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

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.”

“This enabled us to make robust conclusions about the infant’s ancestry, physical characteristics and even certain health aspects,” Modi tells NewScientist.

The boy’s skin was darker than most modern Europeans’ but not as dark as a tropically acclimated person’s, Modi says, and his pale blue eyes match those of other ancient western European hunter-gatherers. The infant also appears to be an ancestor of the Villabruna cluster—a group of post-Ice Age people who lived up to 14,000 years ago—suggesting the Villabruna line began in southern Europe well before the end of the Ice Age, per the study.

The boy’s genome also helped researchers determine his cause of death. He had familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition that causes the heart muscle to thicken, which can cause fatal congestive heart failure.

As well as the boy’s age, the researchers’ detailed analysis of the boy’s teeth allowed them “to infer the health and stress experienced by the child during infancy and/or his mother during pregnancy—something we rarely have the opportunity to explore with such precision,” as Modi and her co-lead author, Owen Alexander Higgins, an archaeologist at the University of Bologna, tell Live Science’s Soumya Sagar.

Nine accentuated lines marking the infant’s teeth indicate “physiological stress events” that occurred before and after birth, per the study. Isotopes in the teeth suggest that his mother stayed in one area during pregnancy and may have been malnourished. And judging by a fracture found in the baby’s collarbone, his birth was likely difficult.

“We imagine that the mother lived in a close-knit community,” Higgins tells NewScientist. “Her life may have involved gathering food and taking part in other daily activities, remaining rooted in the local environment.”

The recent study has illuminated some ancient ancestry, providing vital information about humans during the Last Glacial Maximum.

As Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who wasn’t involved in the study, tells NewScientist, “We are increasingly learning more about Ice Age populations, and this study adds a valuable piece to the puzzle.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.