My theory on human (physical) variation

My theory on how physical variations cluster geographically:

Prior to settling all parts of the world, there was one race, the human race, whose members lived together in the same villages and possessed all the myriad physical variations that we see in people today. Back then, every physical variation, including skin color variation, was a random individual variation. For instance, in the same family, you would have seen some people having whitish skin, some having blackish skin, some having medium skin tones, some who had blue eyes, some who had brown eyes, some who had black eyes, some who had long and straight hair, some who had short and curled hair, etc. etc. In other words, all the current physical variations we see in humans already existed in the same population prior to the time when people began settling other parts of the world.

With the end of the most recent ice age, Africa became a hot place with lots of sunshine, Europe became a cool place with very little sunshine, Asia became a warm place with moderate sunshine. People who had different physical traits preferred different climatic conditions. When people of that early human population began to settle different parts of the world, the light-skinned people preferred colder places with less sun and went northwards to Europe, the dark-skinned people preferred very hot places where there is lots of sun and stayed in Africa, and the medium-skinned people preferred warm places where there is moderate sun and went to Asia. Pardon me, I know that Africa, Europe, Asia each vary greatly in climate, and I am only talking about the climate in general.

Thus, due to genetic drift, specifically, founder effect, in other words, fragmentation of a previous larger population into smaller ones, we now see specific physical traits in specific climatic zones.

Your thoughts?

 

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Nope. It wasn't a matter of personal preference, otherwise there would be a few black Innuits, or some blond white Africans.

Sunshine depends more on lattitude, not ice ages.

 

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Primates - our closest ancestors - are aggressive and violent animals. It's unlikely, therefore, that early human history was as peaceful and uneventful as you suggest, your portrayal of a multi-racial village existence sounds like a very contemporary take on ancient history. But, there is some merit in your suggestion that humans sought out an equilibrium between their physical nature and the environment rather than being 'naturally selected', as the current theory in vogue suggests.

You will find that the largest and most aggressive human race - the blacks - still occupy the most ancient and resourceful hunting ground of human origins - Africa.

Is this just a coincidence?

Is not human history marked by competition and conflict between different ethnic groups?

 

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Actually, I didn't say there was a multi-racial village. I merely said the first villages comprised of only one race, and that all the existing variations were random and individual. Like, for instance, it's common nowadays to find people in the same family having different eye colors, that doesn't mean that family is a multi-racial family.

 

Actually, I think, once the vast majority of the light-skinned people went away northwards to settle in the cooler places where there is little sun due to their preferences for those climates because of their physical traits, the few light-skinned people who did remain in Africa would have found themselves uncomfortable socially because they would have suddenly seemed outnumbered and peculiar and "different" from the majority, so I guess sooner or later they would have left northwards too. The same story would apply for the medium-skinned people.

Thus, I think, preferences for particular climates due to having specific physical traits and the psychology of not wanting to be "different" from the majority would have acted together to create the certain populations that match their climatic habitats that we see today in the Old World.

 

This wasn't the story of individuals, it took thousands of years for people to expand into new territory. There is nothing about having black skin that would make you dislike being in the north. If there was food there, you would go.

 

There never was such a thing as one race, that is a modern political construct.

How exactly did these people know of the differing climates around the world?

I guess pale skinned people just decided to take a shot at it and cross one of the worlds hottest deserts - the Sahara, in the hope of finding somewhere cooler, even though conceptually it is unlikely they could ever have been aware of such a place.

Good point.

Nobody has yet proven that having black skin is a disadvantage in northern climates. Although there's a lot of cod science out there.

 

It is true that your increased melanin production would require a slight increase in calories, and that it would decrease your production of vitamin D, but as an individual, you could probably manage it.

 

People who have dark-skin naturally dislike colder places. This could be due to psychology as well as physiology. Colder places have less sun, and thus would be detrimental to health if you have dark skin, because dark skin blocks sunlight and you can't get Vitamin D. Even today, in the USA, dark-skinned people predominantly live in the South, where the climate is hot and the sunshine is strong.

Besides, the end of the Ice Age may have been abrupt, but, as soon as the settling of places to the north became possible, light-skinned people would have left those early villages to move northward, thus decreasing the proportion of light-skinned people to dark-skinned people in the early villages, and, over time, due to psychology of not wanting to be "different" from the majority, the outnumbered light-skinned people who initially did remain in the early villages would have left northwards as well. Over time, the proportion of light-skinned people would have been driven to zero in the early villages, and that is why Africa today, where the climate is hot and sunshine is strong, only has dark-skinned people.

 

Sometimes I wonder why this is called a science forum, but only when I am awake.

 

But how would you know what the first people were like. Since nobody knows, it's a guess at best.

 

So, then, how can you explain the current physical variations we see? By mutations? Heck, we haven't seen a single mutation, not one, in thousands of years. And, even if there were mutations, they would have been rare and they would have been drowned out by the majority of normal genes, even in a population of a few thousand people, never mind a population of a few million.

Thus, mutations wouldn't have worked. The clustering of physical traits to climatic zones must be due to founder effect.

Take an example, there is a mutation that causes albinism, and, like all mutations, it's very rare. In Africa, you can occasionally find people who have this mutation. But, because the vast majority of the population don't have this mutation, a person who does get this mutation usually have that mutation drowned out by mating with "normal" individuals, and that, after a few generations of mating with "normal" individuals, no trace of the mutation would exist. Thus, I don't think something as simple as rare mutations can explain the fact that certain physical traits are found in certain climatic zones, at least I don't think this would be possible in a large population, perhaps it would work in a very small population say, if the mutation happens to one person who lives in a village of no more than 50 to 100 people.

 

You love it really you bitch!

*bites tongue*

Of course we know. Primates are already coded for race under their fur.

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Black Chimp......................................................................................................................White Chimp


When you consider the physiological differences that separate human races, you realize that we we're never all simply 'chimps', but proto-human tribes that fought each other in viscous wars over lands and resources, with only our raw physical power to depend upon.

The variations aren't that many, and can be explained simply as the expansion of the original phenotypes.

 

There are variations within a population, and it took millenia of natural selection to select certain traits suited to a particular area, but the variations were not as extreme as you suggest within a locality.

It is not true that Blacks like the south due to climate in preference to the north. There are blacks in South Africa and Egypt, Georgia and Detroit.

There have been mutations in recent human history, for instance the one that allows for digestion of lactose into adulthood. This coincided with domestication of animals and the consequent use of milk as food.

 

That's ridiculous. All chimps have whitish skin under blackish hair.

 

Look at the pictures Homer!

 

Consider:

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Black skinned Chimpanzee.....................Black skinned Gorilla.

 

I'm in a bad mood, so I'll just say that if you are genuinely this ignorant you should not be posting nonsense with so much confidence on a science forum. It just shows you up as a blithering idiot.
Now if I wasn't in a bad mood I would give you half a dozen references to the many mutations humanity has undergone in the last few thousands of years, even though you likely couldn't understand them. However, for today at least, please just stew in your own ignorance.

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Besides, racial characteristics are often reflected in human remains.

 

Of course the poor sod couldn't understand them, they are so deliberately obtuse and convoluted as to be essentially meaningless.

It just demonstrates the human capacity for self-delusion and fabrication when one is competing for research grants from private enterprise.

Most anthropologists are little more than corporate whores.