This is my portrait of a man representing the Western Hunter-Gatherers, a population of hunter-gatherers that occupied western Europe between the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and the arrival of agriculture 5,000 years ago. Genetic evidence recovered from their remains suggest that, while these people often sported blue eyes, they appear to lack the genetic alleles for lighter skin that are now ubiquitous in Europe, western Asia, and the Mediterranean basin, suggesting that they retained the darker skin tones of the earliest humans who evolved in Africa. Of course, it’s theoretically possible that the Western Hunter-Gatherers had evolved their own set of skin-lightening alleles separate from that of modern Europeans, but no evidence of such convergent evolution has been found yet, so I went with a darker skin tone for my depiction.
That being said, some hunter-gatherer populations who lived at the same time further east in Europe, known as the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, do appear to have had the alleles for lighter skin of modern Europeans, and it’s likely that these alleles originated in the very far north of Eurasia during the Pleistocene among a third population of people known as the Ancient North Eurasians. At any rate, the hunter-gatherer populations of Europe would find themselves absorbed by immigrating farmers of Anatolian origin who appear to have had Mediterranean pigmentation, thus initiating the Neolithic in Europe. These farmers in turn would absorb nomadic herdsmen from the steppes of western Eurasia who would bring Indo-European languages to the region, and this mixture would produce the modern European populations.