In the beginning of mankind, was there white people or black people?

Question

I have read strong evidence from caniology experts and so forth that suggest caucasians where the primeval race. Others indicate all life came from Africa. So what do you believe was the first race?

Answer 1

We all descended from Africans.

The first people probably weren't any particular, currently surviving "race" (race is a completely bogus concept anyway).

There's no reason to think the first humans looked like modern Africans.

Answer 2

To quote the Wikipedia: "The Recent African Origin (RAO), or "out-of-Africa", hypothesis proposes that modern humans evolved in Africa and later migrated outwards to replace hominids in other parts of the world. Evidence from Archaeogenetics accumulating since the 1990s has lent strong support to RAO and has marginalized the competing multiregional hypothesis, which proposed that modern humans evolved, at least in part, from independent hominid populations. Geneticists Lynn Jorde and Henry Harpending of the University of Utah proposed that the variation in human DNA is minute compared to that of other species. They also propose that during the Late Pleistocene, the human population was reduced to a small number of breeding pairs — no more than 10,000 and possibly as few as 1,000 — resulting in a very small residual gene pool."

So most evidence indicates that the first humans were in Africa, and specifically in sub-Saharan Africa (not in North Africa, where skin is lighter), and so their skin would have been dark, in order to protect them from the abundant sunshine there.

Answer 3

apelike people.  Neither black nor white, they came later.

Answer 4

frankly, I don't care.  We are all of us part of the human race.  Some have more pigment, some less, but we are all human.

Answer 5

Adam and Eve probably had a robust mixture of all the genes necessary to allow for all the variations in people we see today. Noah's family produced a bottleneck in the gene pool after the flood and the separation of people's at the Tower of Babel event then led people to split up and move into different areas of the world which allowed for more finely tuned separations or losses of genetic information that produced the variety of peoples today. The original people on earth were a mixture of all the races we see today....we are one human race.

Answer 6

I thought it had been pretty well established that Africa was the cradle of humanity and that groups that populated  Europe and Asia came out of Africa.  I don't know what color the people were - but it's a fair bet they were black.

Answer 7

The race concept is not particularly useful from the biological or sociological point of view, since all the races belong to an only biological species, Homo sapiens, and they only show small genetic variations. The culture much more constitutes an important factor at the time of determining the conduct and style of life of the different human groups. The term race is controversial by the slight knowledge of superiority and inferiority that takes implicit. The race constituted the justification to implant the state of slavery, the social persecution of minorities and other groups, like the one of the Jewish town during n**i Germany, or the system of apartheid in South Africa. Historically, the physical anthropologists had divided to the humanity, taking care of to their morphologic characteristics, in three great subdivisions or races: negroide, mongoloide and caucasiana. Some scientists were further on adding amerindian and the South Sea islander. Like biological concept, the race was more evident when the differences made reference to the morphologic characteristics, like the pigmentación of the skin, the color, forms and thickness of the hair, the form of the nose or the corporal structure. The appearance of the genetic analysis wine to refute this idea. Before this definition, the classification of the races depended on a combination of geographic, ecological and morphologic factors. In second half of century XX, the investigations on the frequency allocations of genes invalidó this approach. To conceive clear borders between the different races was possible from the morphologic point of view, but the use of the genetic analysis demonstrated that the hereditary variants were indifferent to such boundaries, allowing to the races to intermingle itself through other intermediate forms. , today at sight of its mobility and interrelation every greater time, its infinite number is clear. The concept of race, invalidado by the modern genetic investigation, has not disappeared absolutely. Some scholars still use it; nevertheless, many experts advise against it, even like scientific idea, due to their political connotations and to the height that are having some racist ideologies in some countries of western Europe.

Answer 8

i think it was both. yeah theres evidence that humans have been white in the beginning, but who was it making these discoveries?

Most life that was recorded earlier on was from africa, but at the same time in greece, etc..

I dont think one came before the other

Answer 9

It shouldn't matter but a lot of people are into details, which I suppose is a human trait, so I have to contradict Icadodwa with his own researchers. I had my son ask this question and had to look it up. "In considering the tone of human skin in the long span of human evolution, Jablonski and Chaplin note that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the human ancestors six million years ago had a skin tone different from the skin tone of today's chimpanzees—namely light-skinned under black hair."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_...

So, you would have to know when we lost the protective hair and that is unknown.  No skin has been found from anytime even close to any beginnings.  We don't even have an idea of the skin color or hair of the Neanderthal. A reasonable answer is that man is a tan color getting lighter or darker as needed.

Answer 10

Black.

i read in a book.

Answer 11

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....