How did black people become white?

Question

This is a serious question. Presumably everyone's ancestors were black at one stage, if we came out of Africa. So how did people become white, with all the varieties of hair color and eye color that white people have? Thank you.

Answer 1

Hair and eye colour are also due to lower levels of melanin.

'Normal' [majority] is black hair and dark brown eyes.

Answer 2

My ancestors has never been anything but African, and I can trace my history wayway back - right now my father is the king of my village and we have never ever had a caucasian in my geneaology!

Answer 3

genetics/evolution

in colder climates you need less melanin in the skin to protect you from the sun but more hair, eventually a lighter skinned person appeared with recessive anomalies like blue/green eyes or blond hair and eventually due to reproduction more and more appeared.  that's why I believe we have people with different skin tones, hair and eye colors

Answer 4

I've heard it speculated that people farther from the equator gradually lost the melanin (what makes the skin dark) in order to be able to take in more sunlight.

People need sunlight in order to be able to manufacture Vitamin D in our bodies. We need Vitamin D to fix the calcium in our bones.  Without enough Vitamin D, a person can develop a disease called rickets. It's a nasty one.

Answer 5

ask michael jackson

Answer 6

After many generations of living in Europe, the black people who settled there became white people. They became white because of the environment. It probably took thousands of years for this to happen. It happened slowly.

Answer 7

We humans did start out in Africa, and we were all black.

The out of Africa migration was done during the first half of the Pleistrocence period. It was a time of ice ages, when sea levels dropped significantly and there was increased rainfall in many regions. At the same time Homo erectus was making stone tools and was able to use fire. The question of his being able to create fire has not yet been answered. Given the favorable climate and the increased skills to control his environment, Homo erectus spread out of Africa.

As for skin color:

"In their analysis of human evolutionary history, Jablonski and Chaplin concluded that modern humans most likely evolved in the tropics, where they were exposed to high UV levels. But as they moved into regions away from the equator, where UV levels are lower, humans became fairer so as to allow enough UV radiation to penetrate their skin and produce vitamin D, the "sunshine vitamin," also obtained from eating fish and marine mammals. Vitamin D is essential for maintaining healthy blood levels of calcium and phosphorous, and thus promoting bone growth.

Skin color, according to Jablonski and Chaplin, basically becomes a balancing act between the evolutionary demands of photo-protection and the need to create vitamin D in the skin.

One of the important implications of Jablonski and Chaplin's work is that it underlines the concept of race as purely a social construct, with no scientific grounds. DNA research has shown that genetically all humans, regardless of skin color and other surface distinctions, are basically the same. In an April 2001 article titled, "The Genetic Archaeology of Race," published in the Atlantic Monthly, Steve Olson writes "the genetic variants affecting skin color and facial features are essentially meaningless —they probably involve a few hundred of the billions of nucleotides in a person's DNA. Yet societies have built elaborate systems of privilege and control on these insignificant genetic differences."

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/02...

"Before the mass global migrations of people during the last 500 years, dark skin color was mostly concentrated in the southern hemisphere near the equator and light color progressively increased further away, as illustrated in the map below. In fact, the majority of dark pigmented people lived within 20° of the equator. Most of the lighter pigmented people lived in the northern hemisphere north of 20° latitude."

http://anthro.palomar.edu/adapt/adapt_4....

Answer 8

Who the h**l told you this?

Answer 9

migrating to colder areas of the world. Over time the pigment in the skin changed, hence white people

Answer 10

Ther is no such thing as white people were once black

Answer 11

I think the answer is skin colour is controlled by multiple genes and in many regions of the planet there have been different mutations as solutions to the environmental challenges of skin colour. Its maybe 6 genes in total and two similar shades of skin colour does not indicate that the same genes are mutated to lighten the skin...different solutions in different regions have actually evolved to give the same shades of skin colour.

As far as I know the skin is involved in producing  two vitamins, folic acid and vitamin D, through the action of sunlight. There is a suggestion that folic acid levels are important in closing the neural tube during neuralation in the embryo such that people with darker skin in more northern lattitudes would have been at a reproductive disadvantage in the low sunlight conditions and less offspring would survive to reproduce  themselves. Food sources might have been poor in the ancient world especially up north.Thus a mutation that lightened skin colour would be selected ( in a passive way).

I personally think that the concept of racism and pure races possibly is wired into our brains. As yet no Neanderthal DNA signatures in modern man has been detected suggesting the two species of men never intermingled in northern europe. There is a theory we drove the neanderthals off the planet ( ethnic cleansing ?) . Perhaps there is a deep rooted prejudice in the human brain against other humans that look like us but differ from us slightly ( e.g. in skin colour) and this is the basis for racism ..coming from ancient times when two species of men coexisted( My own theory..not fact/science based). If you examine racist behaviour we always treat the other race as inferior men even though genetically we are the same species.Racism may be more of a psychological factor wired into the brains of humans. ???

The only thing we know for sure is that as you scan the geographical regions of the earth there isn't exactly pure races - there is a blend across cultural boundaries where people in the ancient world would have traded and inter married.

Answer 12

It is a common misconceprtion that people were originally black. Scientifically it has been proven that skin pigments darkened or lightened due to environmental affects and other outside influences. It has been suggested that original people were a tan copper color. Black and white came later..

Answer 13

Over thousands of years, the diet and climates differed after migration. Human life originated in Africa, and in order to cope with the heat, the skin became darker.

Depending on where humans traveled, the ancestors changed accordingly. For example, climates with very cold temperatures, short and pale.

Diet is also an important factor. It has to do with some sort of receptors for skin pigmentation. But I forgot exactly what it was. I think because the skin were dark, they absorbed the light from the sun. But in some places where the sun doesn't shine as much, people began absorbing the light needed from food and animals. And that's why the skin colors changed slowly.

As for eye color, I am unsure.

Answer 14

evolution to allow us to thrive in a differant enviroment.

Answer 15

I thought we were all once monkeys

Answer 16

I believe and so do scientists that it has to do with the sun and elevation. The amount of UV rays over time changing pigmentation.

Wikipedia it.

Answer 17

because the world used to be one continent. in the africa area. because it is near the equator the sun was direct over causing dark skin tones and it became genetic. then the continents split up and depending on the area and the climate it determined the skin and eye color. areas with less sun= lighter colored. it then got in the dna and genetics.