Posted on 08/30/2009 10:40:35 AM PDT by decimon
White Europeans could have evolved as recently as 5,500 years ago, according to research which suggests that the early humans who populated Britain and Scandinavia had dark skins for millenniums.
It was only when early humans gave up hunter-gathering and switched to farming about 5,500 years ago that white skin began to be favoured, say the researchers.
This is because farmed food was deficient in vitamin D, a vital nutrient. Humans can make this in their skin when exposed to sunlight, but dark skin is much less efficient at it.
In places such as northern Europe, where sunlight levels are low, the ability to make vitamin D more efficiently could have been crucial to survival.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Certainly not 'British' English.
Evolutionary scientists are saying this now. I see tremendous irony there, but I suspect the evos are blind to it.
And what about Native Americans who have been in NorthAmerica for about 10,000 years and have farmed for significant portions of that time?Afterall we did get crops like,potatoes,corn,beans,squash,tomatoes,and (my favorite)peppers(just to cite a few), from them.
Certainly not 'British' English.
Try some dictionaries and argue with the publishers.
Author prolly has more of that melonominum than us.
It’s a latin word. The rules of its usage haven’t change in, um, almost two millennia.
Perhaps you were not aware of the blue eyed Mongolians? Genghis Khan's Blue Eyes
I think they remained hunters despite some agriculture. And how far north in the Americas they lived would be a factor.
That's so of all words derived from Latin?
“Unless of course everybody just wanted to do it with the white chick.”
Still, you’d need a bunch of white chicks.
Cite some.
I have my old Union Standard Dictionary (London, 1955) right in front of me.
Now list? That wasn't true, say, in the 1800s? You know that?
Well a fight IS what you should get. This is total utter BS. Even if you subscribe to genetic inheritances ascribed to “WHITE” people you cannot lump them all into the melanin/sunlight argument. And it would take far longer than 5500 years to evolve all the “white” traits including skin pigment.
Some Facts:
Vitamin D is made naturally in the first layers of skin (epidermis). The melanin in skin functions as a filter for light and therefore the amount of melanin in the skin is related to the ability of Ultraviolet B light to penetrate the epidermis and reach the readily available 7-dehydrocholesterol, which is manufactured in normally ample quantities by our bodies. The 7-dehydrocholesterol is converted into Vitamin D3 by this ultraviolet light. Melanin content does NOT alter the amount of Vitamin D that can be produced. Individuals with higher skin melanin content will simply require more time in sunlight to produce the same amount of vitamin D as individuals with lower melanin content. The amount of time an individual requires to produce a given amount of Vitamin D may depend upon the person’s distance from the equator and on the season of the year, because of variations in the amount of absorbably ultraviolet B light. With this “white” argument you could just as easily say tropical Africans developed more pigment because they needed to defend against making too much Vit D because of intense all the time sunlight at the Equator.
In view of what we know about natural Vit D production, one might ask why does MILK today continue to have Vit. D added to it— when we don’t need it. Answer: it was originally done to “help” bone development in the low sunlight peoples of the “northern” areas of the US- that and miners, maybe. Want to get a real overdose headache? Drink a half gallon of Vit D milk and spend all day in the sun at the beach- you’ll get a banger!
This sunlight/D Vitamin theory of race falls apart when you consider outliers, like Asians sub tropical and tropical, Indonesians, Indians etc. It simply doesn’t follow. But it does eat up a lot of research money and annoys people.
Try making the argument of preferential genetic selection for sickle celled red blood cells in tropical Africans— which provided survival in ancient times against malaria which could not destroy the sickled red blood cells. So successful in helping survival the genes were passed on, and now sickle cell anemia is a disease. You can really irritate knee jerk “racist” yellers with that one- even though it is quite proveable.
Interesting. The American Merriam-Webster’s 2nd International (aka, ‘the unabridged’), Springfield, MA, 1961 does offer ‘millenniums’ as a secondary plural.
So if my family starts eating seal eyeballs now, in 5,500 years my descendants will have nice tans? LOL!
Well, it actually can be used correctly, for entirely separate eras. A past millennium and a millennium to come, are collectively and correctly millenniums. Otherwise, it’s wrong.
Just shows ta go ya...
I have my old Union Standard Dictionary (London, 1955) right in front of me.
That is but a web search away. See with thine own eyes.
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