How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
sciencemag.org
How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
1–10 of 84 posts
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#2Haha! There you have it social justice fighters. Getting our privilege was hard work! We earned it!
(it's a joke in case someone is unsure about it)
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#3So vitamin D is the driving factor: either you lose melanin, or become lactose tolerant, or you die. With dark skin, you can't make enough D from sunlight. If you can't drink milk, you can't get it from diet. Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny.
Cool.
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#4I'm struggling to understand this, tallness? Didn't that only happen to some European countries in the past hundred years? Because of diet? The ability to digest milk? The Hindu civilisation is one of the oldest in the world and milk and cows are very much a first class thing, suggesting it's not jsut Europeans that could digest milk, but other culture for a very long time. Maybe I'm reading this wrong but how does this explain the colour difference between black people and Asian people? Some black people are very dark compared to other black people but from the same areas
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#5People are so hopelessly confused about race. I recently made the mistake of reading Facebook comments on a widely shared public post of an article not unlike this one. And... So many comments attempting to graft our contemporary divisions and yes, racism, onto a story like this. It's pretty simple to think that so many years ago, the distinctions were simply not there, to the extent where you would have seemed like a crazy person trying to impose them. And yet all people wanted to do on that thread was talk about present differences.
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#6I'm struggling to understand this, tallness? Didn't that only happen to some European countries in the past hundred years? Because of diet? The ability to digest milk? The Hindu civilisation is one of the oldest in the world and milk and cows are very much a first class thing, suggesting it's not jsut Europeans that could digest milk, but other culture for a very long time. Maybe I'm reading this wrong but how does t…
WARNING! GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION: Potential for tallness is genetic. How much individuals realise of that potential is a matter of childhood diet and health, which has grown very good in Europe during the last 5-10 generations.
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#7I'm struggling to understand this, tallness? Didn't that only happen to some European countries in the past hundred years? Because of diet? The ability to digest milk? The Hindu civilisation is one of the oldest in the world and milk and cows are very much a first class thing, suggesting it's not jsut Europeans that could digest milk, but other culture for a very long time. Maybe I'm reading this wrong but how does t…
Europeans are not a homogeneous group with respect to height; for example the Dutch tend to be taller than the Italians. According to the article, even though average height did increase recently, some disposition and possibly some difference was already there in the genes of people from different parts of Europe.
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#8I'm struggling to understand this, tallness? Didn't that only happen to some European countries in the past hundred years? Because of diet? The ability to digest milk? The Hindu civilisation is one of the oldest in the world and milk and cows are very much a first class thing, suggesting it's not jsut Europeans that could digest milk, but other culture for a very long time. Maybe I'm reading this wrong but how does t…
Many Indians and people of Indian descent (myself included) are in fact lactose intolerant, hence the prevalence of cheese and yogurt products.
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#9So vitamin D is the driving factor: either you lose melanin, or become lactose tolerant, or you die. With dark skin, you can't make enough D from sunlight. If you can't drink milk, you can't get it from diet. Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny. Cool.
Naturally, milk only contains trace amounts of vitamin D. I don't think ancient humans were fortifying their milk.
Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
#10So vitamin D is the driving factor: either you lose melanin, or become lactose tolerant, or you die. With dark skin, you can't make enough D from sunlight. If you can't drink milk, you can't get it from diet. Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny. Cool.
Milk does not naturally contain vitamin D; fish, mushrooms, and egg yolks are the only natural sources, but the mushrooms have to be exposed to sunlight (which is unlikely; they grow in the shade) and nobody eats that many eggs, so only pescetarian cultures retain darker skin at northern latitudes.