Why are Europeans White?

http://essays.backintyme.com/item/332

by alex_marchant • 14 years ago

337 99 14 years ago

essays.backintyme.com

Good thing you can't actually click on the images to make them larger. I didn't really want to look at those maps anyway.

alex_marchant• 14 years ago

Agreed, though they are decent res if you use the browser to do some manual zooming.

dmoy2• 14 years ago

That's odd, I can rightclick-> open image or zoom just fine. Is something wrong with your (or my!) browser?

comex• 14 years ago

That works because the images are being downscaled by the browser, but since the norm is click to expand, because (among other things) asking the browser to download a large image just to downscale it is a waste of bandwidth if the user isn't going to view the large version, the OP didn't attempt to find a larger image that way.

vacri3• 14 years ago

Even then, they're not a great size for examination. The whole format of the page looks like it was made by Crackpots-R-Us, which doesn't contribute well to his argument.

UnoriginalGuy• 14 years ago

I have Hover Zoom (Chrome Addon) and that resolved this issue for me. When I moused over the maps they jumped out into a viewable box.

berntb• 14 years ago

Uh, light skin, blue eyes and blonde hair is just 6000 year old?! Sounds really weird to get so common so quickly.

This should already be well known, by the mutation speed of the relevant genes?

What about an alternative hypothesis, like sexual evolution?

Edit: From the wikipedia page, this theory seems to be quite recent. Interesting. (Sigh, I liked the idea of blonde neanderthals. :-) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Evolution_of_s...

"This theory is supported by a study into the SLC24A5 gene which found that the allelle associated with light skin in Europe may have originated as recently as 6,000–10,000 years ago[23] which is in line with the earliest evidence of farming.[47]"

Nitramp• 14 years ago

I'd assume that evolution happens quite fast if the trait is already there in the population (people are more or less light-skinned everywhere) and there is such a strong selection pressure (much more food available if you can adapt to the lack vitamin D).

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Exactly, it's not evolving lighter skin

It's evolving keeping the light skin by neoteny

dodo53• 14 years ago

The canonical example of fast human evolution is lactase (the enzyme for digesting lactose and so cow's milk), thought to have spread widely in <10000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutionar...

thaumasiotes2• 14 years ago

Peter Frost has been writing about this for years. He comes down on the side of the sexual selection theory, so if you're interested in that, check him out.

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-europeans-wh...

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/04/puzzle-of-european-h...

nosse7• 14 years ago

Then how come not every Scandinavian girl have c-cup tits? I thought sexual selection yields wildly variating features. And Scandinavian skin pigment was some time ago strikingly uniform.

henrikschroder• 14 years ago

But he even contradicts himself in that post. He has an example of a modern experiment where people select brunettes over blondes because of rarity.

So if european whiteness is a product of sexual selection of rare blondes, why didn't it swing the other way when the majority of the population were blonde? In some parts of Sweden and Finland, 85% of the adults are blonde, how could it ever go way above 50%? If the hypothesis was true, then people in those areas would have strongly selected brunettes and reversed it?

gbog• 14 years ago

Sexual selection theories often try to explain large waist big breast as a good competitive advantage for raising kids, a visible fertility trait, and forget that the most populous country has girls with neither...

rvkennedy• 14 years ago

Sexual selection has always seemed to me to be an answer that begs the question. If you suppose that there's a preference for a trait, that would explain its evolution, but it wouldn't explain how the preference evolved.

DanBC• 14 years ago

There's a theory that some Neanderthals had red hair, via a genetic mutation. That mutation is different to the one causing red hair in Homo Sapiens.

Wikipedia says that the gene mutation for human red hair could be from 20,000 to 100,000 years old.

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

The UV map doesn't match the color skin distribution that well (there is a distribution map at the end). Natives all over America had reddish-brown skin instead of black, despite receiving similar amounts of UV to Africa. Maybe related to dense forests vs desert/savana?

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

Well, American natives are supposedly Russian in origin (?), and if they came from a group that had developed the paleness trait, it's feasible that in re-developing darker skin their bodies wouldn't come up with the exact same solution as the original Africans.

mhurron• 14 years ago

Native Americans are Mongoloid in decent, not Caucasian Russians.

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

America != North America

There is substantial evidence that america was populated from the south first, though researchers can't mount the puzzle yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedra_Furada_sites

mkl• 14 years ago

I would guess it has more to do with time. People only reached the Americas relatively recently[1], from high latitude regions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas

shalmanese• 14 years ago

People reached America before the blue eye gene prospered in Scandinavia.

hetman• 14 years ago

It's likely some of the alleles allowing for very dark skin were simply lost. This would be unsurprising since these people are descendants of lighter skinned people who had no need for dark skin anyway and so there was no selective pressure to retain these genetic traits.

exit• 14 years ago

i wonder whether depigmentation happened fast enough for people to be cognissant of the advantages.

well into the processes, would people know that dark skinned atavisms would have nutritional problems?

molmalo• 14 years ago

I think that the most visible advantage/disadvantage of having different skin colors, are the frequency and severity of sunburns. Black people are more resistant to sunburns than white people. And given that they would need to move hundreds or thousands of kilometers, to be exposed to lower latitudes and heavier solar radiation, and that it was a loooong trip in those prehistoric times, maybe they didn't get to see the advantages/disadvantages.

But then again... who knows?!

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

How common were sunburns before indoor lighting and industrialization though? If you spent at least an hour outdoors every day from early spring through late fall would you ever get sunburned?

kqr22• 14 years ago

The Q&A section of the animated video is also interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3eUP4-BlXI#t=08m24s

It addresses other competing theories, in particular sexual selection and genetic drift.

jpxxx• 14 years ago

Nitpick: That heat ferried by the gulf stream is what warns the Baltic is a quasi-religious supposition from the father of oceanography. The thermal ballast of the Atlantic ocean that develops in the summer is primarily responsible for most of Europe's uncommonly warm winters.

vacri3• 14 years ago

The Baltic isn't all that warm either - half of it freezes over in winter.

nosse7• 14 years ago

I'm from small town called Liminka, it's next to Oulu in Finland. The sea freezes in the winter but that doesn't keep Liminka from being a legendary farming area because of high crop yield. It's just warm enough to have good crops in the summer.

The crops are of course not nearly as good as in Germany, but you cant find similar area from the same latitude in Russia or Canada.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Liminka....

spindritf• 14 years ago

> half of it freezes over in winter.

Nowadays only gulfs properly freeze in winter but there are reports from XV century of people travelling over the ice in sleighs and even tales of inns being built on the ice. That was a little anomalous due to the Little Ace Age but even in the XX century ice floe would cover over 90% of the Sea once in a while.

jessriedel5• 14 years ago

The Baltic clearly has anomalous high temperatures for it's latitude.

http://montessorimuddle.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Annua...

nosse7• 14 years ago

Sources please? I live in Finland and find that very hard to believe.

EDIT: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Sea_ice....

bjelkeman-again• 14 years ago

Reading a little bit about the the recent work on the gulf stream and the effect on the climat shows that the interaction is probably much more complex than thought earlier. An interesting paper (PDF) on the subject is : Rhines, P.B.; Häkkinen, S. (September 2003). "Is the Oceanic Heat Transport in the North Atlantic Irrelevant to the Climate in Europe?". ASOF Newsletter. http://www.realclimate.org/Rhines_hakkinen_2003.pdf

devs10105• 14 years ago

Is it just me or do some Asians not seem nearly as white as caucasians? It seems especially Japanese can be fairly pale, I think its fairly subjective to say people of European ancestry are universally the most pale on earth.

kqr22• 14 years ago

The depigmentation ("whiteness") referred to in the article also applies to hair and eye color. Although some East Asians may be pale, their hair and eyes are generally not depigmented.

devs10105• 14 years ago

I understand that point, I just think the author goes a bit far in his assertions. There are many races that have some extent of depigmentation, which I take to mean that they can change their skin tan level by going out in the sun more or less, so it can be a bit subjective to say exactly which are the most pale, however the hair and eye color is less subjective.

batista2• 14 years ago

Of course they do not. Malaysians for example are dark colored, as are Indonesians etc. Also Indians are far from pale.

devs10105• 14 years ago

I work with many Indians and they themselves refer to "Asian" as a different race (meaning East Asian), so I didn't mean Indian people by this, rather East Asian, obviously many East Asians are much darker skinned than whites, however I personally know Asians that are fairly pale and I am sure at times I have been more tan than they are (when I would spend more time outside) and I primarily of German-Irish ancestry.

losvedir• 14 years ago

Dialect quirk. In the United States "Asian" refers exclusively to East Asian people - Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc, and does not include Indians, Pakistanis, Russians, or anyone else on the continent.

My understanding is that in British English "Asian" can include Indians and others from around there. I don't know if Russians are included, though.

nosse7• 14 years ago

Japanese have beauty standard to be pale. Scandinavians have the opposite here.

And do you know anyone from japan who is not albino and virtually could not get a tan. I myself and loads of Finnish people I know are really sensitive to sunlight.

SagelyGuru• 14 years ago

Interesting theory. Pity though for the author that it is well know that white people migrated into Europe from Iran and Northern India.

iand• 14 years ago

I smell BS. He suggests that these people around the coast gave up eating fish in favour of grains. I doubt it. Even today fish and shellfish feature heavily in the region's cuisine.

nosse7• 14 years ago

Heard of Viking crusades? It happened partly because there was too many people living in Scandinavia. That happened because Scandinavian farming had gotten the population to get too big. You run out of reliable fishing sources long before you hit the grains maximum. You don't have to replace fish with grains, just introducing grains to the diet can increase risk of malnutrition.

On the contrary this explains nicely how Sami people can be darker than Germans. They lived of reindeer, bird trapping and fishing, even like hundred years ago. It explains why Finnish are somewhat darker than swedes, we relied on hunting and fishing far longer than Swedes did.

drucken• 14 years ago

gave up eating fish in favour of grains

He did not say that at all.

He said that there was the well-documented introduction of a new (convenient and scalable) source of sustainable food, grains. But now the people there are no longer surviving on a Vitamin D-rich source. Thus, their skin adapts to accept the only other source of vitamin D, UV from sunlight.

Also, it is important to note the scale of the changes. He is talking purely about change relative to other Europeans at the time, not Equatorial or even North African skin tone direct to blonde and blue-eyed...

In my opinion, a little bit more historical evidence from Scandinvian food scientists and census data, especially in the last XX years of globalisation should indicate whether this hypothesis is consistent with food changes and other trends.

Zenst3• 14 years ago

How does this explain blue grass? Is grass the same colour all over the World? Just a thought.

Also white people look white as they reflect that light so there skin is the opposite, same for people who are black in that there skin is obsorbing the other light frequencies and so reflecting back not alot and as such appearing black.

Now if you got all the populations and used transport like planes and mixed them all about over the World then stopped having any movement, would the people in the northern and southern climates away from the equator become paler skinned and would those in the equator become darker skinned! Its like that eggs/drugs analogy - this your skin and this is your skin on sun :-).

Still, I would like to know what is the average shade of green per country and how much effect does its lattitude have upon that shade of green. Plants tended not to move as much and as humans have.

So to answear to original question:

Why are Europeans White? Because none of them are Wong :-) and there not actualy white.

rokhayakebe• 14 years ago

Why was this downvoted?

Zenst3• 14 years ago

No idea, shortcommings in others eludes me as well.

TheSOB883• 14 years ago

Blue grass eh? What the hell? I have never heard of such a thing, and I suspect the people who downvoted you hadn't as well.

Also: >Why are Europeans White? Because none of them are Wong :-) and there not actualy white.

This is not the kind of serious scientific discussion expected here - you're supposed to be making some kind of point. You're not explaining anything by saying "they're not actually white".

Also, sadly, I think people downvoted you because of your grammar - you don't seem to be a native speaker, you're making some odd/un-intellectual mistakes.

Zenst3• 14 years ago

Well light works as a negative when it bounceds of a object.

you have ared object it will obsorbe the red light reflect the rest.

This is why grass which looks green isn't actualy green. How can people not understand light refraction!!!

My spelling and grammer isn;t great, - thanks for highighting exactly what was wrong - not. I have aspergers, so may explain why I was born in the UK.

Sorry if my joke as highlighted by the smiley was not deemed a joke.

but above all thank you for feedback, more helpful than others.

necolas• 14 years ago

This is a hypothesis. IIRC, there is considerable variation in pigmentation in other parts of the world too. There isn't a direct mapping because other factors, like sexual selection (something not mentioned in the article), affect the phenotype of populations.

scalable• 14 years ago

"In fact, it happened after 13 KYA. Cave art from that time always shows normally pigmented people. Notice that in this painting from 13 KYA, the hunters are the same color as the deer."

Notice how the painting is monochrome. Maybe they just didn't have the artistic skill required?

Gustomaximus• 14 years ago

"Blonde hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally."

I felt this is a bit of a loose statement. I would think, like light skin, there would be a reason a recessive genes became so prevalent.

Edit: spelling

TheSOB883• 14 years ago

This happens a lot though. For example, the alleles that keep domestic cats and dogs friendly are from juvenilizing mutations. These mutations also make the ears floppy. It's called "neoteny". The same thing happened when the Russians domesticated silver foxes[1][2].

Humans are subject to a lot of these effects. Our head shape is very similar to the head shape of a baby chimp or gorilla, which obviously changes later in the ape's life. We have much smaller teeth and jaws than other apes our size.

Anyways, the point is that many alleles can be linked to a specific gene, so the fact that blue eyes and blond hair become more prevalent when less skin tone is selected for makes sense.

That said, I don't agree with some of the points made. He's kind of jumping to conclusions. You really can't rely on art to guide your research on skin tone. I draw art where humans are #FFFFFF because that's the color of the paper. Nobody in their right mind would trust something as symbolic as art.

I think the theory as a whole makes sense, though. Grains can grow, need moar vitamin D, lighter skin, other alleles come along for the ride. Now that's a pretty valid theory IMO.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Domestication [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1G2yZMUNUQ

Terretta2• 14 years ago

> Nobody in their right mind would trust something as symbolic as art.

So your conjecture is that the author is insane?

fecklessyouth• 14 years ago

I'm definitely no expert, but it seems to me that the two pieces of evidence he uses to date the creation of "whiteness" aren't very reliable. As one commenter on his blog pointed out, cave painting may be dark simply because that was the color they had available. And in terms of the Egyptians, the woman may simply have been portrayed as wearing make-up...not as being white. And even if his hypothesis is correct, I don't see how a white person in the Baltic would end up marrying the Pharaoh.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

I see that as daylight has reached my multi-ethnic neighborhood near the 45th parallel of north latitude in the middle of North America, this article about settlement patterns of Homo sapiens has received a lot of upvotes. I'll reply based on the more than fifty replies already posted, based on background reading I've done on the subject, and based on my "natural experiment" of living all over the United States (I have been to all states) and living near the Tropic of Cancer in east Asia.

Essential background reading on this topic can be found in a user bibliography on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

Any hypothesis about the origin, in deep prehistoric time, of a human characteristic will be just that, a hypothesis, now that we are remote in time from when our ancestors settled the earth. Tracing geographic patterns of gene distribution for genes that are under WEAK selection pressure helps suggest where the founder populations of different regions of the world most likely came from, and there is no longer any serious doubt that species H. sapiens originated in Africa and settled first the Old World (including Australia, which required sea-crossing canoes to cross the Wallace Line) and then the New World, with islands such as Madagascar and New Zealand being some of the last places on earth to be settled.

My ancestors are known to have lived in recent historic times in the region the author of the submitted article mentions the most, the shores of the Baltic and North seas. People in my family line are quite pale-skinned although not invariably blond or blue-eyed. My wife's family are known to have lived in recent historic times in the region spanning both sides of the Taiwan Strait at the edge of the tropics. There is a large difference in annual sunlight exposure between those two regions, but my wife's family is like many families from east Asia in also being quite pale-skinned as a baseline, although always black-haired and dark-eyed. As several of the previous comments have correctly pointed out, there is LARGE variation of skin color in all geographic populations anywhere on earth. Moreover, there is large individual variation in skin color in most individuals subject to lifestyle variations (more or less outdoor activity) and seasonal variations (sunny summers contrasted with cloudy winters). My children's skin color varies over a wide range, with my son who plays the most travel soccer becoming the most dark during the summer and my son who is a hacker staying the most pale year-round.

The deep ancestral condition of all hominins was pale skin. Beneath their black hair, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have pale skin at birth and in youth.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/text_pop/l_07...

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/skin-color

The hominin line of descent that branched into H. sapiens had to develop skin that began dark and persisted as dark as humans lost body hair and began living in savannah environments with less shade than forests, according to the currently accepted hypothesis. As population bottlenecks in Africa formed the species H. sapiens, presumptively the typical skin color of all modern humans was dark (within a pattern of continued variation among individuals and a continued capacity for individual skin color to vary over the course of seasons). Then as different founder populations settled in Europe (high latitude) and east Asia (cloudy even when not at high latitude in many coastal areas), the local populations were under selection pressure for selective sweeps of mutations that increased the gene frequency of paler skin. Generally, both Europeans and east Asians are pale, but they aren't usually pale because of the same novel gene patterns.

By the way, the "race" categories that are used in the United States are arbitrary, subject to rewriting from time to time for political considerations, and do not correspond to any scientific view of geographical populations. In any event, it is clear that human beings have been traveling back and forth and exchanging genes from one local population to another from the earliest days of human settlement of the earth. For more on the specific "race" categories in United States law and how they are applied to specific situations (especially college and university admission), see

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/12282...

for FAQ links to many official websites with governmental regulations and definitions and statistics.

jessriedel5• 14 years ago

> By the way, the "race" categories that are used in the United States are arbitrary, subject to rewriting from time to time for political considerations, and do not correspond to any scientific view of geographical populations.

These categories are hardly arbitrary, they are political. We separate people into republicans and democrats, too, but just because this separation is not based on genetics or geography does not make it arbitrary or even bad.

primatology• 14 years ago

That's his point. Political categorizations seem arbitrary from a scientific perspective.

laughinghan• 14 years ago

I think his point was that race is often presented as a biological categorization, when in fact, biologically speaking, it is completely arbitrary, i.e. determined by factors completely independent of biology (specifically, politics, as you pointed out).

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

The author of the linked post has a entire book about the legal cases that set down these categories in the US. He does seem to think they are both arbitrary and bad (and somewhat unique to the US, unlike slavery and racism which are not a uniquely US phenomenon), in roughly the same way that a libertarian would object to everyone being pigeonholed as either a republican or a democrat since they believe themselves to be neither.

dkarl• 14 years ago

We never let science interfere with our prejudices; see for example the Supreme Court's reasoning in [1], in which they rejected a scientific definition of race for the purposes of interpreting a statute. However, we always did and still do assume that our beliefs about race (whatever they are) are grounded in biological reality and will be vindicated by science. In the Supreme Court case I linked, after the justices set aside science in favor of "the understanding of the common man," they still felt compelled to discuss scientific theories and imply that a sufficient examination of the scientific evidence would support the same ruling.

[1] http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/asian_voices/voices_display...

Terretta2• 14 years ago

> The deep ancestral condition of all hominins was pale skin. Beneath their black hair, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have pale skin at birth and in youth.

> The hominin line of descent that branched into H. sapiens had to develop skin that began dark and persisted as dark as humans lost body hair and began living in savannah environments with less shade than forests, according to the currently accepted hypothesis. As population bottlenecks in Africa formed the species H. sapiens, presumptively the typical skin color of all modern humans was dark (within a pattern of continued variation among individuals and a continued capacity for individual skin color to vary over the course of seasons).

These two comments, separated in your text by references, seem opposites (ancestral condition was pale...began dark), and the linked texts do not support both of these opposites. But I think you meant humans began pale, became universally dark, then some became pale again.

In any case, all the references you provide support the original post's hypothesis: skin color was affected by both diet and interaction with the sun, each round of research adding a new mechanism to the previously suspected mechanisms (not refuting the previous).

The original post here adds to the collective info you supplied, and neatly explains an otherwise startling variance between their hypothetical charts and the actual charts, that would seem at first blush to invalidate the prior theories but in fact confirms them.

You wrote a lot in your reply, and HN appreciates and votes up for effort. With the mix of personal anecdote (lived everywhere, I'm nordic and my wife's Asian), the gist is that you're adding insight.

However, with your two major paragraphs proposing at least one view that's opposite to your linked research (skin that began dark vs chimps pale skin), and with none of your comments or links addressing or negating the original article's added insight about grain and the loss of vitamin D, I can't tell what you're intending to convey.

It seems your exec summary might have been, "Without addressing the original article which I call 'just a hypothesis', I'd like to say I've seen skin shade variations everywhere including seasonality in my own kids; I am linking research that the linked article builds on; and populations' genes are getting more mixed though even people with pale skin have it for different genetic reasons."

Ok. But not one word of that refutes (or ever directly comments on) the thesis of the original article linked here.

To summarize your reply while tying in the original article, we could say (in a sort of TL;DR):

"The original article explains historically sharply defined regional skin color bands in terms of UV exposure and diet, adding grains and the gulf stream to prior theories involving UV and fish and meat. This explains regions that were problematic for earlier theories. But in today's highly mobile world, people like my own family are becoming more mixed than ever and these regional bands are becoming less sharply distinct. We should be cautious of the increasingly arbitrary politics of race."

hurshp2• 14 years ago

This is just plain wrong, if you watch the documentary "the human family tree" the first people with less pigment were southeast asians as in towards China, and there is genetic evidence for it.

I think it is sad the more I watch these genetic documentaries the more I see the mixing of gene pools the more you know humans are very much the same but we also have a massive innate disposition to see people with different physical traits or culture as different from ourselves.

hurshp2• 14 years ago

I wish White Europeans and American etc. Could get over it, you owe your white skin to Africans becoming light skin asians It has almost nothing to do with Europe except that is where the settlements ended up. The genetic trace has all been done. Yes we are all as much Asian as African believe it or not.

This is why I wish more scientists would speak up because of debates like this where the evidence is out there but no scientist to presents it, instead just random blog posts faking the science behind it.

jlmendezbonini2• 14 years ago

"Children around the world are often blonde, but their hair darkens at puberty. So it is not just northern European adult skin that lacks pigment. It is also adult European hair."

The pictures posted by the author about child blondness look suspiciously like cases of malnutrition [1][2].

[1]http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(... (search for "vitamin")

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hair_color#Medical_condit...

hackinthebochs• 14 years ago

Those pictures were probably from melanesia where blonde hair is native to the population (more striking in children)

jlmendezbonini2• 14 years ago

I've never heard of that population before, it's quite an impressive thing to see [1]. On the other hand, the author's statement makes it sound like it's a common phenomenon around the world when it's not.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=melanesian+blonde&hl=en&...

edj2• 14 years ago

There's another school of thought that attributes the variety of hair, skin, and eye color in Europe to sexual selection rather than the brightness of the sun. In brief, Europe during the last glacial period offered very little food for women to gather, so women were almost completely dependent upon men for hunted meat. As a result of this imbalance, women developed striking looks to attract men.

For an example of this line of thinking in the evolutionary literature see: "European hair and eye color: A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection?" (Frost 2006) [1]

Human hair and eye color is unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe. The many alleles involved (at least seven for hair color) and their independent origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicate some kind of selection. Sexual selection is particularly indicated because it is known to favor color traits and color polymorphisms. In addition, hair and eye color is most diverse in what used to be, when first peopled by hunter-gatherers, a unique ecozone of low-latitude continental tundra. This type of environment skews the operational sex ratio (OSR) of hunter-gatherers toward a male shortage in two ways: (1) men have to hunt highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores over longer distances, with no alternate food sources in case of failure, the result being more deaths among young men; (2) women have fewer opportunities for food gathering and thus require more male provisioning, the result being less polygyny. These two factors combine to leave more women than men unmated at any one time. Such an OSR imbalance would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of color traits: hair- and eye-color diversity and, possibly, extreme skin depigmentation.

[1] http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(05)00059-0/abstr...

Tichy• 14 years ago

So the way to look more sexy was to start looking weird? That sounds rather arbitrary to me. Why not grow three boobs or develop wings or whatever? Anything can be explained like that.

rue• 14 years ago

No…evolution is about the past, not the future. It has no goal in mind.

In this theory, for some reason the women with those traits (which in all likelyhood existed before) became to be seen more desirable, thus lead to more offspring, thus becoming dominant.

edj2• 14 years ago

A peacock's plumage is rather arbitrary and weird, as well. But for whatever reason, vibrant plumage worked to attract the attention of peahens, so it was selected for.

I've heard it argued that the existence of decorative traits indicates fitness because it shows that an organism has a enough extra energy to devote to decoration.

But that's speculative. Sexual selection isn't really a logical proces. It's just an accumulating response to stimuli, over time.

ygmelnikova4• 14 years ago

Of course, there's another reason that's been kicking around for decades. A pair suddenly shows up in Mesopotamia around 6000 years ago. Their descendants taken captive by Assyria, and their eventual migration into Northern Europe as the Anglo Saxons / Celtic peoples.

http://www.livescience.com/9578-common-ancestor-blue-eyes.ht...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism

SageChara• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree with you more.

ygmelnikova4• 14 years ago

Are the down votes due to the science I linked to, or personal bias? Never mind, I already know the answer.

ygmelnikova4• 14 years ago

"Hine's work The British Nation Identified with Lost Israel (1871) sold up to 250,000 copies"

ygmelnikova4• 14 years ago

"It has been claimed that by the early 20th century there were more than two million British Israelites in Britain and the United States"

bfe• 14 years ago

This essay is from 2002 (and most of the citations in the longer cited version were quite old even then), and a great deal has been learned through DNA studies since then. And some of his points of evidence such as the coloration on a piece of cave art are obviously flimsy. (And not to rely on an appeal to authority but he doesn't convincingly overcome being a non-expert commenting on an active scientific field, and I'm calling crackpot on the website.)

There's good evidence that Homo sapiens sapiens first arrived in Europe during a warm period sometime around 45,000 years ago, then lived through the last glaciation maximum covering most of the continent with a peak around 18,000 years ago, driving the population through a harsh bottleneck that strongly selected for traits that aided survival in the cold climate. The population rebounded in numbers and in latitude from that bottleneck as the climate warmed again. A higher initial population under greater selective pressure for a longer period of time than elsewhere suffices to explain the resulting traits.

Why are Europeans White?

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