As you may know the actress Daryl Hannah depicted Ayla, the protagonist from Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, in the film version. Unlike many castings Hannah was an inspired choice, as she does look like the description of Ayla in the novels. Tall, blonde, and with a high forehead (remember, there’s a lot of contrast with Neandertals in these books). Auel depicts human Neandertal interactions to such an extent that there is hybridization. In the 1980s when her series first gained traction this was not particularly a popular angle. This was the age of “mitochondrial Eve”, when replacement was a more fashionable idea (ask Milford Wolpoff about it). Even though in the details Auel may have been wrong about hwo this process played out (admixture seems to have occurred earlier on in the modern human migration out of Africa, not in northern Eurasia), overall she has admitted feeling vindicated by the work of people like Svante Paabo.

But there’s one area that is pretty important where Auel was wrong: it seems that during the Ice Age anatomically modern European humans did not fit the Nordic ideal of tall, blonde, and gracile. One reason I posted the image of the skull of K14 in the post below is that even without professional background in analysis of skeletal morphology it is visually obvious that this individual was rather robust. There’s a reason that it was apparently termed “Australoid” by earlier anthropologists. The native people of Australia and Papua are among the most robust humans alive today. In contrast other populations have gone through a great deal of gracilization, especially over the last 10,000 years. What about the coloring? I couldn’t find a reference in Seguin-Orlando et al. to any analysis of the functions of the genome, but in Anne Gibbons’ piece in Science she states that K14 was ” a short, dark-skinned, dark-eyed man.” I doubt she would say this unless she knew from the research team what the genotype of this individual was. Perhaps there is a later paper coming out on population genomics rather than phylogenomics, but these results would be consistent with other results.

One story that ancient DNA is unraveling is that of the complexity of human demographic history. There are lots of surprises in store. But a second no less important angle is that humans have adapted and changed functionally over the last 100,000 years, to the point where salient physical traits vary a great deal across both time and space.