Power77, you're letting agenda cloud your reasoning.
It has always baffled me how the reconstructions of Early Europeans( Grimaldi,Kostenski) all looked relatively similar to East African populations especially Masai or Nilotic folks.
Grimaldi man had a Caucasoid skull shape, it was because of its weird positioning that in photos it looked Negroid. You have no evidence any Europeans at anytime looked anything like those east African people. Most pre-Neolithic skulls from Europe have the basic Caucasoid skull shape. Many old ones probably don't because they are from such early times in Eurasian history, before major east-west split. Most pre-LGM west Europeans were WHG or proto-WHG and would have had Caucasoid-skull shapes.
These Upper Palaeolithic west Europeans(WHG) look west Eurasian to me.
And I found it interesting how white skin and light hair/eyes were found to have been as recent as 5 000 BC in most of Europe( well the mutation for blue eyes was found in the 7000 year old C6 carrying La Brana individual)! I am also guessing that the I* haplogroup Early Europeans may have looked quite similar to certain Masai types.
You're referring to Wilde 2014. It's 5,000YBP not 5,000BC. They tested 3 pigmentation SNPs on samples from Eneolithic-copper age Bulgaria, Ukraine, and European Russia. It revealed were probably darker than modern west Asians. Their mtDNA though was 100% European-specific. They were a mix of east European ANE-WHG hunter gatherers and ENF-UHG west Asian farmers. Later Indo Europeans(specifically Indo Iranians) in Siberia with pretty much identical mtDNA and probably a similar overall genetic makeup, had light skin, mainly blonde hair, and mostly blue eyes. Pigmentation can change quickly like Lactose tolerance(it dramatically rose in Europe in the last few thousand years). The swathy Eneolithic-copper age east Europeans don't represent everything that was going on in Europe at that time pigmentation wise.
There are no Y DNA I* samples from Mesolithic Europe. Just hg I samples which were not tested for many downstream SNPs, and therefore couldn't find their subclade. We have the skulls of these I* men from Mesolithic Europe you speak of, and they had Caucasoid skulls, as did La Brana-1. You're assuming European-like= non-native and young and non-European= native and ancient. Because you thought they had I* you assumed they looked African. You have a serious miss understanding about human genetics. No modern population is ancestral to another. That's like saying I'm ancestral to my brothers. So, Europeans did not evolve from Africans, like it seems you think.
So far the mtDNA of Cro Magnon people came back haplogroup N which is common among the Masai and similar East African Sub-Saharan populations.
No mtDNA N is a Eurasian lineage, not African. And the single N* sample from Upper Palaeolithic Europe is likely contaminated. If it didn't belong to any modern N clades, it wasn't N*, we just don't know what mutations it had. There is an R(clade of N) sample that's over 20,000 years older than this supposed N* sample. Most mtDNA samples from Upper Palaeolithic Europe are hg U; U5*, U2, U8c, etc. There are also some R0's. There's no such thing as Cro Magnon, it's just a term used for Europeans of a certain time period.
I suspect that the light traits common in Europe today would have been introduced relatively recently by the Indo-Europeans from Central Asia(assiociated with Y chromosome R*). By taking the women of CM haplogroup I*(and possibly G2a*,E1b* or C6*) carriers in Europe, these Indo European invaders gained some of their traits such as slender bodies, wavier hair and perhaps narrower noses and more dolicocephalic/mesocephalic skulls while introducing in Europe paler skin, straighter hair and lighter hair colour.
Well as far as we know proto-Indo Europeans were very dark. What happened in Europe genetically after the initial spread of farmers from west Asia is a big mystery. Indo Europeans who spread east of the Caspian were very pale, then you have Balto-Slavs, Germans, Celts, and Finno-Urgics all existing since at least the bronze age with the same basic pigmentation. Why this is, is a mystery. I doubt it was as simple as these people were pale and made other people pale. The Scythians and Germans would have been hard to distinguish from each other even though they have very differnt genetic makeups. Natural selection is probably the main reason, not ancestry percentages.
Caucasoid features doesn't= European. So thin noses are shared by all west Eurasians, Pakistani and Irish alike. Slender bodies? This is all just stero types in your head, you have no sources to back this up. These stero types come from recent traits associated with Europeans in the last 500 years. Europeanism doesn't always= Civilized, non-native, physically weak but intelligent, etc. These are modern stero types you're putting on pre historic people, and it simply doesn't work.
Straighter hair, are you kidding me? This is Afro-centrism, with nothing to back it up.
