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by hollyjade on November 17th, 2008

hollyjade

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I have been watching educational videos on youtube about human evolution [walking with cavemen] and I noticed that all of the early humans are white males and females. Even a colony H.heidelbergensis which live in Africa are white. shouldn't they be black

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  • by 773491 on November 17th, 2008

    773491

    This is a great observation. Well all humans are very closely related to each other, this means they all shared a common ancestor relatively recently. This is because humanity went through a bottleneck, we almost got wiped out and only a group of some thousand individuals survived. So all modern people must have come from those ancestors.

    I could imagine that the diversity in skin color evolved after this. Here's my hypothesis on this subject:

    People living in places with high sun exposure tend to have darker skin. However, there are exceptions and the correlation isn't as strong as one might expect. Therefore, there must be some other mechanism than just geographical influences on skin color. This would be sexual selection. People tend to marry (or just have children with) others that look similar to themselves. This would have reinforced regional differences in skin color and woulda led to the varieties we see today.

    Why didn't this happen earlier? Maybe because of culture, only about 40000 years ago, humans started to have a culture. This could have led to a deep identification with one's tribe and ethnicity...

    As I said especially the last paragraph here is just speculation of me. The other possibility is that those h.heidelbergensis actually were black, and the people making the video messed up... I'm not even sure if they can determine skin color by looking at fossils.

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