Evolution & life

Discovery of Loschbour man

7 October 1935

The Loschbour man is the skeleton of a hunter-gatherer found in a rock shelter at Loschbour, in the Mullerthal region of Luxembourg, the oldest known human remains in the country. The man lived around eight thousand years ago in the Mesolithic period, after the end of the last Ice Age, when Europe was covered with forests. In 2014 geneticists sequenced his genome, which provided a picture of the western European hunter-gatherers. It suggested that he had dark skin but blue eyes, and that his population was one of the three main sources of the ancestry of present-day Europeans, together with early farmers from Anatolia and later migrants from the steppe.

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