latitudes.
Essentially, people who live along the equator are under adapative pressure (miscarriages) favoring dark skin. This pressure is relaxed away from the equator. But no corresponding adaptive pressure favoring pale skin arose until agriculture.
And so, if I were asked to guess the skin tone of paleolithic people anywhere away from the equator, I would go with the complexion of the Khoi-San of southern Africa or of the Oromo of Ethiopia. These are the remnants of H. sapiens version 1.0, from before they were split by the eastward-driving wedge of Bantu-speaking agriculturalists. I suspect that the Oromo or Khoi-San complexion is the shade that the artist was trying to convey. Here for example, is a painting made by a Paleolithic European.
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