I find this thread very interesting. It is curious because I saw a documentary that claimed light eyes originated in Turkey and that was well accepted. Back then I thought, "Why if we were capable of developing light eyes, couldn´t it have happened multiple times before and again because of the same stimulus?". La Brana man comes along and seems to indicate he had no Turkish origin. Instead people have used his genes as proof of a homogeneous reality. I don't understand that there is such a rush to judgement about ONE person's DNA being sequenced as being representative of the whole of Europe 7000 years ago. He is afterall one of the first people of this era to have his Y Chromosome discovered, we may never know about the rest. If our society fell apart, and 7,000 years later someone found a Romani burial and said, "Ah, this is what Europeans once looked like", it wouldn't be untrue but it also wouldn't be representative. The faces of Europe have probably always been diverse. Which one was the most prevalent is no doubt rather hard to prove on such scant evidence. Just think about the burial practices we have today, we burn a huge amount of our dead. We know that funeral pyres, dismemberment of the dead and burial in ways that do not preserve the body have existed for thousands of years. We are stuck examining people who died sometimes in odd ways such as Ötzi and La Brana man. Wouldn´t the contexts in which these bodies have been discovered be like a modern person dying today as a wanderer or on the fringes of the local society being discovered in the future?
People could build in the time of La Brana 1's death. Why was he holed up in a cave up a mountain? Does this imply that he was representative of those who lived in settlements or that he was on the fringe of the local society? Considering fairly complex settlements existed back then such as in Turkey, when you find someone dead in a cave, sure it preserves them better, but does it represent society back then?
My main curiosity about this is that, considering this article leads us to assume that the process of modern whiteness evolved in only a few thousand years, why do they think it couldn't have happened multiple times from whenever a culture entered the environment that allowed whiteness to evolve? If we are expected to believe anatomically modern humans were in Europe for 40,000 years, why does the discovery of one readable DNA trace get used to prove anything about the people who had been there before and after?
There certainly must be a missing stimulus that causes whiteness that we have not discovered. I am just sceptical about the use of one 7000 year old skeleton as proof of anything other than himself. It´s just clutching at straws based upon the small amount of evidence discovered. There was a stupid report in the paper that blondes are dying out which probably seemed true to the researcher. This was based upon blondness not being very resilient. Then I went to Scandinavia and saw that young children who had one African parent and a Swedish one would have darker skin and African faces but golden afro hair on multiple occasions. In the same way when I met Swedish families who had a middle eastern/persian parent and a white parent, the children came out pale with bright red hair and dark brown eyes. It leads me to believe the more we learn the more confusing things get, so trying to make a rule is unwise.
On the subject of gingers, the Romans were in awe of how largely red headed the people of Caledonia were. Oddly, every Italian girl I have met in England has had a thing for freckles and ginger hair. It goes to show that what is rare is often found beautiful and exotic away from it´s origin. With that, a lot of Jewish people are and were historically red haired which may have originated in a similar way to my middle eastern friends red haired children. Middle eastern plus lighter skinned admixture perhaps makes red hair, Shakespeare often portrayed Jewish characters with red wigs. The proudest man I ever met was a Pakistani man with a red moustache, he explained to me it made him incredibly popular back home. What is a disadvantage in some cultures is something to be proud of for others.
