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Why are Europeans White?

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Re: Why are Europeans White?

#91

The UV map doesn't match the color skin distribution that well (there is a distribution map at the end). Natives all over America had reddish-brown skin instead of black, despite receiving similar amounts of UV to Africa. Maybe related to dense forests vs desert/savana?

Well, American natives are supposedly Russian in origin (?), and if they came from a group that had developed the paleness trait, it's feasible that in re-developing darker skin their bodies wouldn't come up with the exact same solution as the original Africans.

America != North America

There is substantial evidence that america was populated from the south first, though researchers can't mount the puzzle yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedra_Furada_sites

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#92
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both are a result of the socio-economic signals they send. Until recent history in industrialized nations, being able to spend your days inside, as opposed to in the sun, where your skin darkens, was a luxury that only money/power could buy. In today's society, being able to go on vacation and darken your skin is a luxury not afforded to the average working man who spends his days working, largely indoors.

It's all about socio-economic status signals.

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hyp…

Because the genes for being blond or red haired are connected to the perception of pain. Blond people feel less pain than dark haired people and red haired even more. During a time when there was no tooth brush and cereals full of sugar became the main nutrition, this was definitely a factor of vitality and therefor being attractive.

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#94
This essay is from 2002 (and most of the citations in the longer cited version were quite old even then), and a great deal has been learned through DNA studies since then. And some of his points of evidence such as the coloration on a piece of cave art are obviously flimsy. (And not to rely on an appeal to authority but he doesn't convincingly overcome being a non-expert commenting on an active scientific field, and I'm calling crackpot on the website.)

There's good evidence that Homo sapiens sapiens first arrived in Europe during a warm period sometime around 45,000 years ago, then lived through the last glaciation maximum covering most of the continent with a peak around 18,000 years ago, driving the population through a harsh bottleneck that strongly selected for traits that aided survival in the cold climate. The population rebounded in numbers and in latitude from that bottleneck as the climate warmed again. A higher initial population under greater selective pressure for a longer period of time than elsewhere suffices to explain the resulting traits.

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#95
post #48

How 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 ab…

Blue grass eh? What the hell? I have never heard of such a thing, and I suspect the people who downvoted you hadn't as well. Also: >Why are Europeans White? Because none of them are Wong :-) and there not actualy white. This is not the kind of serious scientific discussion expected here - you're supposed to be making some kind of point. You're not explaining anything by saying "they're not actually white". Also, sadl…

Well light works as a negative when it bounceds of a object.

you have ared object it will obsorbe the red light reflect the rest.

This is why grass which looks green isn't actualy green. How can people not understand light refraction!!!

My spelling and grammer isn;t great, - thanks for highighting exactly what was wrong - not. I have aspergers, so may explain why I was born in the UK.

Sorry if my joke as highlighted by the smiley was not deemed a joke.

but above all thank you for feedback, more helpful than others.

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#96
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> tales of inns being built on the ice

Do you have any sources or links for this? This sounds really interesting, I want to read up on it!

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#97

I see that as daylight has reached my multi-ethnic neighborhood near the 45th parallel of north latitude in the middle of North America, this article about settlement patterns of Homo sapiens has received a lot of upvotes. I'll reply based on the more than fifty replies already posted, based on background reading I've done on the subject, and based on my "natural experiment" of living all over the United States (I ha…

> The deep ancestral condition of all hominins was pale skin. Beneath their black hair, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have pale skin at birth and in youth.

> The hominin line of descent that branched into H. sapiens had to develop skin that began dark and persisted as dark as humans lost body hair and began living in savannah environments with less shade than forests, according to the currently accepted hypothesis. As population bottlenecks in Africa formed the species H. sapiens, presumptively the typical skin color of all modern humans was dark (within a pattern of continued variation among individuals and a continued capacity for individual skin color to vary over the course of seasons).

These two comments, separated in your text by references, seem opposites (ancestral condition was pale...began dark), and the linked texts do not support both of these opposites. But I think you meant humans began pale, became universally dark, then some became pale again.

In any case, all the references you provide support the original post's hypothesis: skin color was affected by both diet and interaction with the sun, each round of research adding a new mechanism to the previously suspected mechanisms (not refuting the previous).

The original post here adds to the collective info you supplied, and neatly explains an otherwise startling variance between their hypothetical charts and the actual charts, that would seem at first blush to invalidate the prior theories but in fact confirms them.

You wrote a lot in your reply, and HN appreciates and votes up for effort. With the mix of personal anecdote (lived everywhere, I'm nordic and my wife's Asian), the gist is that you're adding insight.

However, with your two major paragraphs proposing at least one view that's opposite to your linked research (skin that began dark vs chimps pale skin), and with none of your comments or links addressing or negating the original article's added insight about grain and the loss of vitamin D, I can't tell what you're intending to convey.

It seems your exec summary might have been, "Without addressing the original article which I call 'just a hypothesis', I'd like to say I've seen skin shade variations everywhere including seasonality in my own kids; I am linking research that the linked article builds on; and populations' genes are getting more mixed though even people with pale skin have it for different genetic reasons."

Ok. But not one word of that refutes (or ever directly comments on) the thesis of the original article linked here.

To summarize your reply while tying in the original article, we could say (in a sort of TL;DR):

"The original article explains historically sharply defined regional skin color bands in terms of UV exposure and diet, adding grains and the gulf stream to prior theories involving UV and fish and meat. This explains regions that were problematic for earlier theories. But in today's highly mobile world, people like my own family are becoming more mixed than ever and these regional bands are becoming less sharply distinct. We should be cautious of the increasingly arbitrary politics of race."

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#98
post #77

There's another school of thought that attributes the variety of hair, skin, and eye color in Europe to sexual selection rather than the brightness of the sun. In brief, Europe during the last glacial period offered very little food for women to gather, so women were almost completely dependent upon men for hunted meat. As a result of this imbalance, women developed striking looks to attract men. For an example of th…

So the way to look more sexy was to start looking weird? That sounds rather arbitrary to me. Why not grow three boobs or develop wings or whatever? Anything can be explained like that.

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#99

"Blonde hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally." I felt this is a bit of a loose statement. I would think, like light skin, there would be a reason a recessive genes became so prevalent. Edit: spelling

This happens a lot though. For example, the alleles that keep domestic cats and dogs friendly are from juvenilizing mutations. These mutations also make the ears floppy. It's called "neoteny". The same thing happened when the Russians domesticated silver foxes[1][2]. Humans are subject to a lot of these effects. Our head shape is very similar to the head shape of a baby chimp or gorilla, which obviously changes later…

> Nobody in their right mind would trust something as symbolic as art.

So your conjecture is that the author is insane?

Re: Why are Europeans White?

#100

I see that as daylight has reached my multi-ethnic neighborhood near the 45th parallel of north latitude in the middle of North America, this article about settlement patterns of Homo sapiens has received a lot of upvotes. I'll reply based on the more than fifty replies already posted, based on background reading I've done on the subject, and based on my "natural experiment" of living all over the United States (I ha…

> By the way, the "race" categories that are used in the United States are arbitrary, subject to rewriting from time to time for political considerations, and do not correspond to any scientific view of geographical populations. These categories are hardly arbitrary, they are political. We separate people into republicans and democrats, too, but just because this separation is not based on genetics or geography does…

The author of the linked post has a entire book about the legal cases that set down these categories in the US. He does seem to think they are both arbitrary and bad (and somewhat unique to the US, unlike slavery and racism which are not a uniquely US phenomenon), in roughly the same way that a libertarian would object to everyone being pigeonholed as either a republican or a democrat since they believe themselves to be neither.
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