# Population Genetics > Paleogenetics > Paleolithic & Mesolithic >  Elba, the first Mesolithic woman found in Spain

## Carlos

Experts reconstruct the last day of Elba, the pastoralist of the Mesolithic of O Courel

Attachment 10573

https://cadenaser.com/programa/2017/...72_986461.html

Elba is the first woman dated from the Mesolithic found in Spain. She was Galician, with dark eyes and hair and, for more information, lactose intolerant. It was supposedly dedicated to herding and today it would be about 9,300 years old.

Elba's ncomplete skull appeared in 1996 and the other bones were found in several expeditions since 2010. The tests carried out on the remains with carbon 14 revealed that it is 9,300 years old and the food allergy it suffered.

His punished bones reveal that this female who only measured five feet (and who supposedly worked with huge animals) led a very hard life. That probably in childhood had suffered a strong blow to the head that caused a head injury. That he fed poorly, with long periods of scarcity. He suffered from osteoarthritis and surely endured strong dental pain for months before his death. I mostly ate vegetables. And for the collagen it is known that it was not exactly from the area, but from some rather close granitic territory. It was an autochthonous Galician, linked with other remains found in the north of Portugal.

The genetic analysis showed that she was a woman with dark eyes and hair, lactose intolerant, belonging to haplogroup U, characteristic of European hunter-gatherers, and in particular to subhaplotype U5b1, originated in the Iberian Peninsula 16,000 or 20,000 years ago.

The research, which has lasted more than 10 years, has been updated as technological advances emerged that allowed improving the way of working. The importance of this finding is the oldest western sample studied in Europe: "It is an exceptional finding because it is normal to find burials and in this case we have found a woman who was working".

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## Carlos

Attachment 10574
The poetess Rosalía de Castro

I do not know to what extent the vision and cultural information that the specialists who reconstruct a face thousands of years ago can influence and how it can influence them when it comes to doing so.

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## halfalp

Mesolithic and Pastoralism in the same context? I'm confused?

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## halfalp

It looks like the only real component here is the Cranial Cavity, you cannot deduce the low part of the face only with that... It looks pretty weird, the Jaw is almost too smooth and those cheekbones...

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## Carlos

> Mesolithic and Pastoralism in the same context? I'm confused?


"He also allegedly traveled with the three uros that formed his flock, a huge adult specimen with an antlers more than two meters and two younger ones that were not offshoots of the first"

Apparently in the hole next to her there were 3 uros, reason why they must have deduced that it was his flock, since if the two scions were not children of the adult bull it had to be a herd. I do not know, I have to meditate.

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## Davidtab

I live in the same area where Elba lived... you can find faces today just like hers everywhere in that area, it´s incredible. The roof of a hidden cave collapsed when she and the aurochs passed over, she was crushed by one of them and died there, near the limit between actual Galicia and Leon.

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## Carlos

[QUOTE = Davidtab; 562001] Vivo en la misma área donde vivía Elba ... puedes encontrar caras hoy como las de ella en todas partes en esa área, es increíble. El techo de una cueva oculta se derrumbó cuando ella y los uros pasaron por alto, fue aplastada por uno de ellos y murió allí, cerca del límite entre la actual Galicia y León. [/CITAR]

Evidently if in the reconstruction of an unconscious way they have recreated the face of Rosalía de Castro it is evident that at the moment you are going to find many similar women in the zone.

Postdata: Do not you put the Spanish flag in your presentation?

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## Davidtab

Being galician obviously I'm spanish, in other words, I'm proudly spanish because I'm proudly galician. The very best is always plusses identities, not exclude. So the flag is the galician one, which specifies more in a web like this.

Elba's face is similar to a lot of women from northwestern Iberia, even everywhere in Southwestern Europe. Even with fairer skin, fairer hair and green or blue eyes, she would be similar to many women over the land she lived.

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## Angela

Poor woman. I'm surprised that as a Mesolithic woman she ate mostly vegetables. Perhaps they were having trouble hunting the aurochs and smaller game?

So much for how great it was to live as a hunter-gatherer. There's been so much romanticization of ancient peoples in this hobby, including farmers and steppe peoples.

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## Ygorcs

Don't you guys think the reconstructed face looks a bit too like many modern Iberian women for it to be a precise and likely image of hers? Her skin complexion also looks a bit too light for me, I think that moderately light, olive-skinned tone would be found in EEF, but not in WHG like her (I'd expect WHG to not be as dark as that reconstruction of the Cheddar Man, but kind of as dark as modern Yemenis or Pakistanis). As Carlos said, I have some doubt if the scientists who made the reconstruction could avoid being unconsciously influenced by what they preconceived as the looks an ancient Galician woman would have.

As for the herding and flock thing, I'm honestly very confused by that conclusion. Couldn't she be just chasing and leading wild herds to trap and kill them, like Amerindian tribes did with bisons and so on?

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## Angela

> Don't you guys think the reconstructed face looks a bit too like many modern Iberian women for it to be a precise and likely image of hers? Her skin complexion also looks a bit too light for me, I think that moderately light, olive-skinned tone would be found in EEF, but not in WHG like her (I'd expect WHG to not be as dark as that reconstruction of the Cheddar Man, but kind of as dark as modern Yemenis or Pakistanis). As Carlos said, I have some doubt if the scientists who made the reconstruction could avoid being unconsciously influenced by what they preconceived as the looks an ancient Galician woman would have.
> 
> As for the herding and flock thing, I'm honestly very confused by that conclusion. Couldn't she be just chasing and leading wild herds to trap and kill them, like Amerindian tribes did with bisons and so on?


Completely agree as to both points. That's why all these reconstructions have to be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, some Europeans have a great deal of trouble accepting that all their ancestors weren't fair skinned. There were, of course, no WHG pastoralists.

The picture was no longer available, so here it is:

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## Farstar

> Don't you guys think the reconstructed face looks a bit too like many modern Iberian women for it to be a precise and likely image of hers? Her skin complexion also looks a bit too light for me, I think that moderately light, olive-skinned tone would be found in EEF, but not in WHG like her (I'd expect WHG to not be as dark as that reconstruction of the Cheddar Man, but kind of as dark as modern Yemenis or Pakistanis). As Carlos said, I have some doubt if the scientists who made the reconstruction could avoid being unconsciously influenced by what they preconceived as the looks an ancient Galician woman would have.
> 
> As for the herding and flock thing, I'm honestly very confused by that conclusion. Couldn't she be just chasing and leading wild herds to trap and kill them, like Amerindian tribes did with bisons and so on?


I completely agree with this comment.

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## Carlos

The cheekbones maybe put them in the corner hairdresser injecting industrial silicone, then became independent and vegan and the uros had them as pets.

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## MOESAN

@YGorcs
as a whole her reconstructed face is very 'cromagnon'like, was is not astonishing for that time - but if present today among Iberian women (and elsewhere), it's not the kind of face which makes the majority there. Maybe Galicia shows a bit more than the Spanish mean, here I'm not sure.
@Halftap
If you 're right, and I fear it's the case, it's poor science; yes, indeed, this kind of molding is not inducing onebody to confidence...

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## MOESAN

To Ygorcs (again): nevertheless, as a whole I agree with your post.

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## Carlos

Attachment 10596

He estado trabajando unas pocas horas sobre cómo sería esta mujer (Elba). Ha tomado un tiempo, pero cuando se ha demostrado, ha sido una experiencia increíble. Miles de años observándolos, disfruten de la oportunidad.

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## halfalp

> Don't you guys think the reconstructed face looks a bit too like many modern Iberian women for it to be a precise and likely image of hers? Her skin complexion also looks a bit too light for me, I think that moderately light, olive-skinned tone would be found in EEF, but not in WHG like her (I'd expect WHG to not be as dark as that reconstruction of the Cheddar Man, but kind of as dark as modern Yemenis or Pakistanis). As Carlos said, *I have some doubt if the scientists who made the reconstruction could avoid being unconsciously influenced by what they preconceived as the looks an ancient Galician woman would have*.
> 
> As for the herding and flock thing, I'm honestly very confused by that conclusion. Couldn't she be just chasing and leading wild herds to trap and kill them, like Amerindian tribes did with bisons and so on?


I mean they likely have influenced by modern europeans or themselves... You have to choose over the bias to represent it like you know your surrendings, or to represent it like the Cheddar Man, wich for me looks like an highly exageration. We dont have autosomal dna from her i guess, so it doesn't matter that much. I guess, her complexion would have looked as the one from many Iberians till today, some Portuguese and Spanish people look like Indians or Pakistanese, but when you asked them, they are not aware of any kind of Indian ancestry so, might be it. Something like this: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/BPCJKY/an-...ind-BPCJKY.jpg

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## Carlos

`^^
With so much immigration we have from Pakistanis, there are also very good Hindus in bed, I have never confused them with my countrymen, but it does happen that some of them could pass for a Spanish or a Swiss, they are one among a million but there are.

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## MOESAN

> I mean they likely have influenced by modern europeans or themselves... You have to choose over the bias to represent it like you know your surrendings, or to represent it like the Cheddar Man, wich for me looks like an highly exageration. We dont have autosomal dna from her i guess, so it doesn't matter that much. I guess, her complexion would have looked as the one from many Iberians till today, some Portuguese and Spanish people look like Indians or Pakistanese, but when you asked them, they are not aware of any kind of Indian ancestry so, might be it. Something like this: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/BPCJKY/an-...ind-BPCJKY.jpg


Beside we don't know if she is partly tanned, what is often the case among Mediterraneans, this pretty young wife you show with your link doesn't evocate basic Indians nor Pakistanis, rather a typical 'atlanto-mediter' type - I hope she is a Portuguese example you propose here!?!

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## halfalp

> Beside we don't know if she is partly tanned, what is often the case among Mediterraneans, this pretty young wife you show with your link doesn't evocate basic Indians nor Pakistanis, rather a typical 'atlanto-mediter' type - I hope she is a Portuguese example you propose here!?!


The exemple was relative to the skin complexion i would imagine for some prehistoric Europeans, not about the Indian / Pakistanese phenotype. Dark features are a dominant gene, so if prehistoric europeans were like the cheddar man reconstruction, this complexion should have survived till today. Or are we gonna call to a WHG mass extinction who replaced dark features with faired ones?

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## Angela

> The exemple was relative to the skin complexion i would imagine for some prehistoric Europeans, not about the Indian / Pakistanese phenotype. Dark features are a dominant gene, so if prehistoric europeans were like the cheddar man reconstruction, this complexion should have survived till today. Or are we gonna call to a WHG mass extinction who replaced dark features with faired ones?


Are you ever going to read the papers on pigmentation? Until you do you're going to post silly comments like these.

Wait, I looked for some papers to help you by checking the search engine and I find you've been schooled repeatedly on this subject without evident benefit. 
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...e-pigmentation

Skin pigmentation is a polygenic trait. There are snps for de-pigmentation, like SLC24A5, SLC45A2, some forms of TYR and MCIR, OCA2, HERC2 etc. and snps which result in very dark pigmentation. To my knowledge the WHG did not have the ones which result in extremely dark skin, but the only skin de-pigmentation gene for which they test positive is HERC 2, which causes blue eyes and also has some role to play in general skin pigmentation. 

Any decent forensic prediction algorithm chooses the most informative snps (with the biggest effect) and can tell you with very great accuracy whether the person whose dna was sampled is fair, medium or dark skinned. By those tests, the WHG were darker than the Anatolian farmers. I doubt they were black, however.

Regardless, their dark skin didn't survive in Europe because of SELECTION. Have you ever heard of it? It's part of this thing called EVOLUTION. Do us all a favor and go back and read the Mathiesen et al paper. Let me give you a hint. A 60% WHG/EEF hybrid could have inherited all the depigmentation snps of both parents, and would thrive better than a pure WHG with only HERC2. Is the light starting to dawn?

If that's too much for you, think of it this way: Let's say a Nigerian slave is impregnated by her owner (and a Nigerian is undoubtedly darker than any WHG), and let's further say that her descendants are also mated only with Irish and Scottish and English colonists. By the time you have a descendant who is only, say, 20% WHG, what color do you think they'll be? 

Modern Spaniards have a lot of the de-pigmentation snps introduced into Europe by both the EEF and EHG. That they would be as dark as the WHG is highly unlikely.

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## MOESAN

just a point, on the general ground:
1- genetic dominance doesn't implies numeric dominance - It's implies (and here I'm not sure that dominance applies everytime) only that in an heterozygotic couple of alleles, the dominant one will impose its effects - in Northern Europe we see very numerous recessive genes and their percentages allow homozygoty often enough to produce effect: high frequence of light pigmentation - only selective pressure has the big role here -
2- it's true that very often the "good" alleles tend to be dominant genetically but it's not always the case (see other old threads about selection) and a "good gene" here can be a "bad gene" there -

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## Angela

> just a point, on the general ground:
> 1- genetic dominance doesn't implies numeric dominance - It's implies (and here I'm not sure that dominance applies everytime) only that in an heterozygotic couple of alleles, the dominant one will impose its effects - in Northern Europe we see very numerous recessive genes and their percentages allow homozygoty often enough to produce effect: high frequence of light pigmentation - only selective pressure has the big role here -
> 2- it's true that very often the "good" alleles tend to be dominant genetically but it's not always the case (see other old threads about selection) and a "good gene" here can be a "bad gene" there -


Indeed, and that's why in equatorial Africa you don't have people with a full complement of de-pigmentation snps, and why in Europe you don't have people with SSBI, conferring very dark skin.

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## halfalp

> Are you ever going to read the papers on pigmentation? Until you do you're going to post silly comments like these.
> 
> Wait, I looked for some papers to help you by checking the search engine and I find you've been schooled repeatedly on this subject without evident benefit. 
> https://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...e-pigmentation
> 
> Skin pigmentation is a polygenic trait. There are snps for de-pigmentation, like SLC24A5, SLC45A2, some forms of TYR and MCIR, OCA2, HERC2 etc. and snps which result in very dark pigmentation. To my knowledge the WHG did not have the ones which result in extremely dark skin, but the only skin de-pigmentation gene for which they test positive is HERC 2, which causes blue eyes and also has some role to play in general skin pigmentation. 
> 
> Any decent forensic prediction algorithm chooses the most informative snps (with the biggest effect) and can tell you with very great accuracy whether the person whose dna was sampled is fair, medium or dark skinned. By those tests, the WHG were darker than the Anatolian farmers. I doubt they were black, however.
> 
> ...


Yes and then just another post, another girl wich is mostly EEF was rethought to have dark complexion than previously thought no? So if we apply the rule of Numbers and Farmers outnumbered completely HG's, she cannot be mostly EEF and at the same time Darker than other EEF individuals that were mostly Light featured. Truth dont always come from Science... Selection and Evolution cannot explain by themselves the extinction of a dark complexion like some African one, into an entire population. Point is, we are talking about a population wich evolved in cold Europe for millenia, where was the selection and evolution process if they were extremelly dark featured? Natufians wich were in actual Levant, wich at their time was a Tropical Semi-Desert had mostly Light Features no? Instead of read papers individually and get their conclusion on their own, you should make a general and pluridisciplinary conclusion. If you can then found a reason for every solutions, you probably are the closest of the reality. If something seems odd in the conclusion, it then might be that the general rules cannot be applied on everything. The fact is that WHG individuals according Genetiker ( and i know you dont take his work for granted at all ) were mostly Medium Dark skinned with only a minority of individuals Dark Dark skinned. Also i dont really understand why you give me the Fire Headed thread, he seems to have a mixed view over the question of the prehistoric dark complexion conclusion.

_Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis_

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## Angela

Let's take this one at a time.




> Yes and then just another post, another girl wich is mostly EEF was rethought to have dark complexion than previously thought no? So if we apply the rule of Numbers and Farmers outnumbered completely HG's, she cannot be mostly EEF and at the same time Darker than other EEF individuals that were mostly Light featured.
> 
> 
> What girl? What on earth are you talking about? Who cannot be mostly EEF? 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...

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## halfalp

> Let's take this one at a time.


1) I'm talking about the Bell Beaker girl that was recently reconstructed. If datas suggest that mostly EEF people were Light Skinned and they say that this girl is a second generation migrant from " Northern Europe ". But the paper suggest " _Mr Morrison said: "When I received the results of the DNA testing from Maya, which showed that Ava had straight dark hair, brown eyes and a less-fair complexion_. " So in other sense, she is likely related with continental Neolithic ancestry but she had " less-fair complexion "?

2) When i say " Truth dont always come with Science " i mean Deduction needs to have a role in it. Scienitific facts can be interpreted in a very literal way, exemple " less than 100 samples of European HG's tells us that they were darker than modern Europeans = so HG's were all Dark Skinned ". The same rules apply with Yamnaya. Yes all *tested* Yamnaya samples for, were Light Skinned, Dark Haired and Dark Eyed. Absolutely no problem with that conclusion, but it doesn't mean = all Yamnaya individuals were obviously the same. Science needs to make Deductions ( and not Intuitions ) between prehistoric datas and modern datas. Evolution and Selection are not deductions, there is thousand of exemples none explaineable by Evoltuion or Selection. Exemple. Platypus.

3) I'm ok with this point. And as i explained probably 10 times in the past. My problem is not to prove that Europeans are none-related with Africans, that we are in Europe between 500'000 years old and that we are not related with Africans, and that our ancestors were Blonde Haired or Blue Eyed. My problem come with the fact that Science can be used as a Political Motivation. Yes Nazis and other did it, but it doesn't mean they are the only one who are doing it. Racism is a complexe behavior and a lot of racist people are pushing a progressive agenda because they got some God Complexe. One of this problem also lies with Lazaridis wich i also commented multiple times, over all the Harvard or MP searchers i'm following on Twiiter, he got some weird commentry over some points that can influenced, wich want to be influenced. 

4) From Genetiker: I1072
Natufian
11,840–9760 BC
Light
Brown
Brown 


There is no mention in the actual study " The Genetic Structure of the World First Farmers ". So only the amateur community have put their hands on. As i already said multiple times, i take Genetiker with some salt, but apparently the amateurish community have to do things to have " complete datas ".

5) I read all papers, and i comprehend pretty good terminology, not the scientific verbiage however. And we go back to the point 3. Cheddar Man reconstruction is very dark, i expect then that Scientifics have Facts, translated in Genetic Datas that this guy was like his representation. Wich you just said " we know they were darker than us and ancient farmers, but to what extent? ". Problem is once again, Politics dont wait those " scientific confirmation " for pushing a Social Agenda, neither Religious people or various groups that could include Scientifics too. 

5-6) In the thread you say " _Even before the latest improvements in the tests, it was quite common to get extremely good predictions for skin pigmentation using the available forensic tests. It's done all the time. People just don't want to accept it for some reason_ " And now you say " _I said that according to what we know so far they were darker skinned than the Anatolian farmers_ " those two sentences seems totally unrelated but they are. If we can have extremely good predictions, why then only stop to " darker than farmers ". Can we not have extremely good prediction with an actual population sample?

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## Gnarl

Dude, genes can vanish from populations quite easily over time if there is selection against them. Thats the basic concept of evolution. No reason why it shouldn't happen to pigmentation genes.

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