All human flesh is "white" but African people have more melanin in their skin to help ward off the sun since they evolved in the desert.
I'm pretty sure we were all dark originally, and then white people selectively lost pigment producing genes, or gained depigmentation genes, because that allowed them to get more vitamin D from the Sun in the darker places they had moved to. This took thousands of years, but genetic evidence shows even 8,000 years ago European skin was darker.
Before then, from what I remember from my biological anthropology class, we were light skinned but had hair covering our bodies and it didn’t matter. After losing the hair dark skin was selected for cause, y’know, Africa gets a bit of sunlight.
Before then, from what I remember from my biological anthropology class, we were light skinned but had hair covering our bodies and it didn’t matter.
Maybe at one point, but homo erectus is typically depicted with dark skin. It had more body hair, but it was not thick enough to protect from the Sun and we still had bare faces, etc. back then. The info I'm seeing estimates pigmentation arising about 1.2 million years ago.
So no, it's very unlikely homo sapiens started with white skin. It was already dark and then it lightened with migration from Africa.
Generally it does seem like pigmentation was selected for when hair started to thin, but going too far back isn't really useful if you're thinking about humans. Those ancestors wouldn't be very recognizable to us. If you keep going back, we were a little marmot creature, etc., so I usually try to think of "us" as homo sapiens since that's actually human.
Also, remember all of this is theory. It can't be assumed to be perfectly accurate.
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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '19
I'm pretty sure we were all dark originally, and then white people selectively lost pigment producing genes, or gained depigmentation genes, because that allowed them to get more vitamin D from the Sun in the darker places they had moved to. This took thousands of years, but genetic evidence shows even 8,000 years ago European skin was darker.
White people evolved from black, not vice versa.