Quote: (11-05-2013 06:41 AM)Sargon of Akkad Wrote:
Quote: (11-05-2013 05:40 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:
Quote: (11-04-2013 10:13 PM)kdolo Wrote:
You are almost confused, and talk about agriculture when all people were hunter gatherers.
Racial differentiation occurred way before agriculture.
Out of curiosity, what evidence do you have of the above highlighted statement?
Humans had already settled most of the globe -- including regions with environments that would have favoured different skin/hair tones and facial features -- long before aggriculture was invented.
Delenda est Osaka!
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those pre-agricultural human populations looked exactly the same as the races that currently live in those regions.
There's some evidence to suggest that very light skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair associated with genes like
OCA2 and
SLC24A5 became prevalent in northern Europe (Scandinavia and the Baltics in particular) following the end of the last ice age. There's a theory that the gene, along with lactose tolerance, developed as these populations turned from a hunter-gathering way of life to agriculture.
The problem is that by moving away from a meat-based diet, they were suddenly faced with nutritional deficits. But this was something that the originators of agriculture in the Middle East had already responded to.
What made the situation in northern Europe different was that agriculture was introduced to an unusually high latitude. So, agricultural societies in northern Europe had to deal with the low vitamin D content of a starch-based diet in addition to the fact that at their latitudes they got less sunlight. This may be why very light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes became prevalent only in this region in the world.
Meanwhile, these people became lactose tolerant as an alternative way of receiving vitamin D, as a result of turning to cattle raising and dairy consumption.
Very high latitudes + farming may be the equation for very fair skin and blue eyes.
For anyone wondering why Asians didn't develop blonde hair and blue eyes, take a look at a map. Scandinavia and the Baltic region - which have the highest concentration of these traits - are at much higher latitudes than China or Japan. Indigenous peoples this far north elsewhere typically did hunting and gathering.
If this theory is correct, then light hair and very fair skin would have been less prevalent in Europe as recently as the period following the end of the last ice age, prior to the introduction of agriculture from the Middle East.