They say the earliest human was found in Africa, that doesn't mean they looked African, right?

Question

Just because supposedly the earliest human bones or whatever was found in that place called Africa. It doesn't mean they resembled the Africans we see today. What if someone who looked White or Asian happened to just die there.

Why do they say we are all descendants from Africans. Who knows if there is an even older skeleton in some other continent. huh?

Basically what do they mean when they say we all came from Africa?

Does it mean we were all dark skinned, but some decided to go east or west and then stayed out of the sun? While the people who were in Africa didn't leave so they remained dark?

So do the earliest humans who scientist say originated in africa resemble Africans we see today?

I'm just talking about anthropology and physical trait stuff. no intentions on bashing any race or promoting any race. i'm just wondering about the anthropology aspect stuff like such as part of human stuff.

Answer 1

You are thinking about Africa in terms of where it is today.  Remember when the first humans lived the continents were connected, before the ice age.

Answer 2

I'm going to have to be a wiseass here and point out that if they originated and lived in Africa they would, by definition, look African.

Answer 3

Your main point is right I think, if I understand it.  We are not evolved from N e g r o s. (you can use the N word and not N e g r o???)  What the earliest humans look like depends on the definition of who is the earliest.  They wouldn't look like or be exactly like any group today.  We are all descended from them and are the same exact distance.  Moving to Asia or Europe might speed up evolution a bit but that doesn't mean that genes didn't spill back into Africa or that the original Africans didn't largely get replaced by "humans" from other areas.  They use genetic studies to say that but you would have to assume that people don't move over the course of tens of thousands of years to accept them as reliable.

Answer 4

Simple the earliest and oldest hominid fossils all come from Africa!

I think you are confusing human with hominid?

Do some reading on the difference!

Answer 5

Genetically speaking, there are only a few genes that separate any of the races. Get rid of the skin color and hair, and we are all alike. Yes they do say the earliest human remains found came from africa.

Answer 6

The earliest evidence of humans was found in Africa.  This does not mean that all humans are derived from there.  There are three major races of the world:  *******, caucazoid (sp?), and mongoloid.  Early human remnants are found on other continents, but those in Africa are known to be the oldest.  Did they look like blacks today?  Probably.  Does it matter?

Answer 7

They would have been dark skinned, but the modern racial variations you see are all relatively recent, so they wouldn't have looked like modern Africans much in terms of cranio-facial structure. The oldest classically n3groid skull shape is only 13,500 years old in Africa (Jebel Sahaba).  

Answer 8

I'll have to skip over Homo hablis & Homo erectus & start with Homo sapien.  While sapien continued to evolve both in & out of Africa & fossil information doesn't include skin color, we have to hypothesize on what early Africans looked like.  Because dark skin is likely to keep out folic acid destroying sunlight, it is likely they were dark of skin. Because the bushmen of Africa are genetically the oldest living haplogroup of sapien, it is likely that sapiens were very short dark people.

The 1st sapiens out of Africa appear to have been the Negritos of southern India & some South East Asian islands... short dark people that are not closely related to any current Africans.  Because latitude has such an effect on skin color, one has to conclude the Africans that left Africa were dark, but were physically different from current Africans. All sapiens continued to evolve to meet climatic & food restrictions placed on them by environment.  Lighter skin probably evolved to allow those in Northern climates to absorb enough sunlight to make vitamin D... thus preventing rickets which contributes to high mortality during childbirth.

It is doubtful that archaic Homo sapien resembled today's African in any way except skin color.  East Africans (the Horn of Africa)  are actually closer to Europeans & North Africans genetically than they are to other Africans.

Answer 9

I think Ed answered your questions perfectly, and I think you had legitimate questions that are not "racist"  I commend you for asking questions to search for answers that you do not know and are curious about. Kudos to Ed for answering respectfully.

Geesh you guys are a tough audience. I thihk you guys made it a race issue, not the asker.

"  

Answer 10

Haha. I'm going to check back on further answers to this one just to see how people rip you to shreds.

Answer 11

although you dont intend to be racist, you sound racist. No races today are a result of isolation whites in one area Asians in another, blacks in another the first human were tanned and capable of having any colored baby

Answer 12

No, not necessarily. You have to remember that according to evolution each species and sub-species adapts and changes according to their environment over the span of millions of years. So you cannot say that modern day Africans look like the distant ancestors of all of humanity.  

Answer 13

skin color is the resualt of a chemical which acts as a natural sunblock. problem is that our skin needs sunlight to produce vitamin D. in areas like Aferica theres enough sun even with the chemicals, but farther north lighter skin does a better job. so yes that does mean we were all descended from black people. should it matter? no, get up off your high horse.

Answer 14

apparently, YES !

Answer 15

I saw a documentary that traced genetic markers that exist in all humans back to San bushmen in Africa.  If you look at pictures of the San, you can see that they share many physiological traits with all the major ethnic groups.  They have lighter brown skin and somewhat caucasian facial features.

So it seems likely that the rest of humanity is descended from the San's ancestors.

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

Answer 16

It's not that people are negative minded. It's dealing with those that have already made up their minds and don't want to be confused with the facts

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....