Light "white" skin color pigmentation is from lack of Vitamin D in the wheat farm diet: DNA science now proves this!

  Light skin color is from Near East/Levant wheat farming and so Western white skin is less than 10,000 years old and is due to wheat farming diet lacking Vitamin D. see "Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in Europeans during the last 5,000 years...In many parts of Europe, the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition is associated with a switch from a vitamin D-rich aquatic or game-based hunter–gatherer diet (44) to a vitamin D-poor agriculturalist diet....the adoption of an agriculturalist diet, and assortative mating may sufficiently explain the observed change from a darker phenotype during the Eneolithic/Early Bronze age to a generally lighter one in modern Eastern Europeans,"...see "The evolution of skin pigmentation-associated variation in West Eurasia " (2021, Proceedings of National Science journal): "Most notably, a large-effect variant at SLC24A5 [light skin] was introduced to Western Europe by migrations of Neolithic farming populations....evidence for selection in West Eurasia occurring during the analyzed time period." DNA science has now proven that white skin is from lack of vitamin D in the wheat farm diet out of the Near East. "As hunter gatherers, our diet was rich in vitamin D (particularly from fish and meat), but after the development of farming practices, grains became a major dietary component, leading to a deficit in vitamin D status. Given the significance of vitamin D in maintaining reproductive efficiency (see later), natural selection will have favored a loss in pigmentation to allow for improved vitamin D photosynthesis in our skin. So the agricultural revolution that first emerged in the Levant may have triggered this out of Africa late onset natural selection of skin depigmentation."

So Europeans originally had dark African-traits and dark skin:

"The team found that the early European was most closely genetically related to people in Sweden and Finland. But while his eyes were blue, his genes reveal that his hair was black or brown and his skin was dark. "This was a result that was unexpected," said Dr Lalueza-Fox. Scientists had thought the first Europeans became fair [skin] soon after they left Africa and moved to the continent about 45,000 years ago. "It is obvious that this is not the case, because this guy has been in Europe for 40,000 years and he still has dark skin." Genetic tests reveal that a hunter-gatherer who lived 7,000 years ago had the unusual combination of dark skin and hair and blue eyes.

"Dr. Reich and his colleagues also tracked changes in the color of European skin. The original hunter-gatherers, descendants of people who had come from Africa, had dark skin as recently as 9,000 years ago. Farmers arriving from Anatolia [Turkey] were lighter [skin color], and this trait spread through Europe. Later, a new gene variant emerged that lightened European skin even more....He hypothesizes that it was the shift to agriculture, which reduced the intake of vitamin D, that may have triggered a change in skin color. "Evidence for this comes from a study by an international team of scientists, published last month in the journal Nature. The team, led by population geneticists Iain Mathieson, David Reich, and colleagues from Harvard Medical School, analyzed the genomes of 230 people from archaeological sites across Europe who lived between 2,300 and 8,000 years ago, and compared them to the genomes of modern Europeans, gleaned from the 1000 Genomes Project."

"The spread of the light-skin genes in the wake of farming, Mathieson, Reich, and colleagues suggest, may have a similar explanation: since the farmers’ diet was less heavy in meat than that of the hunter-gatherers, their vitamin D intake was reduced. Pale skin enabled wheat-eating farmers to combat vitamin deficiency."

"Anders Götherstörm, head of archaeogenetic research at the archaeological research laboratory at Stockholm University, said: 'Our results stress the importance Anatolia [Turkey] has had on Europe's prehistory. 'But to fully understand how the agricultural development proceeded we need to dive deeper down into material from the Levant.' The researchers extracted DNA from human remains found at the site of an ancient settlement in Kumtepe in Troas, northwestern Anatolia, in Turkey. The remains are thought to belong to Neolithic farmers who were among the first inhabitants of the settlement, which eventually gave rise to the city of Troy. The team behind the study compared the DNA with genetic material from other ancient farmers in Europe along with DNA from modern Europeans. Ayca Omrak, who was the first author of the research at Stockholm University, said: 'I have never worked with a more complicated material. 'I could use the DNA from the Kumptepe material to trace the European farmers back to Anatolia. 'It is also fun to have worked with this material from the Kumtepe site, as this is the precursor to Troy.'

A separate study recently found that a rise in farming and metal work in Ireland led to a 'genetic shift' in the region, fueled by an influx of people from the Black Sea and the Middle East. Genes responsible for lighter skin in northern populations were also far less prevalent in prehistoric Europeans. However, it appears the early farmers from Anatolia who migrated into Europe in the Neolithic period also carried some genes for lighter skin color with them. Those Neolithic farmers mostly had light skin and dark eyes — the opposite of many of the hunter-gatherers with whom they now lived side by side. “They looked different, spoke different languages … had different diets,” says Hartwick College archaeologist David Anthony. “For the most part, they stayed separate.”

"The SLC24A5 gene is important in regulation of melanogenesis and hence an important loci in determining skin pigmentation phenotype. It has a large-effect variant that was introduced into Western Europe via migrating Neolithic farming populations, and continued to be under selection post-admixture (Ju & Mathieson, 2021). Although the SLC24A5 light skin allele is now almost fixed in Europe, it is interestingly also associated with a lighter skin phototype in Africans, achieving high frequencies in Afro-Asiatic groups in East Africa (28%–50%),...However, as alluded to earlier, considerable genetic/evolutionary evidence links depigmentation to the expansion of agriculture and hence loss of vitamin D that would otherwise have been supplied by hunter-gatherers (Ju & Mathieson, 2021; Wilde et al., 2014).