re: Early Irish people were dark skinned with blue eyes.

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They likely had the coloring of a guy from Egypt or somewhere in that region

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Here's how they did it:

They have dug up skeletons from all time periods and extracted DNA. This has allowed them to track genetic changes over the millennia.

The issue is that determining skin/hair/eye color from DNA can only give you probabilities. Sometimes the probabilities are pretty high, but usually not 100%. But with numerous samples I imagine it might approach 100%.

I have no doubt that early Europeans were darker skinned, but I doubt they were black. They likely had the coloring of a guy from Egypt or somewhere in that region.

And, yes, farmers from Anatolia replaced most of the native Europeans starting about 10,000 years ago (depending on where in Europe we're talking). These people would have looked very similar to modern Sardinians (they know this because modern Sardinians have had very little admixture since that time).

Then about 5,000 years ago, the Indo-European people came from Russia/Ukraine and replaced pretty much everyone in Northern Europe (and did so in just a few hundred years). These people were taller and blonder than the natives and gave northern Europe the coloring it has today.

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