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Why are Europeans the whitest people on the planet?
- crux 17y agoUltimately 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 17y agoIt 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.
- petewarden 17y agoThe 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/Gender-Roles/9472049/ 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 17y agoThe 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.
- Tuna-Fish 17y agoAnother good point is that fairer skin is, and has long been, a sexually desirable trait. A pharaoh has his pick of anyone he wants.
- kingkawn 17y agoSince the European conquest of the planet, the fairer skin preference has been projected back onto many other groups of people, but is inherently suspicious given the circumstances within which we've learned about their cultures.
- ksvs 17y agoIt long predates that. European slave girls (and boys) were particularly prized in the caliphate when Europe was a backwater.
- Gupie 17y agoHistorically pale skin was prized because rich women didn't work in the fields, they stayed in doors out of the sun. Tans came into fashion with air travel. Only the wealthy could fly to say the Med for their holidays Also I suppose poor slum dwellers didn't get much sun. They only got rickets due to a subsequent lack of vitimum D.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 17y agoThe article as posted references a more scholarly presentation of the same material: http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=4 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 17y ago(Re note: a good reason, therefore, to publish a mainstream-style article alongside the academic paper?)
- prawn 17y agoThe 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 17y agoTraits 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.
- thaumaturgy 17y 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?
- gort 17y ago(Slightly off topic, but isn't the benefit of the appendix outweighed by how often if becomes infected, etc?)
- roqetman 17y agoOnly with the "western" diet. You'll see much fewer cases of appendicitis amongst those who don't eat the overly-rich western diet. So in my opinion, this is cultural, not genetic.
- xiaoma 17y agoMy father had appendicitis before the age of 25, despite a relatively simple diet. His father, who lived through WWII food rationing, had appendicitis, too. He wouldn't have survived without being cut open and treated with penicillin. For obvious reasons, I wish this were caused by culture, but genetics is almost certainly at work.
- eru 17y agoCulture saved them in this case.
- pohl 17y agoAre we really at liberty to disagree with the replicators on that one? If it really outweighed it, it would have been the end of the line.
- gort 17y agoNeither 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 17y agoProbably because the basis for the article is anthropology not genetics.
- crux 17y agoWell, he spends quite enough time talking about genealogical adaptation to environmental pressures. Are you concerned that he's not being sufficiently clearly anti-creationist?
- pohl 17y agoIt 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"?
- jeromec 17y agoThe 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 17y agoHow does this hypothesis explain pale skin coupled with dark hair, i.e. the typical Mediterranean phenotype.
- tfh 17y agothis is the first knol article i find useful :) actually the first i read..
- tfh 17y agowhy am i being downvoted? I just wanted to say that knol didn't trun out to be the wikipedia killer as google intended.
- antipaganda 17y agoBecause your first post turned out content-free, so the downvotes want people not to bother reading it.
- jvdh 17y 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 17y agoI 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 17y agoI live in Europe, UK, and we grow plenty of grains here.
- alexgartrell 17y agoGrains are low in Vitamin D, that's why native europeans are pale. Paleness allows you to absorb more vitamin D from sunlight.
- cool-RR 17y agoMaybe it's because they were spending less time in the sun? Please deliver my Nobel prize in the mail, thanks.
- henrikschroder 17y agoIf 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.
- 10ren 17y agoWhy 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 17y agoTo run down prey without overheating.
- grinich 17y agoand 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 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
- aquateen 17y agoThey should make it fair and have the runners carry a horse.
- 10ren 17y agoAh yes, the persistence hunt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557452 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557452 The nightmare concept of a relentless, unstoppable killer (as in zombie movies and the Terminator) appears to be based on us. Our bipedalism and big brain from a high protein diet also seem related to this. It seems to have given us our human qualities, yet also feels so very unrelated to those human qualities.
- 10ren 17y agothanks. I'd upvote your reply to me, but my upvotes don't count hint, hint
- bh23ha 17y agoI'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.