The pattern that ancient DNA research has repeatedly established is that early European hunter-gatherers — people who lived in Europe from the initial modern human colonization through the Mesolithic, roughly 45,000 to 8,000 years ago — predominantly carried the ancestral dark-pigmentation variants.

The shift toward lighter skin pigmentation in European populations was associated primarily with the spread of farming populations from the Near East beginning around 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, and with subsequent genetic shifts including migration from the Pontic steppe.

The light-skinned, light-eyed European phenotype that might intuitively seem “ancient” to modern eyes was actually a relatively recent development, the product of specific selection pressures and demographic events that had not yet occurred in Zlatý kůň’s time.

A 45,000-year-old woman from central Europe would, the genomic evidence strongly suggests, have looked more like someone from a region of high UV radiation and long evolutionary history of dark pigmentation — sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, parts of the Middle East — than like a modern Northern European.