Skin Deep by Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin

Human evolution: the study of how and why our human ancestors changed over millions of years.

Every body has a different amount of pigment in their skin , that's how we are all different .

People who live near the equator often have darker skin. Natural selection plays a role in coloration to protect one’s skin from ultraviolet light and body from folate depletion. Folate deficiency is the lack of folic acid in the body. Ultraviolet radiation (UV) from the sun is the cause of evolutionary pigmentation. Skin cancer has driven in the evolution of black skin because of albinism, melanin, and racial properties.

In this article, Anthropologists talk about how pigmentation has changed throughout the years. Some examples are they tested DNA samples on a 5,000 year old skeleton from Ukraine, compared the samples to malaria resistance and lactase persistence, (which is the ability to digest the main sugar in milk as an adult) and discovered it to the human genome. They also conducted that the darker pigmentation was from a lack of UV rays from the sun and because the northern region doesn’t get much sunlight. They studied that the people years ago had very dark skin, and didn’t expect natural selection to favor the lighter pigmentation. The lighter pigmentation also acted as a way to attract the opposite sex. The parents genes get passed down to their

Why does it matter whether you have a different color of skin? Ethnicity is what makes a human who they are as a solution of how they are established. Our ethnicity affects who we are not be the color of skin you have or where you come from. Race symbolizes the development of culture, ethnicity makes us who we are as a result of how we are impacted on, and Nationality tells where we come from. Whether you’re dark, light, or “sun-tanned” skinned doesn’t mean you're different, being different is what makes us human.

The ultimately summarized the primary and secondary pigmentation traits are associated in the six regions on the genome. The research allowed us to identify several new variants that account for differences in the pigmentation. Each of these variants are viewed to have a moderate effect on pigmentation in Europeans. It has been thought that before migrators bought the light skin species out of africa 60,000 years back, our ancestors were all dark skinned. It is consistent with the correlation of human skin pigmentation and proximity to the equator. The results of this research support the conclusion that most of the pigmentation variants discovered in this study show positive selection in European populations. The advantage of having a lighter skin pigmentation is that it facilitates the formation of Vitamin D3 though lighter skin people live in colder areas where there is low exposure to sunlight/ UV rays. The newly discovered determinants provide promising candidates for for forensic geneticists and for the study of

In “Skin color is an illusion”, Nina Jablonski explains how human skin pigmentation is a product of evolution based on natural selection as a result of UV radiation. She says that the earliest humans in our evolutionary background existed in equatorial Africa where there was a very concentrated amount of ultra violet radiation, proving that, one of humanities first ever ancestors did in fact have darkly pigmented skin as opposed to the lighter skin color that is more commonly portrayed in media today. This means that all humans have had a common ancestor that had dark skin in their lineage. She then further explains how melanin, which is a natural sunscreen that is the cause of color in humans and that has existed for at least a billion years , was adapted by human evolution to protect us from the massive influxes of UV radiation that they were bombarded with in there earlier evolutionary fazes.

Skin color has evolved rapidly since the beginning of humanity; in the beginning, everybody had light skin and dark hair. As populations started to lose hair and their sun exposure increased, the African sun threatened people’s stores of folate, as sunlight destroys folate (which is needed for cell DNA replication, especially important for a growing baby). Eventually, this created a preference for darker skin in Africa, and became an important gene in the African gene pool. Darker skin, full of melanin, absorbs less UVB rays, thus protecting a person against losing a lot of folic acid in their body as well as protecting against sunburn. As populations moved North and the sun became less and less effective in converting cholesterol into Vitamin

There are many theories that attempt to explain why some humans evolved to have lighter skin than others. According to livescience.com, one theory is that when humans moved north up to colder climates, there wasn’t as much sunlight. As a result a person with darker skin would have to stay outside upwards of 6 times as long as a person with lighter skin to get the same amount of vitamin D. So we evolved to get lighter skin to more efficiently absorb vitamin D from sunlight. [livescience.com]

We don’t come out of the womb knowing the difference amongst ourselves, its taught to us. My mother is about half a shade lighter than me, and my aunt, her sister who may be a shade or two darker, lived with my grandmother when I was five or six years of age. Both women ended up with dead beat husbands and fathers, who looked very different in appearance. My father was dark skin, and my cousins father was light skin. Since I was young and even as an adult I have a distinct line going down the middle of my biceps. Over the years I have noticed

Skin color is one of the many things that have been altered to benefit the human race through natural selection processes. Melanin is the main protector against sunlight so it is easy to assume that in areas with an immense amount of sunlight, which are areas where Homo sapiens originated from, humans would be considerably darker (Parra 2007). This also explains why the early members of the Homo genus were darkly pigmented (Jablonski 2004). Skin color variation contributes to the understanding of human evolution because it is not only an interesting and divergent trait, it also played a role in the survival of

The hypothesis that is presented is that cold injury has a previously unrecognized causative influence with white skin evolution. This hypothesis is supported with evidence from in vitro observations that the higher melanin pigmentation of cells were less successful compared to lesser melanotic pigmentation. This likely caused a selection for lighter pigmentation compared to the previous generation to be more successful. The authors evidence to support their hypothesis is in discrediting the alternative hypotheses.

In the world we have over 5 billion people. And most of those people have different skin color, and most of those people live in different places. We are told we have lighter and darker skin compared to others. We are taught and told that there have been many incidence of segregation and discrimination and racism. For what? Skin color. We have no control of what skin color we have. It’s not our choice if we want to have light and dark skin. And segregation and discrimination for something we can’t control. Because people think that colored skin is dirtier that white skin. Well to clear that thought I want to show the scientific reason behind skin color and the people who have fought for the same belief.

As Sarkar and Nandineni hoped, this study is valuable to the field of Anthropology. Before this study, there little was known about the genetic variation of skin pigmentation amongst Indians. Only a few studies were done, and they focused on individual regions. This study built upon that knowledge by looking at various regions in India. Their results also further supported previous findings, where specific SNPs and latitude are most significantly associated with the phenotype of skin pigmentation.

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then