Why are Europeans the whitest people on the planet?

http://knol.google.com/k/frank-w-sweet/why-are-europeans-white-e1/k16kl3c2f2au/14

by martian • 17 years ago

174 62 17 years ago

knol.google.com

crux2• 17 years ago

Ultimately this is the sort of thing that is utterly fascinating to me, but since a) it gives me no reason that I _shouldn't_ believe it (corollary: mentions no competing viewpoints), and b) I have no expertise at all in the field, I have to assume that I shouldn't go around telling everybody that I know why Europeans are the whitest people on Earth, just yet.

The one presented fact that I'm _not_ totally solid on is, I'm not sure that prehistoric and ancient art are sufficiently solid to provide a date by which we can assume Europeans were white.

Ixiaus• 17 years ago

It would appear the author is an amateur scholar; he provided a very interesting point of view and I enjoyed the read. It would have been comprehensive had he supplied opposing arguments, references, and fleshed out his writing a bit more.

dkarl• 17 years ago

The funny thing is that it contains about as much substance as a "TED Talk," but without better visuals and an animated delivery I have a hard time taking it seriously.

petewarden• 17 years ago

The assumption that cave art conventions reflect actual pigmentation is pretty shaky. The egyptian statue reference is just wrong - there's a long tradition of females being depicted as yellow or white versus red or brown for males. This probably has some basis in men engaging in more outdoors activity, but this art is definitely not a photo-realistic rendering. If you want a modern analogy, think the Simpsons! Here's some academic work that mentions the gender conventions:

http://www.mywire.com/a/Oxford-Encyclopedia-Ancient-Egypt/Ge...

I don't know anything about the other points in the article, but these errors make me doubt their accuracy.

herdrick• 17 years ago

The redness of men in Egyptian art is based on the fact that men's skin is redder, due to more hemoglobin closer to the surface.

vidarh• 17 years ago

The article as posted references a more scholarly presentation of the same material: http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=4

(Note that I have not read this version, nor have I looked at any of the references he's provided - I just noticed the link and briefly scanned through the page)

DougBTX• 17 years ago

(Re note: a good reason, therefore, to publish a mainstream-style article alongside the academic paper?)

prawn• 17 years ago

The Wikipedia page on the topic suggests that chimpanzees have pale skin under dark hair and that humans might have evolved sweat glands and less hair for heat management related to a larger brain. Seemed to me that the suggestion there is that paler ancestors became darker in regions closer to the equator (Africa, Australia, Indonesia).

I guess paler people today in Northern Europe may have either had ancestors who became darker and then lightened (as per the Knol piece) or moved out of Africa before their skin darkened to deal with the UV/Vitamin D issue. From memory, it's been suggested that expansion into Europe was around 50,000 years ago.

Interesting story though - have never read a page on Knol before.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Traits tend to go away when not needed. Pigment is essentially an appendix.

EDIT: Okay, wisdom teeth then. Or teeth in general, which are gradually disappearing.

thaumaturgy2• 17 years ago

...in that the appendix was recently discovered to have a useful function as a backup store for intestinal bacteria in case something killed off all the good stuff in your gut?

gort8• 17 years ago

(Slightly off topic, but isn't the benefit of the appendix outweighed by how often if becomes infected, etc?)

BearOfNH• 17 years ago

[Citation Needed]

gort8• 17 years ago

I doubt it; isn't it providing protection from UV-caused skin cancer and such?

[Edit: I took you to mean that pigment was generally not beneficial, but probably you meant only in certain environments, which would be fair enough.]

kingkongreveng_• 17 years ago

Other way around. Darker skin in North America is correlated to more cancer, due to the consequent vitamin D deficiency.

Most of the population is now vitamin D deficient because people don't spend much time outside.

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

Actually you have it backwards. Melanin is considered extremely important by the body, some people have high latent melanin levels but all people regardless of race are able to darken their skin color via tanning (exposure to the sun triggering melanin release). Darker skin protects you from being sun burned, which is harmful and can even be fatal (leading to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, etc.) The body considers melanin production so important that some of the natural checks and balances against cancer are inhibited in melanin generation cells, which is why skin cancer is fairly common compared to other types of cancer.

gort8• 17 years ago

Neither the word "evolution" nor the word "gene" appears in an article that is clearly about a change in gene frequencies over time caused by natural selection. Hmm.

(Perhaps the author is trying to avoid the suggestion that white people are "more highly evolved", which is of course nonsense; it's just different adaptations suited for different environments.)

[Edit: Yes, this comment is probably stupid.]

spamizbad• 17 years ago

Probably because the basis for the article is anthropology not genetics.

crux2• 17 years ago

Well, he spends quite enough time talking about genealogical adaptation to environmental pressures. Are you concerned that he's not being sufficiently clearly anti-creationist?

pohl4• 17 years ago

It does mention adaptation, traits, and survival. He doesn't really need to put too fine a point on it.

What do you mean by "more highly"?

gort8• 17 years ago

It was in scare quotes to indicate that it doesn't really have a clear scientific meaning.

jeromec• 17 years ago

The article posits that a physical feature can be shaped evolutionarily by environment. Observations of other species appear to support that. We see today that there are different distinctive physical features for people around the globe, so it might be fair to suppose other features may have come about with environmental influence (even if we haven't yet found correlations). Yet, we also know that the human skull has evolved to change over many years, but if we were to compare the skulls of people across the globe today my guess would be that they are quite similar. Therefore, I think a more accurate assumption would be that modern day humans across the globe have "differently evolved" in some aspects, such as physical appearance.

Gormo• 17 years ago

How does this hypothesis explain pale skin coupled with dark hair, i.e. the typical Mediterranean phenotype.

tfh3• 17 years ago

may be people around the mediterranean used to eat more fish. the same goes for the japanese phenotype.

astine• 17 years ago

Mediterraneans aren't very 'pale-skinned.' They have a lot more melanin than you find in say, Sweden.

mitko• 17 years ago

Right! For example, people in Sicily have darker skin.

tfh3• 17 years ago

this is the first knol article i find useful :) actually the first i read..

tfh3• 17 years ago

why am i being downvoted? I just wanted to say that knol didn't trun out to be the wikipedia killer as google intended.

antipaganda• 17 years ago

Because your first post turned out content-free, so the downvotes want people not to bother reading it.

jvdh• 17 years ago

[quote] Too much UV penetrating the skin (too pale-skinned under intense sunlight) increases Vitamin D but reduces folate. Lack of folate causes neural tube defects in the fetus, causing such congenital abnormalities as craniorachischisis, anencephalus, and spina bifida, leading to many miscarriages. [/quote]

So the Europeans had adapted to their environment, changed to a grain diet, suddenly had too little vitamin D. This would mean they would increase their vitamin D, but reduces folate, and therefore increase the number of miscarriages?

Seems like a simple way to test if this hypothesis is actually true. Just look at some historic numbers of the number of miscarriages with those diagnoses (these days pregnant women in Europe get folate supplements).

gojomo• 17 years ago

I found the way the folate side of the equation was dropped midway through the article undermined the story a bit.

Did the grain-eating D-deficient Baltic-dwellers have to do something else to restore the folate being lost by their lighter pigmentation?

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

I live in Europe, UK, and we grow plenty of grains here.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

Grains are low in Vitamin D, that's why native europeans are pale. Paleness allows you to absorb more vitamin D from sunlight.

cool-RR• 17 years ago

Maybe it's because they were spending less time in the sun?

Please deliver my Nobel prize in the mail, thanks.

henrikschroder• 17 years ago

If you had actually bothered to read the article, you would have found out that it's the other way around. White people have less pigment to maximize the amount of vitamin D that can be synthesized given the little sunlight they receive.

10ren2• 17 years ago

Why are humans furless?

I loved the semi-aquatic-ape theory (that in foraging for shellfish we lost our fur as whales, dophins, hippos did), but I understand that one has fallen from favour.

pg• 17 years ago

To run down prey without overheating.

grinich• 17 years ago

and here's a bit more detail.

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.

from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html

More on the Man vs. Horse Marathon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

bh23ha• 17 years ago

I'm not sure what's new here.

We've known for a very long time vitamin D is produced when the skin is exposed to UV light. We've known how important vitamin D is. Northern Europe dark and cold, yep we've known that too for a while.

Innuit get their vitamin D from the seafood based diet, we've also known that too. Northern Europe being unusually warm thanks to the gulf stream, that is also old news.

Why are Europeans the whitest people on the planet?

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