A study of within-Africa variation in skin color has demonstrated that the huge level of diversity is linked to previously-undescribed regions of the genome that seem to have been present for several hundred thousand years. Previous work has hypothesized that variation in skin pigmentation is adaptive for sun exposure. The regions of the genome described here also seem to be linked to the lower risk of Africans for melanoma. In terms of human evolution, an interesting finding noted that the older version of these variants in many cases was the one associated with lighter skin, suggesting that perhaps the ancestral state of humans was moderately pigmented rather than darkly pigmented skin.
News article here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171012143324.htm
Kim Foecke
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