Earliest Dutch were dark-skinned with lighter eyes: DNA research
The original Dutch were not white and blond, though they did tend to have light eyes. The earliest modern humans who lived around and off the Dutch coast were hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago. They had dark skin and often light eyes, according to a huge genetic study into how hunter-gatherers moved across Europe over the past 35,000 years, the Volkskrant reports.
The international team of scientists, led by Cosimo Posth from the University of Tubingen, studied the genetic data of 356 excavated primordial skeletons from 14 countries, including the Netherlands. They found that in the far east, people had lighter complexion and darker eyes. In the West, the genetic marker for lighter skin was “almost completely absent,” they said in their publication in Nature.
The Dutch part of the study consisted of eight pieces of human bone found on the Dutch coast and in fishing nets. “Our ancestors were always portrayed as those tough, white types. But they looked quite a bit different,” archaeologist and DNA expert Eveline Altena, who performed the analysis, to the Volksrkant.
Five year’s ago, London’s Natural History Museum sent shockwaves through the UK when they presented the reconstruction of the “Cheddar Man,” who was black. But this discovery of dark-skinned earliest Dutch is far from unexpected, Altena said. In recent years, scientists also discovered the genes for black skin color in primeval bones from Norway, Denmark, and Luxembourg, among others.
“And now it has been demonstrated for the first time with genetic evidence for the Dutch material,” Luc Amkreutz, curator of the National Museum of Antiquities, said to the newspaper. “It is important because it shows that there was no prehistoric white population in Europe. The oldest modern inhabitants of our country had dark skin and blue eyes. Deal with it.”
The earliest Dutch lived in what is now the Netherlands and the area called Doggerland, which stretched off the coast on what is now the bottom of the North Sea. They hunted game and caught fish. Gradually the landscape changed from woodland to more open and swampy. Only much later, with the advance of agriculture from present-day Turkey and then with the arrival of steppe people from the east, did the local population get an increasingly lighter complexion.
The lighter complexion happened gradually, over between 3,000 and 5,000 years, the scientists estimate. Some of the black population left, although there are still traces of the hunter-gatherers in the DNA of today’s Dutch, Amkreutz said. The light skin color likely came as an adaption to the low-vitamin D, grain-rich diet that stems from agriculture. Lighter skin lets more sun through, resulting in more vitamin D.
“This is the most comprehensive study of DNA data from early modern humans in Europe to date,” Amkreutz told the Volkskrant. “That always turns things upside down.”
Modern humans trickled into Europe about 50,000 years ago, gradually succeeding neanderthals. The period was cut roughly in half by the “glacial maximum” ice age, between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago. The ice age pushed modern humans back to southern Europe, the new study showed.
After the ice age, the hunters returned in waves from the south, eventually reaching the Netherlands about 10,000 years ago. They formed a vast genetic group called the Oberkassel-cluster, named after a stone age grave excavated near Bonn in 1914. The grave contained a man, a woman, and a dog. Until recently, they’ve always been depicted as white, blond, and blue-eyed. Turns out, those depictions got all but the eye color wrong.
