In the literature of the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity, descriptions of the physical aspect of various nations in terms of color is commonplace. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga, meaning "the black-headed people". Dr. Vicki Leone contrasts this in her book Uppity Women of Ancient Times, noting that the Sumerians paintings and mosaics depict a people possessing dark blue eyes.The Ancient Egyptian (New Kingdom) funerary text known as the Book of Gates distinguishes "four races of men". These are the Egyptians, the Levantine peoples or "Asiatics", the "Nubians" and the "fair-skinned Libyans". Xenophon describes the Ethiopians as black, and the Persian troops as white compared to the sun-tanned skin of Greek troops.Herodotus similarly used Melanchroes "dark-skinned" for the Egyptians and he compared them to the Aithiopsi "burned-faced" for the Ethiopians. Herodotus also describes the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair. These color adjectives are typically found in contrast to the "standard" set by the own group, not as a self-description. Classicist James Dee found that, "the Greeks do not describe themselves as "white people"—or as anything else because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves—and we can see that the concept of a distinct 'white race' was not present in the ancient world." http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...vOjKDQ&usg=AFQjCNHr32BbOliBkIpaWTRoFLuJ4BNTYA
I encountered the ancient Chinese describing themselves as black haired peoples . There is also a different in facial features between Ethiopian dark skin and the West African Inhabitant or the one from sub-Sahara, If we look on north African , they resemble more to the European stock then the sub-Sahara people. What I am driving is that the concept of modern man coming from Africa imply s the modern man was African black and O believe there is much inclination to believe the migrant modern man from Africa had more feature as the current Mediterranean inhabitant .
What is "Laban"? Lebanon? If you are you asking what skin color the earliest anatomically modern humans to leave Africa had, I don't think that anyone knows. There's currently a lot of research underway gathering biological samples from populations all over the Earth and DNA sequencing them. The goal is to discover genetic simularities and differences between the populations, to discover who is most closely related to whom, and ultimately to map early human movements and migrations during the paleolithic period. Researchers already know that it's very complex. People may have left Africa on multiple occasions. They may have headed east through Aden as well as north through Lebanon. There seem to have been multiple waves entering India at various times during the stone age, perhaps through Afghanistan along routes that many later historic invaders took. I get the impression that many researchers think that the African Bushmen and their kindred might represent the most direct descendents of the earliest anatomically modern populations. So we can speculate that the earliest modern humans may have looked something like Bushmen, which may or may not be entirely true. The Australian aborigines seem to be derived from an early population as well that was kind of isolated in a geographical cul-de-sac and may have survived in less mixed form than humans in other places. But even in Australia, there may well have been more than one migration of humans into that continent. The many diverse American Indian groups apparently came from northeast Asia originally, but they don't display all of the stereotypical Asian racial features, so they may be descended from an earlier Asian population that existed before those features had fully appeared. I guess that the best guess is that all of today's classic and rather stereotypical races are more recent evolutionary developments that appeared after humans had already spread across the earth, formed remote reproductively isolated populations and started to genetically diverge. It's interesting that contemporary transport has thrown everyone back together again into close reproductive proximity, so I expect the physical differences between the races to decline gradually in the future, as long as easy worldwide transport lasts.
What manner of "-oid" they were has probably become muddled now that there's genetic evidence of modern humans interbreeding with existing archaic populations in the regions they migrated to. This happened even in Africa, where those that stayed put supposedly mixed with a now extinct member of the homo genus. We at least know that one of the groups that migrated 50-60,000 years ago was dark skinned --i.e., the ancestors of aboriginal people in Australia and the journey they made through areas like India. But some of their contemporaries can be quite flexible in terms of characteristics -- with a frequency of blond-brown hair appearing during childhood. If that's not merely the result of encountering ruttish European males in the past, then their ancient ancestors might have had the variability to diverge into peoples that were precursors of some of today's groups (if interbreeding with local archaic populations only marginally accounted for the differences).
I am not sure that the migration into the Mediterranean were the Bushman Take a look in the maps http://www.anthrocivitas.net/forum/showthread.php?p=167360#post167360 The Australian man is supposedly be 70000, while there was a large population of modern man in north Africa from east of the Nile river up to Oman and tere are evidence they were ther 150000 years ago , which is earlier the the man in Australia .
The maps show Bushman migrations within the last couple of hundred years. It has nothing to do with the out of Africa question.
Look into the very recent research of Dr. Cavalli-Sforza. The first successful migration of our species out of Africa occurred roughly 60KYA. Because it was the depth of an ice age, so much water was locked into glaciers and icecaps that rainfall was much less than today. As a result there was a famine in Africa and members of a tribe called the San or "Bushmen" (who in those days lived much farther north than they do today) traveled to the southwest corner of Asia. Remember that in an ice age sea level is much lower and seas are narrower, so stone age boat-building technology was sufficient for the crossing. They made it all the way to Australia, which, due to the vagaries of weather patterns, had plenty of rainfall and lots of food. They were the ancestors of the Native Australians. (Cavalli-Sforza has all the DNA analysis to show who is related to whom in the modern world.) About ten thousand years later, another group of adventurers from the same tribe did the same thing. This time the drought was not as severe and they found plenty of food in Asia, so they settled there. These were the ancestors of all modern non-African people except the Native Australians. (Again, DNA analysis shows that the San are our closest relatives, while all of the other modern sub-Saharan African people are much more distantly related to us.) I don't know what you mean by "migration into the Mediterranean." North Africa was uninhabitable to people with stone age technology, so there were no human colonies on the south shore of the Mediterranean. The descendants of the San colonists eventually migrated in all directions, reaching eastern Asia around 40KYA, Europe around 25-30KYA, North America around 15KYA, and Polynesia much more recently. Once they developed the technology of agriculture around 12KYA, they were able to colonize places that would not support Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and at some point they crossed back to Africa and colonized the Mediterranean shore with their crops and their herds. The modern North Africans speak languages in the Afroasiatic family that are clearly related (although in most cases except Amharic distantly) to Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, etc. So did the ancient Egyptians. So all the shores of the Mediterranean were colonized long ago, but not all by the same people. However, they were all descendants of the San, not of other sub-Saharan Africans. Yes, but North Africa became a desert and was slowly abandoned as Paleolithic people lacked the technology of agriculture (farming and animal husbandry). They could not grow their own food to make up for the food that was not growing naturally. The humans who resettled the region later appear to be immigrants from Asia, who brought agriculture with them, which had already been invented there. This is why, when anthropologists talk about Africa, they make an important distinction between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The two regions have different histories. (To be fair I must add that our knowledge of North Africa is not as clear as we would like. The region has been a giant melting pot like today's United States, so it's not easy to trace the DNA of the people who live there now. Instead we analyze their languages and their culture, but we would really like to do it with DNA.) In any case, it's important to understand that skin color is one of the most ephemeral of human traits. When people migrate south into a sunnier climate or north into a less sunny climate, it only takes a couple of thousand years for the individuals with the proper amount of melanin in their skin to survive through natural selection. Melanin blocks sunlight and therefore prevents deadly skin cancer in equatorial latitudes. But in the same way it also blocks the absorption of Vitamin A, which leads to malnutrition in northern latitudes. Look at the very light-skinned Latvians and the very dark-skinned southern Indic people. They are very closely related, both speaking Eastern Indo-European languages. They are separated only by three or four thousand years of migration in opposite directions from the original Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.
