A few disclaimers, please. This is NOT a Great Debate. This is NOT a Pit Rant on skin color or race, or anything of that ilk. I have a very specific question for Anthropologists and students of Evolution and Science. It’s a volatile O.P., and I hereby request that anyone who feels the need to stray in any way from my O.P. and intent, open a separate thread in the proper forum. Please don’t turn this into something it is not.
I absolutely ascribe to the theory of Evolution, that we evolved from Great Apes.
Now then. There I stood, on the commuter train last night, my back against the door, facing a carful of people. Almost all white people. Something clicked in my head, and I thought about Polar Bears. They have black skin, and clear hair follicles, so that the U.V. coming in towards them, so that the U.V. can more efficiently warm their skin- in the cold northern climes.
This gets me wondering. Why is it that primates and the Great Apes we descended from, have darker skin when it is irrefutably accepted by anthropologists that Early Man/Woman came out of sub-Saharan Africa ? Why is it that lighter skinned primates did not develop, there in the blisteringly hot U.V.-filled African veldt?? Why is it that as the pre-human and proto-humans spread out across Pangea, that their skin color didn’t darken- just as a polar bear’s did, to make maximum use of the meagre U.V. coming into far northern and far southern climes?
Why did it happen in exactly opposite patterns from that which kind of makes sense to me? Why aren’t primates pale pale pink skinned?
