Origins of the pale skin color in Europeans

[Violet]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe500eIK1oA

What is with me today?

[Angrboda]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue0Jd-bomn0

[Anomalocaris]

And what? They all hang out in the clearings to work on their tans?

As a matter of fact, the villages where they live and spend much of their time socializing would most likely be located in a clearing. They may not deliberately be trying to catch any rays but they will under such conditions.

Perhaps that has as much to do with darkness under the canopy being demonstratably psychologically depressing, then with any desire to bake under the sun in particular.

[jonb]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ifS2nP53...re=related I can remember before colours we could not even imagine what a coloured future would be like

[Minimalist]

What is with me today?

Seems like every other day.

[Violet]

What is with me today?

Seems like every other day.

Yeah, but usually I'm more subtle about it, and what I say has greater depth. I've just been clowning around

[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.

[Anomalocaris]

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.

There may have been "racial distinctions" within Homo Erectus, but I take the view the racial distinction between Homo Sapiens is largely an independent and very recent, on going and very fluid development. Take a population now, and take their direct ancesters from 10,000 years ago, in many cases people would classify them as distinctly different races, so much have the population changed physically.

20,000 years ago, you can't find anyone you would call Mongoloid today, a few chisel shaped incisors on the Peiking man 450,000 years ago not withstanding.

[Minimalist]

There may have been "racial distinctions" within Homo Erectus,

I'm not so sure that "we" aren't HE, though. That's where the HE dna comes in.

[CapnAwesome]

Why religion already provides the only reasonable explanation via the Nation of Islam, which clearly explains that white skin results from the evil big-head scientist Dr. Yakub, who cross bred the DNA of human beings with those of devils to create the white race, 6600 years ago. Duh.