The Lonious Monk;4341754 said:
kai_valya;4340758 said:
ummm, do people not understand how skin color works yet?
if you live in a climate with a lot of sun, over time you will get dark(er) skin. and the filipines is a climate with a lot of sun. this is the same reason you'll see people from india, bangladesh, cambodia, thailand, etc, with drake skin
it doesn't mean they're "black." well black people have black skin because we come from africa which also has a hot climate
lol this is backwards as a mutha fucker. You think these people were light and turned dark because of the climate? Remember prevailing archaeological theories are that people originated in Africa and spread out. So it's much more likely that these people were already black and didn't change as others did. That said, the deserts in the middle east are hot as hell and most Arabs aren't that dark, so you might want to rethink your theory here.
you're only talking about humans, i'm going back way further.
throughout evolution, our ancestors slowly lost the body hair we have in common with great apes. our earliest hominid ancestors had fair skin just like chimps. about 4 million years ago, hominids moved down from the rain forest and onto the savanna, which meant they had to work harder for food and were exposed to the sun more.
but hairless skin is much more susceptible to sun damage. it was long thought that our ancestors evolved melanin as a method to absorb/disperse harmful ultraviolet light, but the affects of UV light (ie cancer) are not felt until later in life after they reproduced. it's now been found that UV light has a drastic effect on folate, an hour of sun can cut the folate in your body by a half if you are light.
folate is also very important in embryonic development (low folate levels during pregnancy can result in anencephaly and spina bifida), therefore coupled with random mutations, through natural selection, ancestors developed darker skin, which kept the uv light from robbing their bodies of folate, and were more likely to pass on their genes plus have healthy offspring.