Drawn into New York City by the bright lights, action, and bevy of college friends, while troubled by the filth, the price, and the frequent encounters with strangers, I counted the number of times I was stopped by someone I didn't know, whether for money (most often), a survey, a request for directions, a flirtation (damn, none), etc. Of my eight, the most unusual chance meeting wasn't actual random at all, for the interested party (a woman with an extended, gloved hand) stopped me only because of my blue eyes. Pressed for time and caught off guard, I didn't stop long enough to realize how her hustle related to my eye color.
If we met 7,000 years ago, however, perhaps the ocean-like quality of my eyes wouldn't have been an adequate opening line, according a scientific study that analyzed the DNA of an ancient hunter gatherer found in the mountains of northwest Spain in 2006, the Guardian reported.
Based on DNA analysis of his wisdom tooth, the hunter had blue eyes and a complexion/hair color darker than most current Europeans (and a complexion darker than most people with blue eyes). Though it was just a single body, the finding suggests the transition from brown to blue eyes occurred before the transition from dark to lighter skin on the European continent. Previously, scientists believed the opposite, according to the Guardian.
"This guy had to be darker than any modern European, but we don't know how dark," said Carles Lalueza-Fox, leader of the study. Of course, the skin didn't stay preserved; its DNA only indicated a darker complexion.
"You see a lot of reconstructions of these people hunting and gathering and they look like modern Europeans with light skin. You never see a reconstruction of a mesolithic hunter-gatherer with dark skin and blue eye colour," Lalueza-Fox said as a way to underline the finding's significance.
Not as headline grabbing, but probably more interesting and useful to science was how Lalueza-Fox tested the hunter's DNA for pathogen resistance. Along with colleagues from the Institute of, he found the skeleton's genetic characteristics most resembled that of modern day Swedish and Finnish people, and that they shared several immunity genes. Again, the finding changes the course of previously theorized events. Conventional thinking attributed much of modern pathogen resistance to after the introduction of farming, which was still in the Middle East at the time of the hunter's life.
"There is a no doubt oversimplified grand narrative that the move from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming was initially bad for our health," Martin Jones, professor of archaeological science at Cambridge University, told the Guardian. "A number of factors contributed, particularly living closely together with other humans and animals, shrinking the food web, and crowding-out water supplies. The authors are drawing attention to the role of pathogens in pre-agricultural lives, and that is interesting."
