"Although today’s southern Europeans tend to be somewhat darker than their northern counterparts, they are still relatively light-skinned compared with Africans, an adaptation often linked to the need to absorb more sunlight and so produce adequate amounts of vitamin D. "

southern europe has been successfully colonized by many darker-skinned people, from phoenicians and greeks (and maybe egyptians) through to arabs and moors. there have been population movements from the north as well (germans, vikings, celts, slavs). the result is pretty "gray" across the mediterranean. i see no reason to think that the same process of dark-meeting-light (south-meeting-north) wouldn't have been present in the region at the time.

as pointed out elsewhere, i'm pretty sure the blue eye mutation has been identified as a single event and localized to europe. i guess we know the mutation is older than 8500 years now. it doesn't really answer the question of where it came from, though.

"It seems possible that latitude is not the key factor in skin depigmentation, but diet,"

well, i'm glad people are questioning this, anyways.

truth is it's barely even correlated.

i'm still leaning more towards drift

(maybe sexual selection helped with the drift)

"This suggests, Willerslev says, that there might have been “substantial gene flow between east and west” leading to more homogenous populations than previously suspected."

not necessarily. well, i mean the fluidity. we know there was a migration of people from the north to the south after the ice melted.

well, at least we used to know this. did the goddamned hippies erase the evidence because it created too much negative energy?

if so, there's some old models to dust off that provide an easy explanation.

i'll just be brief about this, i'll get into it with something more topical: a lack of archaeological evidence is not something to reject a theory on.

for those that don't know what i'm talking about, there's been this awful hippie movement in archaeology and anthropology that wants to purge pre-history of all human conflict. we were just all god's children playing happily in the garden. then there was capitalism, and then violence. i'm being overly dismissive.

but they've actually been derp enough to stand up and say "well, i know there's this pile of interdisciplinary evidence, but we can't find an archaeological record, so therefore it didn't happen".

the general response is to point out that there's a long list of historically documented events that cannot be corroborated with archaeological evidence, and yet we know happened. it's a logical fallacy, in fact - an inability to prove an event occurred does not imply it never happened. but, the hippies were arguing from ideology in the first place, so it hasn't been an effective way to counter them.

now, we've got all this genetic and other novel evidence coming in that's backing up the interdisciplinary conclusions, and the archaeologists are just terribly confused by it.

some of the younger ones may not even be aware of the older conclusions.

the answers are there, though. you just have to go back to sources that were published before the 90s to find them.

i'd expect this to continue as more dna evidence comes in.

fucking hippies….

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/01/how-farming-reshaped-our-genomes