But they are the best available approximation of what her face was like — and that approximation is not nothing.

Pigmentation, Selection, and Deep Time

The inference of dark skin, dark eyes, and dark hair in Zlatý kůň is not a surprising finding to specialists in ancient DNA, but it continues to surprise general audiences — and it is worth exploring more fully why it should not be surprising, and what the broader picture of human pigmentation evolution looks like.

Human pigmentation is among the most variable characteristics of our species, and this variability has a well-studied evolutionary history.

The ancestral condition for anatomically modern humans — the condition of the populations from which all living humans descended, in sub-Saharan Africa — was dark pigmentation.