The origin of human skin color
The origin of dark color in human skin is strongly connected to our African roots. However, it is puzzling how different we are from the great apes…
SHAVE a chimpanzee and you will find that beneath its hairy coat its skin is white. Human skin, though, was almost always black—at least it was until a few thousand years ago when the species began settling in parts of the world so far north that the sunshine was too weak to allow dark skin to synthesise enough vitamin D. This means that, sometime after chimps and people parted ways, the colour of human skin changed. And that, in turn, must have required an evolutionary pressure.
via Human evolution: The skinny on skin colour | The Economist.
Photo by The British Library
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