Origins of the pale skin color in Europeans

[Minimalist]

Anyway, to get serious for a moment, most apes have dark fur and light skin.... ( this will come as a big shock to the white power and fundie xtian crowd!)...so the implication is that the dark fur protected the skin. As a result, one can look way back to the time when early man began to lose its fur as the time when skin color would matter. But, IIRC, there was another factor: the development of sweat glands. Humans have far more sweat glands per square inch than other mammals and this is an efficient way of cooling. However, anthropologists have noted that having fur interferes with the cooling process of the sweat glands hence the trend away from hairy ape-men.

This took a lot more than a couple of hundred years and surely hairy apes did not go to the edge of a glacier and say - "Hey, time for a hair cut!"

I'm still holding out for these "racial distinctions" ( remember, skin color is only one of them.... there are skeletal differences, too ) to have developed when we were all just Homo Erectus. That is at least a one million year period of evolution. Now that they have done the HNS genome project we really need a major effort to find a sample of HE dna.