“What’s with the dark skin? Is this because man is thought to have come out of Africa? Or does the DNA confirm skin color?”
Well, for one, it’s an “artist’s impression”, which means it really doesn’t have anything to do with the topic matter and only truly relates what some artist “felt”.
But moving beyond that for a moment, I’d like to ask, how hairy do you think Australopithecus was?
You see, many individuals working in anthropology are extremely leftist, and quite a lot of them have a pathological hatred of western civilization. This often translates as intellectually unsupportable knee-jerk interpretations that are consciously or subconsciously meant to denigrate white people.
As an example, I still recall one of my college instructors saying “Human beings are black, it’s white people that are the mutants.”
Naturally, that statement utterly ignores that modern Africans are generally as distant from our common ancestors as modern Europeans are. Further, it would be irrational in the extreme to assume that a modern African, whose ancestors most likely arose from the Bantu explosion that resulted in near total population replacement in Africa, is more morphologically indicative of a mythical “true” human prototype than any other population on Earth.
But back to my question of hairiness. Primates have no real need of melanin for protection from the sun, as they have fur coats. Aside from some small areas of the body that are usually hairless, most primates have light-colored skin under their coats. Early hominids would first have to lose their fur, and then evolve increased melanin concentration to deal with the loss.
Whether or not early humans possessed light or dark skin would reasonably be a function of when hominids started losing body hair. What’s more, even after losing body hair an early human population might not have experienced strong selection for melanin production - depending on the lifestyle and local environment there may have been little need, remember that ancient Africa was in terms of climate a great deal different than modern Africa. From a purely rational standpoint, assuming that the first humans were dark-skinned is just as wrong-headed as assuming they were light-skinned.
However, anthropologists as a general rule really don’t like light-skinned people, and so they take every chance they can get to denigrate, isolate, or ridicule light-skinned persons.
Well, for one, it’s an “artist’s impression”, which means it really doesn’t have anything to do with the topic matter and only truly relates what some artist “felt”.
That's true, and it's a New York Times article, so it's heavily slanted toward communism; other than that, it's very factual and informative.
They did not bathe as often as we do, and when by chance they did, they had no soap.