In 1996 they found a skull of a 7,500 year old woman in a cave by Point Europa in Gibraltar. This makes her the oldest known modern human resident of Gibraltar, although she was buried near other caves where Neanderthals had been buried 100,000 years ago. Gibraltar is a peninsula off the coast of Spain, but is in British possession today. It is one of the closest parts of Europe to Africa and you can see Africa across the sea from there. Point Europa is the southermost tip of Gibraltar and has a light house on it, and some nearby caves. The woman was named Calpeia, from the ancient name for Gibraltar, Mons Calpe.
In 2019, they studied Calpeia’s facial features (even though her skull had been deformed) and her DNA. They were able to tell some of what she looked like, as well as trace her ancestey. It turns out that only 10% of her dna was from the local Mesolithic hunter gatherers of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain/Portugal), whereas the other 90% of her was from the Neolithic farmers of Anatolia (modern day Turkey), located on the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea. This suggests that her recent ancestors must have migrated from Anatolia. Since it would have taken many generations for her to reach overland, and likely picking up other genetic signals along the way, they must have arrived by a coastal route. By my reckoning, since if 10% of her DNA was local, then I could imagine that one of her great grandparents was from the Iberian Peninsula, who would have married someone with Anatolian DNA, and their child (her grandparent) would marry someone else with Anatolian DNA (her other grandparent), so that their child (her parent) was 1/4 Iberian and 3/4 Anatolian, while her other parent could have made the trip straight from Anatolia. That’s pretty fast to cross that big sea. Since the population of the island of Sardinia is largely Anatolian, it seems likely that they crossed the sea West on boats. The people of Iberia were Western Hunter Gatherers, while the Anatolians were some of the first people to farm. The Anatolians spread across Europe, introducing agriculture, and interacting with the local hunter gatherers in various ways, sometimes trading with them, other times pushing them to niche lands while they took the best farmland for themselves, sometimes assimilating them, and other times maybe even enslaving them or treating them as lower class. The Anatolians were newcomers to this area at this time, but had already built some stone circles in Iberia (they would go on to build Stonehenge a couple thousand years later after they reached the British Isles). The Anatolians living at Gibraltar didn’t appear to do any agriculture though, and seemed to have gotten most of their food from hunting and fishing. Evidence of farming nearby (125 miles) is present though in the form of wheat seeds.
They were able to find out enough about what she looked like to recreate her face, and displayed a model of it in a museum. Like most Anatolians, she had light skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. The native Iberians would have had darker skin and blue eyes, which she did not inherit. Calpeia would essentially look like a modern Spanish woman today, as most of Spain’s ancestry is from the Anatolians, since later waves of migration into Iberia from the West didn’t leave much of a genetic imprint.
Sources:
News Stories -
Unveiling Recreation (Sep 2019)
https://www.chronicle.gi/unveiling-calpeia-the-face-of-the-first-known-gibraltarian/
Facial Recreation (Jun 2020)
Visiting (Jul 2020)
https://www.chronicle.gi/a-visit-to-europa-point/
Videos:
Creating face - https://youtu.be/WeQyW4CObLo
Unveiling face - https://youtu.be/2241v3jqZC0
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