Brown Eyed Neanderthals

According to a report by ScienceNow Neanderthals may not have the same features that that they normally possess in display cases in museums around the world. This new hypothesis was brought about using new DNA evidence from two female Neanderthals originally from Croatia. The new evidence shows that they may have sported darker skin tones and even had brown eyes.  Also with this new information they should be able to reveal new data on how the prehistoric family that includes Neanderthals but also modern humans has evolved over time, which also died out about 30,000 years ago.

With this new information skeptics are numerous. Alot of outside researchers have voiced their opinion on the matter saying things like breaking the long held hypothesis that Neanderthals have had lighter skin for the sole purpose of gaining the required amount of Vitamin D.  Even with the numerous problems that have been discovered scientists have seen a silver lining because its logical that Neanderthals from different regions would have different levels of pigmentation in skin tone. To determine this the researchers focused on 40 different stretches of genetic material. The specific areas that they were looking at were ones used to determine the pigmentation of living people. The main problem with this is that hair color is controlled by multiple genes. To solve this problem researchers used a technique in which they added up each gene and which ever gene was in the majority would be the one displayed by the organism. For example a female Neanderthal known as Vi33.26 had 3 genes for blue eyes, 4 genes for not blue eyes, and one gene for not brown eyes, and finally 7 genes for brown eyes. This gave a positive number count for brown eyes and a negative number count for blue eyes. Most likely giving Vi33.26 brown eyes.

This technique was validated by testing it with 11 people and had a 60% success rate.  They accept that low rate due to the massive amount of complexity in hair color and eye color. Another problem with the data is that hair color and eye color markers used are based on modern human genetic variation. When Neanderthal eye and hair color genes are unique to them.