• Question from:Johnny

I have posted a link to an article (just google it) from the Discover Science Journal. The study hypothesizes that early humans had fair skin, just like our closest relatives chimpanzees. The evidence collected by the study seems to support the 'early human - fair skin' hypothesis. Of course nobody knows for sure, but I thought you might be interested. Enjoy!

Discover, Vol. 22, No. 2, February, 2001. Gina Kirchweger

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  • QMUL, London
  • Posts: 1,022

Thanks for that. Though obviously there's not much for us to do here....

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  • Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China
  • Posts: 237

It does bear pointing out that the article appears to be addressing a very early stage of human evolution, in fact so early that the applicability of the word "human" is debatable. The argument is that skin colour was probably light in some ancestral species that lived in the forest and retained extensive, ape-like body hair. Subsequently, body hair would have been reduced and skin colour would have darkened as these proto-humans moved onto the savanna and continued to evolve under different conditions.

All this happened well before the emergence of our modern species, Homo sapiens, and it's still a good bet that the earliest members of our species had relatively dark skin. As I've said before on these forums, however, this has absolutely nothing to do with any meaningful concept of "supremacy", except in the trivial sense that dark skin was more suitable for the environment and way of life of early members of Homo sapiens than light skin would have been.

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  • University of Bristol
  • Posts: 2,463

Thanks Corwin - I and others made the same point to Bill (aka Johnny) in our previous posts on the subject.