‘Black people’ lived in Europe 6,000 years ago, says scientist – 11/29/2023 – Darwin and God

Here is yet another example that prehistory has increasingly become a political battleground around the world: this text on the Science Nordic website, signed by Hannes Schroeder, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen. The bone of contention that motivated the text is the beautiful artistic reconstruction below, which depicts “Lola”, a girl, member of a hunter-gatherer culture, who would have lived around 6,000 years ago.

The detail is that “Lola” lived in the region of present-day Denmark. But her artistic conception portrays her with dark hair and dark skin. Schroeder went public to highlight that she is not doing “woke science” (or “politically correct”, for those who don’t really like using that term in Portuguese) when presenting this image of the prehistoric girl.

The detail here is the following: the researcher from the Danish university and his colleagues reconstructed the girl’s appearance from her DNA (craziest of all: the genetic material was obtained thanks to the fact that she had used a piece of gum as “gum” little bit of tree resin, leaving your saliva on it). And the genomic analysis made two things clear: she most likely had blue eyes AND dark skin at the same time.

The combination is only present in today’s European populations thanks to immigration or miscegenation. But at the time Lola lived, these traits were COMMON among Europeans who were still hunter-gatherers, even among those living in Great Britain and Scandinavia. Genes linked to a fair complexion arrived there later, brought by farmers whose ultimate origin was the Eastern Mediterranean.

Scientists who have studied these ancient genomes are accused of wanting to interfere in modern debates about immigration on European soil. The fact, however, is that today’s appearance-based racial categories also have a history of transformation. They did not fall out of the sky and, in many cases, are the results of very recent events when viewed within the broader context of human evolution.

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