Light skin

Light skin is a naturally occurring human skin color, which has little eumelanin pigmentation and which has been adapted to environments of low UV radiation. Light skin is most commonly found amongst the native populations of Europe as measured through skin reflectance. People with light skin pigmentation are often referred to as white or fair, although these usages can be ambiguous in some countries where it is used to refer specifically to certain ethnic groups or populations.

It has been hypothesized that dark skin pigmentation was the original condition for the genus Homo, including Homo sapiens. However, as populations migrated away from the tropics between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation, they developed light skin pigmentation as an evolutionary selection acting against vitamin D depletion. Based on ancient DNA analysis conducted in 2014 on human skeletal remains from western Europe, this change from dark to light skin pigmentation likely occurred only recently for at least some Europeans. Paleogenomics researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and his colleagues observed that a 7,000-year-old hunter-gatherer from the La Braña-Arintero labyrinthine cave in the Cantabrian Mountains possessed the allele for blue eyes but not the European mutations for lighter skin pigmentation.