Ancient Mankind was Black Skinned

Iain Mathieson (2020), The evolution of skin pigmentation associated variation in West Eurasia https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.08.085274v1.full.pdf

This article is further confirmation that the ancient Europeans were Black skinned. Mathieson et al, wrote that: “The genetic scores of the oldest individuals in the dataset fall within the range of present-day West African populations, showing that Early Upper Paleolithic [~50-20,000 years BP] modern humans, such as Ust’Ishim, carried few of the light skin pigmentation alleles that are common in present-day Europe.”

The authors recognized that not only were the Upper Paleolithic anatomically modern humans (AMH) Black, the Neanderthal and Denisovans were also Black. “Relatively dark skin pigmentation in Early Upper Paleolithic Europe would be consistent with those populations being relatively poorly adapted to high latitude conditions as a result of having recently migrated from lower latitudes. On the other hand, although we have shown that these  populations carried few of the light pigmentation alleles that are segregating in present-day Europe, they may have carried different alleles that we cannot now detect. As an extreme example, Neanderthals and the Altai Denisovan individual show genetic scores that are in a similar range to Early Upper Paleolithic individuals (Table S1), but it is highly plausible that 258 these populations, who lived at high latitudes for hundreds of thousands of years, would have adapted independently to low UV levels. For this reason, we cannot confidently make statements about the skin pigmentation of ancient populations.”

This final statement is false. We can say the pigment of the ancient Europeans was Black/Dark skinned.