I smell BS. He suggests that these people around the coast gave up eating fish in favour of grains. I doubt it. Even today fish and shellfish feature heavily in the region's cuisine.
Why are Europeans White?
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#42Nitpick: That heat ferried by the gulf stream is what warns the Baltic is a quasi-religious supposition from the father of oceanography. The thermal ballast of the Atlantic ocean that develops in the summer is primarily responsible for most of Europe's uncommonly warm winters.
The Baltic isn't all that warm either - half of it freezes over in winter.
I'm from small town called Liminka, it's next to Oulu in Finland. The sea freezes in the winter but that doesn't keep Liminka from being a legendary farming area because of high crop yield. It's just warm enough to have good crops in the summer.
The crops are of course not nearly as good as in Germany, but you cant find similar area from the same latitude in Russia or Canada.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Liminka....
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#43Uh, light skin, blue eyes and blonde hair is just 6000 year old?! Sounds really weird to get so common so quickly. This should already be well known, by the mutation speed of the relevant genes? What about an alternative hypothesis, like sexual evolution? Edit: From the wikipedia page, this theory seems to be quite recent. Interesting. (Sigh, I liked the idea of blonde neanderthals. :-) ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
Peter Frost has been writing about this for years. He comes down on the side of the sexual selection theory, so if you're interested in that, check him out. http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-europeans-wh... http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/04/puzzle-of-european-h...
But he even contradicts himself in that post. He has an example of a modern experiment where people select brunettes over blondes because of rarity.
So if european whiteness is a product of sexual selection of rare blondes, why didn't it swing the other way when the majority of the population were blonde? In some parts of Sweden and Finland, 85% of the adults are blonde, how could it ever go way above 50%? If the hypothesis was true, then people in those areas would have strongly selected brunettes and reversed it?
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#44I smell BS. He suggests that these people around the coast gave up eating fish in favour of grains. I doubt it. Even today fish and shellfish feature heavily in the region's cuisine.
Heard of Viking crusades? It happened partly because there was too many people living in Scandinavia. That happened because Scandinavian farming had gotten the population to get too big. You run out of reliable fishing sources long before you hit the grains maximum. You don't have to replace fish with grains, just introducing grains to the diet can increase risk of malnutrition.
On the contrary this explains nicely how Sami people can be darker than Germans. They lived of reindeer, bird trapping and fishing, even like hundred years ago. It explains why Finnish are somewhat darker than swedes, we relied on hunting and fishing far longer than Swedes did.
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#45Uh, light skin, blue eyes and blonde hair is just 6000 year old?! Sounds really weird to get so common so quickly. This should already be well known, by the mutation speed of the relevant genes? What about an alternative hypothesis, like sexual evolution? Edit: From the wikipedia page, this theory seems to be quite recent. Interesting. (Sigh, I liked the idea of blonde neanderthals. :-) ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
I'd assume that evolution happens quite fast if the trait is already there in the population (people are more or less light-skinned everywhere) and there is such a strong selection pressure (much more food available if you can adapt to the lack vitamin D).
The canonical example of fast human evolution is lactase (the enzyme for digesting lactose and so cow's milk), thought to have spread widely in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutionar...
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Baltic isn't all that warm either - half of it freezes over in winter.
I'm from small town called Liminka, it's next to Oulu in Finland. The sea freezes in the winter but that doesn't keep Liminka from being a legendary farming area because of high crop yield. It's just warm enough to have good crops in the summer. The crops are of course not nearly as good as in Germany, but you cant find similar area from the same latitude in Russia or Canada. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co…
I don't question that cereals are grown there, but I do question the hypothesis that the gulf stream is responsible for making cereals viable via warming the Baltic.
The author may be spot on with his cereal theory, but I'm not convinced by the suggested mechanism. The nascent fluid dynamicist in me doesn't see how a sea with only one tight opening can exchange enough water for a significant thermal exchange, one which would have to be pretty sizeable given the freezing. I could be wrong, but I do note that the 'gulf stream' graphic barely gets past Newfoundland, let alone showing the North Sea or the Baltic...
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work with many Indians and they themselves refer to "Asian" as a different race (meaning East Asian), so I didn't mean Indian people by this, rather East Asian, obviously many East Asians are much darker skinned than whites, however I personally know Asians that are fairly pale and I am sure at times I have been more tan than they are (when I would spend more time outside) and I primarily of German-Irish ancestry.
For whatever reason, pale skin is highly coveted by many Asian cultures and some will avoid the sun almost entirely to avoid darkening their skin. As well as using (potentially dangerous) skin lightening products which is a huge market in Asia: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v35/naacr_vol35_273.pdf
>For whatever reason, pale skin is highly coveted by many Asian cultures and some will avoid the sun almost entirely to avoid darkening their skin.
Isn't the opposite also true in Western cultures? In Europe, where I live, people want to look darker, and go sunbathing. And in the US there's also this "fake tan" thing.
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#48How does this explain blue grass? Is grass the same colour all over the World? Just a thought.
Also white people look white as they reflect that light so there skin is the opposite, same for people who are black in that there skin is obsorbing the other light frequencies and so reflecting back not alot and as such appearing black.
Now if you got all the populations and used transport like planes and mixed them all about over the World then stopped having any movement, would the people in the northern and southern climates away from the equator become paler skinned and would those in the equator become darker skinned! Its like that eggs/drugs analogy - this your skin and this is your skin on sun :-).
Still, I would like to know what is the average shade of green per country and how much effect does its lattitude have upon that shade of green. Plants tended not to move as much and as humans have.
So to answear to original question:
Why are Europeans White? Because none of them are Wong :-) and there not actualy white.
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#49Nitpick: That heat ferried by the gulf stream is what warns the Baltic is a quasi-religious supposition from the father of oceanography. The thermal ballast of the Atlantic ocean that develops in the summer is primarily responsible for most of Europe's uncommonly warm winters.
The Baltic isn't all that warm either - half of it freezes over in winter.
> half of it freezes over in winter.
Nowadays only gulfs properly freeze in winter but there are reports from XV century of people travelling over the ice in sleighs and even tales of inns being built on the ice. That was a little anomalous due to the Little Ace Age but even in the XX century ice floe would cover over 90% of the Sea once in a while.
Re: Why are Europeans White?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm from small town called Liminka, it's next to Oulu in Finland. The sea freezes in the winter but that doesn't keep Liminka from being a legendary farming area because of high crop yield. It's just warm enough to have good crops in the summer. The crops are of course not nearly as good as in Germany, but you cant find similar area from the same latitude in Russia or Canada. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co…
I don't question that cereals are grown there, but I do question the hypothesis that the gulf stream is responsible for making cereals viable via warming the Baltic. The author may be spot on with his cereal theory, but I'm not convinced by the suggested mechanism. The nascent fluid dynamicist in me doesn't see how a sea with only one tight opening can exchange enough water for a significant thermal exchange, one whi…
For what I know, the gulf stream is not warming the Baltic ocean. It brings warmer water to the cost of Norway, which creates warmer weather in the northern Europe.