An Ice Age Infant's 17,000-Year-Old DNA Reveals He Had Dark Skin and Blue Eyes

An Ice Age Infant’s 17,000-Year-Old DNA Reveals He Had Dark Skin and Blue Eyes
The baby boy’s recovered genome suggests he’s related to a famous Ice Age population

Sonja Anderson
Daily Correspondent

October 21, 2024 2:50 p.m.

By analyzing the ancient skeleton of a baby found in southern Italy, scientists have put together a striking picture of the young boy: The poorly developed child lived during the Ice Age—17,000 years ago—and he likely had brown skin, curly dark hair and blue eyes.

His remains were discovered in 1998, in the Grotta delle Mura cave in Monopoli, Puglia, according to a study recently published in Nature Communications. Archaeologist Mauro Calattini, one of the study’s coauthors, found the baby’s bones carefully covered with rock slabs, surrounded by no grave goods. The simple burial was the cave’s only grave.

The skeleton was largely intact, allowing scientists to determine that the child was likely a bit over two and a half feet tall when he died, while a recent dental examination revealed that he was somewhere between 7.5 and 18 months old. Earlier radiocarbon dating determined his remains were between 16,910 and 17,320 years old, meaning the so-called “infant of Grotta delle Mura” lived just a few centuries after the Last Glacial Maximum, Earth’s most ice-laden period, when glaciers covered a quarter of the planet’s land about 20,000 years ago.

As co-lead author Alessandra Modi, an anthropologist at the University of Florence, tells NewScientist’s Christa Lesté-Lasserre, ancient skeletons found in warm climates are usually too degraded to conduct significant genetic analysis. But in the cool cave, the child’s remains were protected from Puglian heat and therefore well preserved. The researchers were able to recover about 75 percent of the boy’s genome, which Modi says is “a remarkable achievement for ancient remains of this age.”

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/an-ice-age-infants-17000-year-old-dna-has-revealed-he-had-dark-skin-and-blue-eyes-180985305/