The 10,000-Year-Old Man Found In A British Cave — And The DNA Test That Changed What Scientists Thought Early Europeans Looked Like
And it challenged — not for the first time, but more effectively than before — the assumption that the European past is the story of a people who have always looked like modern Europeans.
That assumption is wrong.
The people who built the first European civilization — if we can call the Mesolithic world a civilization — looked different.
They were replaced, or substantially replaced, by people who came from elsewhere.
And the light skin that many Europeans associate with their deepest identity is a relatively recent evolutionary acquisition, not an ancient one.
This is what the limestone cave in Somerset preserved for ten thousand years.
This is what the two-millimeter drill hole and the modern sequencing machines extracted.
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