How to explain different skincolour of Australian Aboriginals and Scandinavians if the "Out of Africa" is true

Question

The climate of Tasmania and Scandinavia is similar, so why are Scandinavians so fairskinned while Tasmanians were very dark, if the forebears of both groups left Africa about the same time (40 mya)?

Answer 1

Tasmainia is more like the latitude of Spain or about 42 degrees off the equator.  Scandanavia is over 55 degrees off the equator.  It makes a very big difference in the amount of UV light which is more important than climate.

Answer 2

Not only that, there tends to be more UV rays in Tasmania as the ozone layers fluctuate.  The populations might be too small and occassional interbreeding with the mainland Australian populations might tend keep the skin darker.  You notice that blacks living in America retain their dark skin as long as they don't mix with too many Europeans.  Dark skin is not that big of a disadvantage.  It limits Vitamin D if you don't get enough sun but it is probably not a big deal in Tasmania unless they dress up in coats and avoid the sun.

Answer 3

Say what?  Have you been to Tasmania?  It's full of white Australians?  I don't think they have many/ if any Aboriginal people there & it's not been proven they descend from Africans anyway, it's just a recent theory.  Since when did Africans go to Scandanavia?  you're not getting mixed up with the Danish novel "Out of Africa" by Karen Blixen which is about a Danish woman living in Africa?  There is no way Scandinavians descend from Africans dude!!

Answer 4

Well, to start with the 40k date is ludicrously wrong. That's the date that the Europeans moved West, and the Asians East. the Out of Africa date is much more likely to be about 100k.

The Aborigines are thought to have arrived in Australia about 50k  ago, the Tasmanians were a small founder group formed of Aborigines. They very likely just didn't have the full pre-existing range of skin colour genes that were available in from their original African origin, and their very dark skin is the result of a founder effect.

Mutations for skin colour are pretty uncommon. Africans with no admixture can produce a kind of golden cafe au lait skin colour down to nearly jet black. Tasmanians didn't seem to get the full genetic palette to choose from, and so were waiting around for a rare mutation, which takes a long time in a small population.

Europeans are such a light colour because of a really recent (8,000 years or so old) mutation that appears to have spread like wildfire as far as Northern India and central Asia.

Answer 5

Uhhh...your whole idea is a little over-simplified.  It is not like people migrated directly from Africa to Scandinavia or directly from Africa to Tasmania.  It is a long process with many factors affecting each groups particular evolution.