Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG update

Ireland's broadband users face price hikes of 18% from next September?

TELCOS SAY THEY INTEND TO PASS ON EIR’S INCREASE IN WHOLESALE RATES TO CONSUMERS

    

EIR DEFENDS PRICE CHANGES, SAYING THEY WERE LINKED TO THE COMPANY’S INCREASED INVESTMENT IN HIGH-SPEED FIBRE BROADBAND.

Consumers can expect an 18% hike in broadband prices from next September as a result of changes to Eir’s wholesale rates.

The State’s largest telco rents space on its network to rival operators such as Vodafone, BT, Magnet and Sky, as well as its own retail arm.

From September, it plans to raise fibre broadband prices for wholesale customers from €19.50 to €23 a month. Non-Eir operators have signalled the hike, which has been approved by regulator Comreg, would be passed on in full to consumers.

Eir, however, said the rate increase, when combined with a €2.11 reduction in its traditional fixed-line rental rates due in July, was broadly price neutral, and therefore did not necessitate a price rise at the retail end.

The assertion was disputed by rivals, which claimed the two price changes related to different product sets and could not be used to offset each other.

Alto, the umbrella group for non-Eir companies, described Eir’s move as “cynical”, claiming it bore no relation to the costs associated with providing the service. “With improved efficiencies and economies of scale, the costs should actually be decreasing,” Alto spokesman Ronan Lupton said

He said Eir was imposing such charges with impunity and without any regard to the impact it would have on wholesale customers and ultimately the consumer.

In the context of the National Broadband Plan, Mr Lupton said Eir’s move emphasised the importance of having “very strict price controls on the winning tenderer”.

However, Eir defended the price changes, saying they were linked to the company’s increased investment in high-speed fibre broadband.

“We believe it is fair that we can make a reasonable return on investment that delivers much improved services,” the company said in a statement.

The likely price hike comes in the wake of an analysis by the European Commission, which suggested Irish consumers already face the second highest prices in the EU.

Priest claims Irish Catholic Church 

‘is beyond the point of redemption’

Fr Tony Flannery says female clergy would make a dramatic change amid serious crisis.

      

REDEMPTORIST FR TONY FLANNERY PIC ABOVE LEFT: ‘THE CATHOLIC PRIESTHOOD AS WE HAVE KNOWN IT, THIS MALE CELIBATE THING, IS GONE.’

Dissident Irish priest Fr Tony Flannery has said the Catholic Church inIreland is in such “serious crisis” that it may well have gone beyond the point of redemption.

Fr Flannery, a Redemptorist priest who was suspended from duties in 2012 by the Holy See, was speaking in Rome on Wednesday at a meeting of WOW (Women’s Ordination Worldwide) in the celebrated House of Women, just down the banks of the Tiber from the Vatican.

Fr Flannery’s support for the concept of women priests in the Catholic Church was one of many issues which led to disciplinary sanctions against him.

Despite that, he repeated his support for women priests , saying: “We all know that the Church in Ireland is in serious crisis, indeed a lot of people would say at this stage that it has gone beyond the point of redemption.

“If you could release the energy of women, it would make a dramatic change.

“I’d say for example that a fair number of Redemptorist priests agree with what I say about women priests but they just think that I made the mistake of saying it publicly,” he said. “A lot of them keep their heads down because they don’t want to lose their ministry.

“The argument that a woman cannot be a minister of the Eucharist because she cannot be a persona Christi (someone who acts as Jesus and as God), that is such a ridiculous argument.

“That argument belongs to the time of the flat earth, when Galileo was persecuted.

“It is depressing and sad and disturbing that Pope Francis, a man for whom we have so much hope, seems to have that dreadful attitude (towards women priests)”.

Fr Flannery said parishoners “have moved light years ahead of the bishops in attitude”, which makes it difficult to maintain a dialogue with an ecclesiastical authority that is out of touch.

He said that within the church reform movement, people were warned “not to talk about the ordination of women”, because that was too “radical”.

Even though he conceded Pope Francis remains doctrinally conservative, he said he is “still quite hopeful” about the reform movement.

“The Catholic priesthood as we have known it, this male celibate thing, is gone,” he said. “So while all of that is happening, it gives me hope for real, real change. I certainly won’t live to see it…if it bears fruit in one hundred years’ time, it will have been worth doing.

“As for Ireland, it is no longer a Catholic country. A lot of people now say I don’t see what the issue is anymore, people just take it (sexual equality) for granted. Young Irish people will tell you that this Church is mediaeval in its thinking, they simply don’t care.”

Men can underestimate how much sex their wives and girlfriends want?

      

Men in long-term relationships tend to underestimate their female partners’ sex drive, new data from two Canadian universities show. A study published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicates that the conventional wisdom eternally exploited in sitcom riffs and stand-up routines and that wives are incapable of satisfying their husbands’ gargantuan libidos which may be a figment of the male imagination.

Psychologists from the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario studied 229 North American couples, most of which were heterosexual partnerships. (A few same-gender couples participated, but not enough to produce any statistically significant data.) Research subjects were aged 18 to 68 and had been in their current relationships for an average of six years; they reported having sex about one to two times per week.

The members of the couples either visited the lab once to report on their general sexual desire, their perception of their partner’s sexual desire, and their satisfaction with their relationship, or kept a daily three-week diary on those same three factors. Some also reported on their daily level of motivation to evade sexual rejection.

The researchers found that, on a regular basis, men significantly underperceived the degree of their female partners’ sexual desire, while women consistently made accurate judgments about how much their male partners wanted sex. Among diary-keeping couples, on days when men underestimated their female partners’ libido, the women showed higher levels of relationship satisfaction.

This suggests that, whether consciously or not, men might be better partners when they think they have to work for it—in other words, a man will try harder to please his female partner if he thinks she’s not responding to his advances, which keeps him from taking the relationship for granted and getting lazy. Another likely explanation for male sexual underperception: fear of rejection. On days when men reported in their diaries a high level of motivation to avoid sexual rejection, they were more likely to underestimate their partners’ desire for sex, perhaps as a precaution against making advances that could go unreturned.

Socialized beliefs and behaviors could contribute to the perception gap, too. Women may make fewer or subtler sexual overtures that their partners, or, Elizabeth Bernstein suggests at the Wall Street Journal, if a woman knows she has a higher sex drive than her husband in general or on a particular occasion, she may refrain from making a move to avoid embarrassing or emasculating him if he wants to say no.

But there’s a larger, more amorphous barrier to accurate male sex predictions out there: The prevailing notion that women just aren’t that concerned with sex. As Taryn Hillin writes at Fusion:

Consider this—when this study started making news this week, the most common headlines were some variation of “Women are more interested in sex than you think” or “Hey guys, women want sex more often than you think.” These headlines assume that we, the readers, believe women are not interested in sex to begin with, and so this news is somehow shocking.

These framings ignore the fact that women also read news reports and probably already know that all those sitcom gags about sexually uninterested wives don’t match up with the reality of their experiences. As a lump demographic, men report higher sex drives than women, but women’s reports cover a much larger range that varies based on geography and other environmental factors, suggesting that the concept of sex drive is molded by sociocultural forces. Kristen Mark’s June 2015 paper in Current Sexual Health Reports analyzed 31 studies on sexual desire and sex-drive discrepancy in relationships; she found that, in long-term heterosexual partnerships, women and men are equally likely to be the lower-libido member of their couple.

Still, the findings of this new Canadian study were somewhat surprising, because the only previous research on men’s sex-drive perception focused on the situation of a man meeting a woman for the first time or evaluating the sexual interest of a fictional or unknown woman. These studies have reliably shown that men tend to overestimate the sexual interest demonstrated by these women’s behaviors.

That explains the circumstances of most overaggressive late-night bar encounters. Taken together, these contradicting trends suggest that when many men try to gauge a partner or potential partner’s desire, they perceive what they want to believe.

Now you can obtain a Wild Atlantic passport!

     

PICTURED (RIGHT) AT THE LAUNCH OF A NEW PASSPORT FOR THE WILD ATLANTIC WAY ARE MINISTER OF STATE FOR TOURISM AND SPORT PATRICK O’DONOVAN WITH FIONA MONAGHAN, HEAD OF WILD ATLANTIC WAY, FAILTE IRELAND

Minister of State for Tourism and Sport, Patrick O’Donovan has launched the official Wild Atlantic Way Passport.

The joint Fáilte Ireland and An Post initiative provides visitors to the west with a recorded souvenir of their journey along some or all of the 188 Discovery Points on the world’s longest coastal touring route.

Minister O’Donovan said: “The Wild Atlantic Way is already proving popular with visitors – both from overseas and from Ireland. We want to deepen visitor engagement and encourage those who travel along the route to slow down, dwell longer and immerse themselves in the local towns and villages of Sligo along the west coast. The local Post Office is at the heart of these communities and the passport is a clever means to build such interaction into the Wild Atlantic Way experience.”

The new passport contains a section for each of the various zones along the route and visitors to Discovery Points can call in to the local Post office to have their passport stamped with a unique motif for each one. The Wild Atlantic Way Passport may be purchased (for €10) at over 130 selected An Post Offices, along the Wild Atlantic Way route as well as at Dublin’s GPO and St Andrew’s Street Post Offices.

Fiona Monaghan, Fáilte Ireland’s Head of the Wild Atlantic Way, today emphasised: “This passport is a wonderful way for visitors to record their experiences along the Wild Atlantic Way. However, by encouraging visitors to visit local towns to get their passport stamped in the Post Office, we also hope the passport will help increase tourist activity and engagement with people and places of Sligo.

“The passport is also neatly placed to encourage a return trip for those that have part-completed their passport – and we will be urging visitors to think about completing their collection of Wild Atlantic Way stamps over a number of years.”

Visitors will be rewarded for buying a passport with free entry into a draw for a holiday of a lifetime along the Wild Atlantic Way. Additionally, every time a visitor reaches 20 new stamps in their passport, they are encouraged to call into the nearest Tourist Information Office to receive a Wild Atlantic Way gift.

An Post Director of Innovation and Quality, John McConnell said that visitors are assured of a warm welcome at Post Offices along the Wild Atlantic Way.

“Ensuring the best possible customer experience is what An Post does on a daily basis throughout our retail network. This colourful, keepsake Passport is a great addition to our range of products and services and will help to drive footfall into rural Post Offices along the route. We’re delighted to be working so closely with Fáilte Ireland and here’s to a busy summer season ahead.”

Promotional material will be visible in all participating Post Offices and 16 Tourist Information Offices advertising the Passports to both domestic and overseas visitors. Training for all the Post Office staff involved has been provided to ensure they are knowledgeable about the Wild Atlantic Way initiative and its objectives.

The Wild Atlantic Way Passport is also being promoted across all Wild Atlantic Way digital platforms – the website, the dedicated App and social media channels.

Fungie the bottlenose dolphin injured by a ‘propellor blade’

      

THE BELOVED DINGLE DOLPHIN, FUNGIE, HAS BEEN INJURED, MOST LIKELY DUE TO A PROPELLER OF A BOAT.

Spotted yesterday, photos show the bottlenose dolphin has a deep wound on his side while a scratch goes over the side of the dorsal fin.

A Facebook page devoted to the dolphin and his welfare, Fungie Forever, posted the images of the injury saying that “while it looks deep, wide and red but we have seen deeper wounds on other dolphins that healed quite well”.

In a post on Facebook, they said they will continue to keep an eye on him:

“At first Fungie seemed to be quiet and stayed under water but after as while he started to play spontaneous and jump over and over and over… We tried to leave him in peace, give him some rest but he started to jump again and again.”

They also say that while they are “gutted”, they expect him to make a full recovery – last year, he sustained an injury to his chin which has healed within weeks.

It is unknown how exactly the injury was sustained – Fungie is said to be well used to the local boats, he is sometimes attracted to visitors to the harbour.

Our Universe is expanding way faster than we had thought, Researchers now say

I WRITE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.  

      

LEFT PICTURE IS A DIAGRAM OF THE COSMIC DISTANCE LADDER.  THE BRIGHT SPOT IN THE LOWER LEFT OF THE MIDDLE PICTURE IS A SUPERNOVA IN THE NGC 4526 GALAXY.

The Universe is expanding. In the standard model of cosmology the rate of that expansion is given by the Hubble parameter, which is a measure of the dark energy that drives cosmic expansion. New observations of distant galaxies yield a higher than expected Hubble value. That may mean the Universe is expanding faster than we thought, but there’s no need to start rewriting textbooks just yet.

Since the Hubble parameter measures the rate of cosmic expansion, one way to determine it is to compare the redshift of light from distant galaxies with their distance. The cosmological redshift of a galaxy is easy to measure, and is due to the fact that cosmic expansion stretches the wavelength of light as it travels across millions or billions of light years, making it appear more red. By comparing the redshifts for galaxies of different distances we can determine just how fast the Universe is expanding.

Unfortunately distance is difficult to determine. It relies upon a range of methods that vary depending on distance, known as the cosmic distance ladder. For close stars we can use parallax, which is an apparent shift of stars relative to more distant objects due to the Earth’s motion around the Sun. The greater a star’s distance the smaller its parallax, so the method is only good to about 1,600 light years. For larger distances we can look at variable stars such as Cepheid variables.

We know the distance to some Cepheid variables from their parallax, so we can determine their actual brightness (absolute magnitude). From this we’ve found that the rate at which a Cepheid variable changes in brightness correlates with its overall brightness. This relation means we can determine the absolute brightness of Cepheid variables greater than 1,600 light years away. If we compare that to their apparent brightness we can calculate their distance. By observing Cepheids in various galaxies we can determine galactic distances. We can observe Cepheids out to about 50 million light years, at which point they’re simply too faint to currently observe.

Enter the supernova. In a single burst of light a supernova can outshine an entire galaxy, so they can be detected across billions of light years. While there are several types of supernovae, one type (Type Ia) has a fairly consistent maximum brightness. We know this by observing several in galaxies where Cepheids have been used to determine their distance. Just like Cepheids, we can compare the actual brightness of a Type Ia supernova with its apparent brightness and determine the distance of a galaxy.    

Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG update

Irish Water customers set to get first quarterly bills from Wednesday next

Utility expects to raise €70m from first billing quarter

   

Irish Water has announced a boost in the number of customer service agents at the Cork-based company Abtran, with 750 agents available to take calls from the public as the billing commences.

Irish Water bills will begin arriving at customers’ homes from Wednesday as the utility begins charging for water usage over the past three months.

Customers in Gorey, Navan and north Donegal will be among the first to receive meter-read bills.

Customers with no meters will receive bills based on a fixed charge rate.

The first batch of quarterly bills will be issued to 1.5 million customers, sent via email and post, arriving at homes around the country every day for the next eight weeks.

Irish Water expects to raise €70 million from the first billing quarter (covering the period January 1st to March 31st, 2015) and a total of €271 million for the year.

Deluge of queries

Cork-based call centre Abtran, which deals with Irish Water queries, has hired an additional 350 staff to deal with an expected deluge of customer queries as bills begin to arrive.

The company, which employs 2,200 people at its offices in Mahon and Curraheen, has trained a total of 750 people to deal specifically with Irish Water queries over the next eight weeks.

Two-thirds of customers have registered, amounting to 1.25 million households, according to Irish Water.

“Those who have their own water and waste water services shouldn’t be getting a bill from us, but we have no way of knowing who they are because you might have your own well or septic tank and also have a service from the mains but you don’t use it, so we need to have that information so we know exactly who to bill,” Irish Water head of communications Elizabeth Arnett said.

A conservation grant?

All households are eligible for the €100 Water Conservation Grant, whether they are supplied by Irish Water or not.

In situations where Irish Water cannot distinguish households by their address, the utility will wait for customer engagement on receipt of the bill and then allocate an account number.

For example, a cluster of houses using the same townland address will be issued with individual bills.

When the customer contacts Irish Water and quotes the account number on their bill, that number will become their unique account number.

Some 40% of Irish households have non-unique addresses, but Irish Water says it has “worked through the data” to minimise problems to about 10 per cent of households.

Geospatial database

In these cases, the utility will use An Post’s geospatial database to confirm the correct bill is delivered to the correct house.

To facilitate meter billing, the country has been divided into three geographic regions, with 41 sub regions and 123 “read parcel” areas to issue bills every 13 weeks.

As meter installation continues, the billing cycle will remain consistent as customers move from unmetered to metered tariffs.

The “metering effect” could bring about a reduction in water usage of between 10 per cent and 15%, while the first 1,000 leaks to be fixed under Irish Water’s €51 million “first fix” scheme will save 20 million litres of water.

Leaks identified

Leaks identified in the first 413,000 metered homes last October amounted to 46 million litres of water.

“That’s enough water to supply Limerick city every day, leaking under driveways,” Ms Arnett said.

Irish Water will issue a total of 1.7 million bills, inclusive of households not classed as customers, such as those served by group schemes or private wells.

Bills will be issued quarterly and will be based on the number of days in each quarter. Bills will be metered and unmetered, depending on whether a meter has been installed. A single occupant household can expect a first bill of €40 or less, while a two-adult household can expect a charge of €65 or less.

Customers can apply for the government’s Water Conservation Grant, which will be available through the Department of Social Protection from September.

A leaflet drop

Protesters gathered outside Abtran offices in Mahon on Tuesday said they plan to drop leaflets to every household in Cork calling for continued resistance to Irish Water and demanding its abolition.

Protester Brian Gould said Irish Water’s figures do not add up.

“Irish Water are telling us there is 1.5 million people signed up, do they count the amount of letters that were sent back to them with no consent?

“We are not their customers, we already pay for our water and we have been paying for it for the past 30 years,” he said.

House prices in Mayo six per cent higher than a year ago

  

House prices in rural counties such as Mayo are on the rise.

House prices in Mayo for the first three months of 2015 were six per cent higher than a year previously, according to the latest House Price Report released by Ireland’s biggest property website, Daft.ie. This compared to a fall of five per cent a year ago.

The average house price is now €127,000 – nine per cent above its lowest point.

Nationally, the average asking price for a house in Ireland grew by 4.6 per cent in the first three months of 2015. This marks a return to price growth following a one per cent fall in the final three months of 2014.

The average asking price nationwide is now €201,000 – the first time since mid-2011 that it has been above €200,000. This compares with a low of €170,000 in mid-2013 and a high of €378,000 in mid-2007.

For the first time in nearly four years, quarterly growth in prices in Dublin was slower than elsewhere in the country. Prices in Dublin are now 2.9 per cent higher than in late 2014, whereas outside Dublin prices rose by 5.9 per cent in the same three-month period.

Commenting on the figures, the author of the Daft.ie report, Ronan Lyons, said: “It is clear that the Central Bank rules have had an impact on the market. Dublin prices are now anchored to real economic conditions, with survey respondents expecting significantly slower house price growth now than a year ago.

“Similarly, compared to a year ago, a far higher proportion of respondents, in the capital and elsewhere, indicated the need to save for a deposit as a key reason for delaying buying a home.”

“Outside Dublin, the Central Bank rules that link mortgages and incomes seem to have had, if anything, a positive impact on prices. The fact that house prices vary across the country by far more than incomes do means demand should reshuffle from Dublin to elsewhere in the country. While this may sound helpful, it does not address the underlying lack of supply in Dublin, which needs to be addressed as a matter of priority.”

Eircom refunds given to over 11,000 Irish customers for loss of service

Telecoms firm agrees out-of-court settlement with industry watchhdog ComReg

   

Eircom has refunded more than 11,600 customers for loss of service last year.

Eircom has refunded more than 11,600 customers for loss of service last year. The company refunded €700,000 to residential and retail customers who experienced outages exceeding ten working days between the end of December 2013 and April 30th last year.

The outages occurred during a period when the country was hit with severe storm damage.

Eircom agreed an out-of-court settlement with industry watchdog ComReg to refund customers disrupted. The settlement will also include customers affected from October 31 last year until the end of 2015.

As part of the settlement, Eircom withdrew its High Court appeal. The settlement will also see Eircom establish a Performance Improvement Programme for 2015.

Eircom’s revenues fell by 4% to €629 million for the six months to the end of December 2014 on the back of losses in its fixed line business.

Fixed line access net losses for the period were 22,000, the company said, with fixed line revenues down 5% to €474 million.

However, the losses were partially offset by a reduction in operating costs which fell by 18 million or 4% to €403 million.

Is your sex drive abnormal? 

Science says you never had one to begin with

  

The following excerpts are from an interview by New Scientist’s Alison George with Emily Nagoski, director of Wellness Education at Smith College. In her new book on the science of sex, Come As You Are, Nagoski refutes the existence of a “sex drive,” claiming that such a notion misses the bigger picture.

Why is there no such thing as a sex drive?

A drive is a motivational system to deal with life-or-death issues, like hunger or being too cold. You’re not going to die if you don’t have sex.

But biologists might say that if you don’t reproduce, that is a form of death

Yes. That’s the argument that was used when desire was being added to the way sexual dysfunctions were diagnosed in the 1970s, to justify the framing of sexual desire as a drive. But when it comes to sex, there just isn’t any physical evidence of a drive mechanism.

So what’s going on?

If sex is a drive then desire should be spontaneous, like a hunger. When you see a sexy person or have a stray sexy thought, it activates an internal craving or urge for sex. That’s called “spontaneous desire”. It feels like it comes out of the blue. But there is another way of experiencing desire which is also healthy and normal, called “responsive desire”, where your interest only emerges in response to arousal. So, your partner comes over and starts kissing your neck and you’re like, “oh, right, sex, that’s a good idea”.

Could super-bugs kill more people than cancer?

 

Recent infection incidents add urgency to Obama administration’s recent superbug plan.

Superbugs could kill more people than cancer by 2050 if antibiotic overuse trends continue, according to a recent study that explored the scenario of a world with bacteria unfazed by any drugs.

A $1.2 billion action plan just released by the Obama administration aims to prevent that possibility. It mandates better stewardship of the existing antibiotic arsenal and accelerates efforts to develop new classes of these medications.

The list of dangerous microbes continues to grow as policy makers, health experts and scientists scramble to react. On Thursday, for example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the spread of Shigella sonnei, a drug-resistant bacteria estimated to cause severe gastrointestinal distress in half a million Americans each year.

In California, Olympus Corporation issued a new set of cleaning guidelines for the specialized medical scopes linked to superbug outbreaks at two hospitals in the state. Medical centers from coast to coast are re-examing their procedures for disinfecting the devices.

Taken together, drug-resistant bacteria infect about 2 million Americans per year and kill about 23,000 of them, according to the CDC.

Carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, the microbe known as CRE that recently killed two patients and infected seven more at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, was barely in the public conscience a decade ago.

Today, it is a serious concern.

Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for health care associated infection prevention programs at the CDC, said it has been striking to watch CRE cases emerge across the nation over the years.

“You go back and look at the map in the early 2000s, and only three or four states were lit up. Now, essentially, you have almost all 50 states with reported CRE infections,” Srinivasan said.

As of February, only Idaho and Maine had no confirmed CRE cases.

The scientific and medical communities haven’t ignored the problem. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved six new antibiotics in the past 11 months, expanding the options for physicians treating infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly known as MRSA.

But drug development efforts have not been enough, Srinivasan said.

“Antibiotic resistance is developing faster than we are developing antibiotics,” he said. “We are in a crisis situation with respect to the impact that this threat poses to people in the United States and worldwide. Big threats require big actions.”

SCARY PREDICTION

Last year, the United Kingdom published a study that examined the economic and humanitarian impacts of rising antibiotic resistance rates.

The study found that if drug resistance reached 100 percent within 15 years, the worldwide number of people who die each year would increase from about 700,000 today to 10 million, eclipsing current cancer death rates by nearly 2 million.

A supporting study by the RAND Corporation found that the 100 percent scenario could cause 444 million deaths by 2050, while a 40 percent increase in resistance would mean 104 million deaths during the same time frame and a 5 percent jump would cause 11 million deaths.

The economic impact in the worst-case scenario would exceed $100 trillion over 40 years.

Humans in Europe only recently developed Light Skin

  

A new study has revealed that humans living in Europe had dark skin for the majority of the time they have inhabited the continent.

The study, presented at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists (AAAS), suggests that many of the characteristics associated with European genetics are a recent development in the broader history of human evolution and migration. Led by Dr. Iain Mathieson from Harvard University, the international team of researchers analysed 83 human gene samples collected as part of the ‘1000 Genomes Project’ (an initiative designed to sequence the genomes of a large number of people and allow public access to the data for scientific research).

Focusing on two genes, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, which are responsible for de-pigmentation and pale skin, the team studied samples taken from a wide range of ancient populations spread across different periods and different locations.

Home sapiens resided solely in Africa up until 700,000 BCE, with the first examples ofAustralopithecus afarensis, the precursor of Homo erectus, appearing there around 3.3 million years ago. Exactly when the ancestors of humans began their migration to other continents is open to debate, but the oldest human fossil ever found in Europe was discovered near Heidelberg in Germany, and dates back to 650,000 BCE.

The study confirms the existing presumption that the first modern humans migrating from Africa to Europe had dark skin, which would have been beneficial in the hot African climate. However, it also found that early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary lacked the genes responsible for pale skin as recently as 8500 years ago.

Migration from the Near East is believed to have been responsible for the arrival of the genes associated with lighter skin pigmentation. As these farmers first came to the continent their interbreeding with the existing inhabitants saw the SLC24A5 gene spread through central and southern Europe, leading to lighter skin pigmentation in those regions. As the AAAS reports: “As they (farmers from the Near East) interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.”

In northern Europe however, the situation seems to have been different. Remains studied from Southern Sweden were found to have the gene variants responsible for lighter skin and blonde hair as far back as 7,700 years ago, indicating the inhabitants of Northern Europe had light skin and eyes before the migration from the Near East.

It is still unclear why the genes related to paler skin spread so quickly and so widely, but the study suggests it was probably connected to a need to absorb Vitamin D. The climate of Europe generally provides shorter days and less sunlight, particularly in the north. Lighter skin pigmentations allow the more efficient absorption and synthesis of Vitamin D (the crucial vitamin that humans can synthesize from sun light).

The focus of the study was the process and rate of natural selection in Europe. By successfully charting the timing and spread of the SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 genes, the study has raised some fascinating questions. Exactly why the change in skin pigmentation occurred when it did is unclear, while the speed at which natural selection took place was much faster than typically expected.