Were the first humans black or white?
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Were the first humans black or white?
I don't know of any studies done on early human DNA to determine race, or if we even know what markers to look for in early humans, but based on climate it would be shocking if they were anything but dark brown aka black.
Black power! :laughter:
Weren't they still very ape like in appearance?
Or are we talking early man?
Reffering to them as Black or White is damn silly though, oh society what have you done?
I honestly don't know why people are so obsessed with the topic
(Not referring to you :tongue:)
Black...
Well the first humans would look human being they were human. I'm sure there would be some different facial features much like we have between races today, after all at this point they are the only race and still have a couple of 100k years to diversify, but they would be unmistakably human.
The first humans lived in Africa and were presumably black, insofar as they fit into any modern racial category.
Given that there's a theory that civilisation started in East Africa, why did it start there? Why not somewhere else?
I think the guy just wants to know, not exactly about race here just curosity if the first humans were white, black or green or whatever
And I believe they were black, but I have a couple of doubts about it
We know that both humans and chimpanzees can have a variety of skin colours, this mean that our ancestors most likely also carried the same properties. This mean that the ability to have light or dark skin have been present even before Homo Sapiens started to wander the earth. This also mean that the environment was the deciding factor of skin colour. Bushmen are living in an environment similar to what we think the earliest humans were living in.
http://strangersinafrica.files.wordp...ana_reis-1.jpg
Some chimpanzee pics showing their variance in skin colour
http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:...ee-picture.jpghttp://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:...ing_poster.jpghttp://tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:...anzee-Head.jpghttp://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:...e-pictures.jpghttp://tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:...chimpanzee.jpghttp://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:...-with-baby.jpghttp://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:...nzee-glock.gifhttp://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:...Chimpanzee.jpghttp://tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:...st-friends.jpghttp://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:...y__303x400.jpghttp://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:...impanzee19.jpg
Edit: I found a better pictures of the bald chimpanzee. source
http://freerangetuna.files.wordpress...impanzee21.jpg
A not too wild guess is that our skin colour became increasingly dark as we lost our bodyhair and later had the reverse happen when we put on clothes and entered a colder climate.
I had a professor say that the 'black' race emerged in west Africa a few thousand years ago. If we are talking about the original humans millions of years ago who is to say that there was not some diversity over time. I would think the first humans had a darker hue but black per say maybe not.
I saw somewhere that the first Humans were Black or that of a similar colour, or of dark complextion.
I would say they were mostly black. There are different races of chimpanzees Adar, maybe that has something to do with their different skin colours? Different chimpanzee populations can have huge genetic variation, chimpanzees in the north of the congo have more genetic variation with those in the south of the congo than any 2 humans, even one Ethiopean and one Scottish.
That doesn't follow at all. We're genetically quite different from our ancestors. In this case, human skin pigmentation follows climate very closely. The indigenous peoples of hot equatorial climates have dark skin, while inhabitants of cold northern regions have light skin. The prevalent theory is that regions with more sunlight promote darker skin to reduce the harmful effects of UV radiation, while regions with less sunlight promote lighter skin to allow synthesis of vitamin D. These effects are very strong, so that the skin color of human populations is very reliably linked to climate. You can read the Wikipedia article for more info, including citations of the original research establishing the correlations.
Based on that, it's likely that our earliest ancestors had black skin, since they lived in Africa. Chimpanzees have fur, so the pressure toward dark skin doesn't apply to them, or only much less. The fur presumably stops most of the UV from getting to their skin anyway.
Yes, this seems to be the prevalent hypothesis AFAICT.
The concept of "the black race" really isn't well-defined. We can talk about skin color, though. Early humans likely had dark skin. I have no idea whether they had other racial characteristics that we would today associate with black people; I don't see why they would.
The estimates I've seen mostly place the origin of the human species at less than a million years ago.
I don't think you considered/understood the underlying genetics when writing your reply. Both chimpanzees and humans exhibit a great variance in skin colour. There are two possibilities here; the feature evolved separately (highly unlikely). Or our last common ancestor had a complex system for skin colour similar to the one human and the chimpanzees have. This property is exactly what have caused human pigmentation to follow the climate so closely. We are never more than a few mutations away from becoming darker/lighter.
Also, the wikipedia article support my theory. The article clearly state that the last ancestor we share with chimpanzees seem to have the same colouring properties as chimpanzees (" Jablonski and Chaplin note that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the hominid ancestors six million years ago had a skin tone different from the skin tone of today's chimpanzees—namely light-skinned under black hair*."). Natural selection in favour of the darker skin tones then turned the pre humans toward a darker complexion, just like the wikipedia article state "But as humans evolved to lose their body hair a parallel evolution permitted human populations to turn their base skin tone dark or light to adjust to the competing demands of 1) increasing eumelanin to protect from UV that was too intense and 2) reducing eumelanin so that enough UV would penetrate to synthesize enough vitamin D. By this explanation, prior to Homo sapiens colonization of extra-African territories, humans had dark skin given that they lived for extended periods of time where the sunlight is intense. As some humans migrated north, over time they developed light skin".
I really don't understand what you consider yourself to be refuting in your post. Your 2nd paragraph is "Based on that, it's likely that our earliest ancestors had black skin, since they lived in Africa. Chimpanzees have fur, so the pressure toward dark skin doesn't apply to them, or only much less. The fur presumably stops most of the UV from getting to their skin anyway."
In my post I state "This also mean that the environment was the deciding factor of skin colour. Bushmen are living in an environment similar to what we think the earliest humans were living in." And the final statement of my post is "A not too wild guess is that our skin colour became increasingly dark as we lost our bodyhair and later had the reverse happen when we put on clothes and entered a colder climate."
This mean that our conclusions are in perfect agreement as long as you agree that Bushmen have dark skin.
*Which is an oversimplified statement. Many chimpanzee exhibits darker skin tones than we normally call "light skinned", just like we can see on my chimpanzee pictures.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Brown.
Skin color in different areas is almost totally controlled by sunlight, not the hotness or coolness of the climate or use of clothes. Lighter skin absorbs sunlight easier, but takes damage from the sun easier. Whites living in places with lots of sunlight would die off faster than black or brown-skinned people, but brown/blacks would not get enough sunlight, dying off more in the reverse climates. And as the gene pool narrowed, less and less people had the worse trait, making the prevailing skin colors correspond to sunlight exposure.Quote:
A not too wild guess is that our skin colour became increasingly dark as we lost our bodyhair and later had the reverse happen when we put on clothes and entered a colder climate.[
It would be surprising if it was anything but black, we werent living in a enviroment that required more pale skin yet.
Larger parts of the body were probably through evolution even after the separation of homo and pan covered by hair. How long we were furries may not be clear yet. Homo Erectus may still have been. We would have to ask paleo-anthropologists, they may have some ideas about.