The first humans to leave Africa 40,000 years ago are believed to have had dark skin, which would have been advantageous in sunny climates. But humans did not uniformly develop light skin when they reached the colder regions of Europe.
Dark skin. All modern humans share a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa. Comparisons between known skin pigmentation genes in chimpanzees and modern Africans show that dark skin evolved along with the loss of body hair about 1.2 million years ago and that this common ancestor had dark skin.
Evidence still suggests that all modern humans are descended from an African population of Homo sapiens that spread out of Africa about 60,000 years ago but also shows that they interbred quite extensively with local archaic populations as they did so (Neanderthal and Denisovan genes are found in all living non-Africa ...
Evolution. Due to natural selection, people who lived in areas of intense sunlight developed dark skin colouration to protect against ultraviolet (UV) light, mainly to protect their body from folate depletion. Evolutionary pigmentation of the skin was caused by ultraviolet radiation of the sun.
Many scientists have believed that lighter skin gradually arose in Europeans starting around 40,000 years ago, soon after people left tropical Africa for Europe's higher latitudes.
Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans.
Since strong sun exposure damages the body, the solution was to evolve skin that was permanently dark so as to protect against the sun's more damaging rays. Melanin, the skin's brown pigment, is a natural sunscreen that protects tropical peoples from the many harmful effects of ultraviolet (UV) rays.
Answer and Explanation: Yes, the first humans were almost certainly black. The human species evolved in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. Black skin was necessary for survival in this hot and sunny climate.
This makes the Inuit population an exception of the latitude-correlated distribution of skin color. One possible reason is that the dark skin could protect the Inuits from the severe UV exposure because of the long daylight hours in winter and high levels of UV reflection from the snow.
Cells called melanocytes located in the skin, produce melanin. Melanin gives the skin its color. In certain conditions melanocytes can become abnormal and cause an excessive amount of darkening in the color of the skin.
Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.
Abstract. Using gene frequency data for 62 protein loci and 23 blood group loci, we studied the genetic relationship of the three major races of man, Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid.
Putting all this together, between 9,800 and 9,700 years ago is an accurate date of creation for Adam and Eve. During this time, the Upper Paleolithic/Lower Mesolithic, humans created before Adam and Eve were yet hunter-gatherers.
Researchers discovered the ancient pink pigments in 1.1-billion-year-old rocks deep beneath the Sahara Desert in the Taoudeni Basin of Mauritania, West Africa, making them the oldest colors in the geological record.
Around 90 million years ago, our primitive mammalian ancestors were nocturnal and had UV-sensitive and red-sensitive color, giving them a bi-chromatic view of the world.
All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors before the Identical Ancestors Point, all the way to the very first single-celled organism. However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes.
Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin.
Microscopic evaluation reveals that Black skin contains larger mast cell granules, and differences in stuctural properties and enzymes of mast cells compared with White skin, possibly accounting for differences in pruritus experienced by the individuals of these racial groups.
The 'Palaeo-Eskimos' arrived about 6,000 years ago and stayed up until the Thule culture arrived and replaced them. The big surprise has been, that the DNA samples show that all the various Paleo-Eskimo cultures carry the same DNA, they are in fact, the same people.
Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts.
The skeletal and archaeological evidence made it clear that the first Europeans were probably dark skin, not pale skin. This research was conducted at the Uthman dan Fodio Institute in Chicago. The samples for this study includes published research literature on population movements from Africa into Western Eurasia.
We are now the only living members of what many zoologists refer to as the human tribe, Hominini, but there is abundant fossil evidence to indicate that we were preceded for millions of years by other hominins, such as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and other species of Homo, and that our species also lived for a time ...
Researchers have found that men are subconsciously attracted to fairer skin due to its association with purity, innocence, modesty and goodness, while women feel that darker complexions are associated with sex, virility and danger.
Mutations influencing both light and dark skin have continued to evolve in humans, even within the past few thousand years.”
The billions of human beings living today all belong to one species: Homo sapiens. As in all species, there is variation among individual human beings, from size and shape to skin tone and eye color. But we are much more alike than we are different.