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 ...
You get a lot more sunlight in the tropics, so lighter skin is probably not as useful.
Indeed this is all just fun speculation.
Strangest case of Agrarian Reform I ever heard of.
However, this is even happening with poultry.
Chickens and turkeys that are fram-raised on grain rations have more white meat, and the dark meat is lighter, than the foraging chickens & turkeys of yester year.
Same thing with pigs: ever since they switched from rooting in the garbage, and started getting fed farmed feeds, they have become "the other white meat".
Still, as Rocky Horror (Meatloaf AGAIN!?!) pointed out, humans still come with both white or dark breast meat. ;-)
Some milleniums they did; some milleniums they didn't. They couldn't make up their minds. OTOH, they ones in Southern Europe took on a golden-brown glow from the olive oil in their diets; hence, "olive complected".
The Inuit "not agerarian' excuse doesn't wash, really, unless the Lapps/Finns/Sandanavians/Vikings weren't white. From what I understand, no red blooded man would touch his veggies, unless they had been either liquified and fermented; or been pre-processed by an animal, first. Might be wrong about that, but that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Didn’t domestication of food critters and animal husbandry develop along side cultivation?
I don’t understand why settling down and growing food would, necessarily, mean going meatless or less meaty at supper time.
It seems to me, if anything, that the settled food growers would have had steadier and more consistent access to foods, seeing as how they were no longer dependant on critter migrations and only eating what they managed to chase down and catch.
Also, what was to keep the grower dudes from hunting between growing and harvesting seasons?
Maybe the first batch of growers were vegan? Vegans tend to be rather pale and listless.
no, the Inuit get vitamin D from fish oil.
But even in Asia, northern Asians have lighter skin than those in the south...the Ainu of Japan for example. But the skin of the Chinese and Japanese is fairer than that of Malaysia or the Philippines...
It wouldn’t take too long to evolve. IF you lack vitamin D, you are more prone to ricketts....and women with even mild ricketts have deformed pelvises and can’t deliver babies normally...ergo, blond scandanavians and Slavs, but darker Italians. Celts somewhere in between.
Tropical people work all year in the sunlight. Without the dark skin, you get terrible sun burn and skin cancer. When I worked in Africa, we had to remove skin cancers from our albino patients.
But in northern climates, the problem is that a dark skin prevents the sun from letting your body develop vitamin D, so you are more prone to ricketts.
Women with ricketts develop deformed pelvises, and they die in childbirth...
Within a few generations, darker skinned people die out... And vitamin D can be found in some foods, especially salmon and fish...hence the absense of ricketts in Eskimos.
“Millennia” is plural in and of itself, and implies continuity, an uninterrupted era.
So, “millennia” is the term the author should have chosen, and would have, if he had any grasp of Latin.
YOU know you're right; I know you're right; but I can't find the needed source, either.
"The Third through the First Millennia BC saw less technological innovation than...,"; "In Asian history, there were three separate and distinct millenniums that saw...."
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,which is difficult to explain since it was at least 7500 years ago in Europe, and the currently known oldest (uncalibrated) RC date for multirow barley is 14,000 BP. :')
See there?
Science proves we’re evolved!
Who ever they were they were pre-Indo-European migratory peoples it seems.
> So what’s the theory on Asians?
> And evolved from what?
Monkeys, just like they rest of us.
“Within a few generations, darker skinned people die out...”
Modern man has been living in northern Europe more than 5,000 years.
“Indeed this is all just fun speculation.”
A lot of it is.
But it is true that light skin can be a negative in the tropics and dark skin a negative in cloudy cool higher latitudes.
Modern Man probably moved out of Africa about 150,000 years ago or so.
So there was plenty of time to develop into lighter skinned Euopeans or even some eastern Asians who have light complections in the winter and darker complections in the summer.
But the differences between Black Africans, Caucasians, Autralian natives, North Americans and Asians go a lot furher than skin pigmentation, althoug in the big picture, all human beings are far more closely related genetically than racists of any color would care to believe.
In geological time, 150,000 years is the blink of an eye.
another day another theory.
I very much doubt anyone could know this. It’s probably part of the sick master-race crap that the British are peddling, known as The Replacement Theory.
actually, northern Europe was covered with glaciers until 10 thousand BC, so you are probably right, but only by a few thousand years.
The problem is that a lot of the information of the past is being rewritten as those DNA studies and more archeology is being done.
I’ve started reading some books on this, and the ideas have changed a lot since I was in college...
I heard a fascinating theory - that Europeans and people in general were much taller and slimer pre agricultural revolution - more like African Masai - and that the switch to grain based diet stunted our ancestors.
Only now with meat easily available as part of the diet have we reached the height level of the hunter gathering ancestors.
I had always assumed our ancestors were tiny to start with. If you visit Europe and pass by homes occupied since the late middle ages you can see by the door frame size how small people were until just recently.
I read somewhere that DNA studies are unsettling the old anthropology guard that based theories by the study of skulls or teeth, etc,
http://www.homepage.montana.edu/~geol445/hyperglac/time1/time.htm
Its possible there were modern humans living in Europe before the start of the last major glaciation which ended about 11,000 years ago.
If modern humans left Africa 100,000 - 60,000 years ago, they may very well have morphed into Caucasian and Asian racial types before the ned of the last glaciation.
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