Complexion of the roman emperors

[Condottiero Magno]

A very recent Nature paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v52...14507.html

suggests that an Early Bronze Age culture from the Pontic Steppe the Yamnaya Culture may have been the ancestral Indo-Europeans. Interestingly the latest ancient DNA work seems to suggest that ancestral Europeans, especially in the Mesolithic, were dark-skinned with light eyes, the Yamnaya people in contrast, the above paper suggests, were light-skinned but dark-eyed. The later Europeans being the result of admixture, light skin becoming rapidly fixed in the population, but eye colour remaining more mixed (with a N-S cline) to the present day. The Yamnaya may also have been the originators of the European lactose-digestion persistence mutation, an obvious advantage to a pastoral cattle-herding people.

All in all a bit of a kick in the balls for the blond-blue-eyed-pale-skinned Aryan myth beloved of Hitler et alia., if, as the DNA evidence suggests, pale eyes and pale skin had entirely different origins, in different populations.

Cannot access the above paper without a subscription, so does it also cover this theory? Europeans drawn from three ancient 'tribes'
"Hunters and gatherers get vitamin D through their food - because animals have a lot of it. But once you're farming, you don't get a lot of it, and once you switch to agriculture, there's strong natural selection to lighten your skin so that when it's hit by sunlight you can synthesise vitamin D."