??

dark skinned is a better term for early humans. skin color is based on your environment so if we did evolve in hot and sunny africa the first of our ancestors were adapted to that type of environment.

race is a social construct.

so a better question would be were darker skinned individuals the first around (/e as psycho- has said). and well to answer that question, i would assume not necessarily. you have to remember the conditions millions of years ago were considerably different and could have changed which skin shade may have been dominate at the time. so just because from anthropological records and what not say we evolved from/in Africa doesnt mean that we can assume the conditions back then were equivalent to what they are now, because well thats just not true.

This post was edited by cialda on Dec 18 2010 12:36am

adam was white yo

adam didnt exist. in the bible the description of jesus is NOT white. that doesnt even make sense, troll. o wait.

I don't find this true, since modern homo sapiens were not around millions of years ago.

Our predecessors were ape-like humans, covered in fur and dark skinned like all other apes and chimpanzees.

Races (and skin color) are the result of evolving over many, many years by different circumstances, the environment.

itt: white people mad cuz their granddaddy black

im pretty sure our LCA between apes/monkesy and etc, etc were covered in fur. Now iirc, our LCA with them was ~ 7+ million years ago. now several millions years ago, im pretty sure we wouldnt have still been covered in fur. and as i have already said before, the conditions in africa were different millions of years ago then it is today. so just because currently darker skin is favored in this area does not mean that it was favored years ago. also, please google apes and chimpanzees, they are not all dark skinned.

and most importantly, race is a social construct. so races do not evolve genetically, they evolve socially.


even if u are correct in that we are covered in fur, the hair, which contains melanin, will absorb the radiation reducing any natural driving forces favoring darker skin.

This post was edited by cialda on Dec 19 2010 10:19pm

No idea what LCA is but we branched off from chimpanzees 5-7 million years ago.



Wrong, they were still very hairy several million years ago. Google here is your friend.



Wrong, again. Africa was still a warm location millions of years ago and could have even been tropical (excluding the warming and cooling periods of the earth). Google here is also your friend.



What I should have said to make myself more clear is that skin color, has evolved on humans due to environmental factors. This is why there is dark skin in hot places and white skin in colder places.

E: also try looking up Mitochondrial Eve


This post was edited by 26105 on Dec 19 2010 10:44pm

LCA is last common ancestor. google is your friend

assuming they were very hairy millions of years ago from wikipedia (for my lack of googling more valid sources) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair

i never said africa wasnt a warm location... the reason darker skin is favored is due to protection from radiation. having tree cover, which iirc, is what africa was like in parts of the continent years ago. which goes to your next part where you wrongly assume hot places favor darker skin when it should be sites of stronger radiation favor darker skin. Correlation is not causation

, i thought we were talking about millions of years ago?

This post was edited by cialda on Dec 19 2010 10:55pm