The Pith: the evolution of lighter skin is complex, and seems to have occurred in stages. The current European phenotype may date to the end of the last Ice Age.
A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, The timing of pigmentation lightening in Europeans, is rather interesting. It's important because skin pigmentation has been one of the major successes of the first age of human genomics. In 2002 we really didn't know the nature of normal human variation in skin color in terms of specific genes (basically, we knew about MC1R). This is what Armand Leroi observed in Mutants in 2005, wondering about our ignorance of such a salient trait. Within a few years though Leroi's contention was out of date (in fact, while Mutants was going to press it became out of date) . Today we do know the genetic architecture of pigmentation. This is why GEDmatch can predict that my daughter's eyes will be light brown from just her SNPs (they are currently hazel). This genomic yield was facilitated by the fact that pigmentation seems to be a trait where most human variation is controlled by half a dozen genes. In contrast, height or I.Q. are controlled by innumerable genes.
