Agnostic Atheism? Your opinions thread's landfill

[Epimethean]

Tango, even your beloved Egyptian texts suggest that light skinned people came from the area of Syria. Where do you get the notion that light skinned people originated in South Africa? Certainly, the research now suggests that it was from South Africa that the original modern man came (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march...30411.html), but as far as skin color, please share your source for "whites" coming originally from that region, since the science is still out on exactly how white skin came to exist and what we do know seems to suggest it is likely to have developed north of the Equator due to environmental adaptations.

[houseofcantor]

While my research is minimal, I'm gonna go with clothing being responsible for white skin. That's a+b=c. And I should have specified modern technology is given from the cold.

Dtango I like; he knows stuff I don't, he's an expert. There's this question of expertise based on publication and popularity, I don't agree with. Here's a guy doing it for love and passion, his agenda is his own. Once you start throwing fame of the name in the mix; agenda starts to go exponential.

Being a naive philosopher doesn't mean naive. Anybody with any kinda name has already incorporated someone else's agenda. The last "expert," on circumcision was an apologist - thinking Christian 'cause it was LA - and they ain't gonna be crediting no Egypt with no Hebrew 'cause that just ain't done. That's what I got from skimming that page - agenda - and researching experts for their agenda is not having a good time.

I'm having a good time listening to dtango tell it, and throwing my two cents in. If I'm being senseless, we''ll debate it.

[Shell B]

I'm pretty sure aliens are responsible for whiteness. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant and will know better when they are older.

[Epimethean]

Shell B is someone I like. She's not an expert but has the intellect to know the difference between expertise and mania.

[Shell B]

Dtango I like; he knows stuff I don't, he's an expert.

Knowing stuff you do not know does not make someone an expert. There is also the little distinction between "knowing" and "asserting." Asserting is a lot like assuming in some situations, in one very important way.

Thanks, Epi. I like you too.

FYI, I'm not an expert in pseudosciencesociologyEgyptologyracism, but I do know a fuckload about genocide. A little research and a fourth grade textbook would put you miles ahead of tango on that subject. "Hurfdurf, you know, the Ukrainians, Jews, Congolese, Darfurians and Armenians could have just stopped being Ukrainian, Jewish, Congolese, Darfurian or Armenian and they would not have been slaughtered. Those fucking idiots deserved to die. I blame them, narf." Yeah, expert. *rolls eyes* Shit, I forgot, "Whitey did it."

[dtango]

Where do you get the notion that light skinned people originated in South Africa? Certainly, the research now suggests that it was from South Africa that the original modern man came (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march...30411.html), but as far as skin color, please share your source for "whites" coming originally from that region, since the science is still out on exactly how white skin came to exist and what we do know seems to suggest it is likely to have developed north of the Equator due to environmental adaptations.

Let us begin with the main line of modern reasoning:
Gods are today regarded as being immaterial and therefore were thus regarded at all times!
Native Africans are today blacks therefore native Africans were at all times black!

I read the article you suggested and apart from lack of any reference to skin colour I was impressed by the insistence of geneticists to disregard the conclusions paleoanthropologists have come to (something that they did in the case of the interbreeding between Hss and Neandethals). Microlithic assemblages are the work of modern humans and although South African fossils such as Klasies River Mouth have not been classified as “modern” the presence of microlithic assemblages in South African sites is evidence of presence of Hss in the area.

Anyhow, read the following abstract on the Florisbad cranium (the emphasis is mine)

The human cranium recovered at Florisbad in 1932 is compared with other Sub-Saharan African hominid remains from Broken Hill, the Omo and Klasies River Mouth. The Florisbad frontal is very broad, but despite this breadth and differences in zygomatic form, there is a definite resemblance to archaic Homo sapiens from Broken Hill. There is also some similarity to both Omo I and Omo II, while fragmentary remains from Klasies River are more lightly built and hence more modern in appearance. These impressions are strengthened by measurement and statistical analysis, which demonstrates that Florisbad and Broken Hill are distant from recent African populations. Even if Florisbad is less archaic than the earlier (Middle Pleistocene?) hominid, it is not noticeably Bushman-like. New dates suggestive of early Upper Pleistocene antiquity also place Florisbad securely in a lineage containing Broken Hill, and there is no evidence to support special ties with any one group of living Africans.(Wiley online library)

The first Australian Aborigines reached Australia 55,000 or even 60,000 years ago. How do we know that it was not at that time that the blacks moved into South Africa as the whites moved out?

Chinese and Japanese have skin of the same colour as the Caucasian whites. Why did they not develope blue eyes as well?

While my research is minimal, I'm gonna go with clothing being responsible for white skin.

Oh, my dear Irish friend, you will have to find an excuse for the black people living in South Africa clothed (Cape town is on Latitude 34 South while Malta and Crete Islands are located in virtually the same latitude but in the northern hemisphere) and keeping their deep dark colour as well as for the natives living in the area of Cape Horn (having a latitude of 56S that equals the latitude of Kopenhagen) and still keeping their original light dark colour and dark-coloured eyes.

I think we must be very careful when dealing with scientific myths because they seem to be fairy tales to a degree far more superior to that of the traditional myths.

Tests of the American army proved that dark skinned people absorb too much radiation in lower latitudes resulting in overheating and loss of strength.
Black people were not made for sunny climates. Melanin is there to protect the skin, not to overdo it and turn it into black.

@ Epimethean
Do you think that the races were already developed at the stage of Homo erectus, as the multiregional model suggests, or not?
African Homo erectus was quite different from Asian Homo erectus. Did they both belong to the same race? There is still so much we do not know. How can we be so sure that the original natives of Africa were black?

P.S. What a Christmas present (this off-topic post) for Shell-B!

[The Grand Nudger]

Clothes.....ffs.......

Tango, the only myth here, is that this is a scientific myth. It is not, it's just something someone said on a forum. I'd love to see this Army test btw, sounds like something that might have been conducted in the 30's and 40's..hehehe. Dark skin isn't an impediment to life in africa, it's an adaptation to it. We've gone from hairy, to hairless and white, ranging all the way up to "black"...and then some of us crept back down the scale to the status of "whitey" (with a fun stopover at "yellow" for those migrating to asia, having the same selection pressure acting on a different area).

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Approximately 1.5 million years ago, the earth endured a megadrought that drove hominids from lush rainforests into arid, open landscapes. This, coupled with the loss of dense body hair, caused early human skin to endure excess UV-B radiation and xeric stress.[43] Rogers et al. (2004) performed an examination of the variation in MC1R nucleotide sequences for people of different ancestry and compared the sequences of chimpanzees and humans from various regions of the Earth. Rogers concluded that roughly five million years ago, at the time of the evolutionary separation of chimpanzees and humans, the common ancestors of all humans had light skin that was covered by dark hair. Additionally, our closest extant relative, the chimpanzee, has light skin covered by thick body hair.[44] Over time human hair disappeared to allow better heat dissipation through sweating[3] and the skin tone grew darker to increase the epidermal permeability barrier[43] and protect from folate depletion due to the increased exposure to sunlight.[4] By 1.2 million years ago, around the time of homo ergaster and homo erectus, the ancestors of all people living today had exactly the same receptor protein as modern Africans.[44] Evolutionary pressure meant that any gene variations that resulted in lighter skin were unable to survive under the intense African sun, and human skin remained dark for the next 1.1 million years.
Approximately 70,000–100,000 years ago modern humans began to migrate away from the tropics to the north where they were exposed to less intense sunlight, possibly in part due to the need for greater use of clothing to protect against the colder climate. Under these conditions there was less photodestruction of folate and so the evolutionary pressure stopping lighter-skinned gene variants from surviving was reduced. In addition, lighter skin is able to generate more vitamin D (cholecalciferol) than darker skin so it would have represented a health benefit in reduced sunlight if there were limited sources of vitamin D.[3] Hence the leading hypothesis for the evolution of human skin color proposes that:-
From ~1.2 million years ago to less than 100,000 years ago, the ancestors of all people alive were from Africans which had dark skin.
As populations began to migrate, the evolutionary constraint keeping skin dark decreased proportionally to the distance North a population migrated, resulting in a range of skin tones within northern populations.
At some point northern populations experienced positive selection for lighter skin due to the increased production of vitamin D from sunlight and the genes for darker skin disappeared from these populations.
The genetic mutations leading to light skin, though different among East Asians and Europeans,[25] suggest the two groups experienced a similar selective pressure due to settlement in northern latitudes.[5]
There is a long-standing hypothesis that the selection for lighter skin due to higher vitamin D absorption occurred soon after the Out of Africa migration sometime before 40,000 years ago. A number of researchers disagree with this and suggest that the northern latitudes permitted enough synthesis of vitamin D combined with food sources from hunting to keep populations healthy, and only when agriculture was adopted was there a need for lighter skin to maximize the synthesis of vitamin D. The theory suggests that the reduction of game meat, fish, and some plants from the diet resulted in skin turning clear many thousands of years after settlement in Europe and Asia.[45][46] This theory is supported by a study into the SLC24A5 gene which found that the allelle associated with light skin in Europe may have originated as recently as 6,000–10,000 years ago[23] which is in line with the earliest evidence of farming.[47]
One of the most recently proposed drivers of the evolution of skin pigmentation in humans is based on research that shows a superior barrier function in darkly pigmented skin.[48] Most protective functions of the skin, including the permeability barrier and the antimicrobial barrier, reside in the stratum corneum (SC). It seems logical to surmise that the SC has undergone the most genetic change since the loss of human body hair. Natural selection would have favored mutations that protect this essential barrier; one such protective adaptation is the pigmentation of interfollicular epidermis, because it improves barrier function as compared to non-pigmented skin. In lush rainforests, however, where UV-B radiation and xeric stress were not in excess, light pigmentation would not have been nearly as detrimental. This explains the side-by-side residence of lightly pigmented and darkly pigmented peoples.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color

[Epimethean]

Yeah, that was a pretty funny statement.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

While my research is minimal,

Is that code for 'non existent'?

I'm gonna go with clothing being responsible for white skin.

Umm,actually scientific consensus is that skin colour is caused by MELANIN, which in turn is related to climate more than any other factor. If it was due to clothing,it would not be genetic.

Human skin color is primarily due to the presence of melanin in the skin. Skin color ranges from almost black to white with a pinkish tinge due to blood vessels underneath.[1] Variation in natural skin color is mainly due to genetics, although the evolutionary causes are not completely certain. According to scientific studies, natural human skin color diversity is highest in Sub-Saharan African populations,[2] with skin reflectance values ranging from 19 to 46 (med. 31) compared with European and East Asian populations which have skin reflectance values of 62 to 69 and 50 to 59 respectively.[3] The term "range" is loosely defined in this case, as African albinos have obviously not been taken into consideration when calculating the "range".
The natural skin color can be darkened as a result of tanning due to exposure to sunlight. The leading explanation is that skin color adapts to sunlight intensities which produce vitamin D or ultraviolet light damage to folic acid.[4] Other hypotheses include protection from ambient temperature, infections, skin cancer or frostbite, an alteration in food, and sexual selection.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color

[houseofcantor]

I ain't afraid of being wrong (yeah I know that makes me fearless, shush) but ya gotta be wrong to learn stuff.

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although the evolutionary causes are not completely certain. ...which could mean clothing.