Obligatory SP reference: “You are safe here. We have thrived here unharmed for many generations.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Angelica Jolie!”
Of course black or white is a false dichtomy. The basal human population groups, the negritoes, Khoi San, pygmies and so forth don’t have black skin, they have brown skin. It is as different in colouration and makeup from black skin as it is from white. These people have lived in tropical habitats with absolutely no problems for a hundred thousand years or more.
So it is at least equally plausible that the first humans had brown skin, and that both black and white populations evolved much later.
Not much different IMO then Americans being proud of America (or Brits being proud of Britain etc.). Americans didn’t choose to be born American, most Americans personally contribute very little to what makes America great, yet I see nothing wrong in taking pride in your country and heritage.
Please fight my ignorance: what does ‘basal human population’ mean? While the pygmies and Khoisan people might be living in a place that is geographically close to the origins of homo sapiens, there’s been signifiant climate change in that area over the past 250,000 years, and there’ve been roughly the same number of generations in the populations who wound up in Chile as there have been in the populations who remained more or less stationary.
I don’t believe that the Pygmy and Negrito populations have the same general skin tone as the Khoisan populations. The latter tend to be more of a medium brown color, and the two former groups are much darker– not at all unlike the larger Bantu speaking populations of Africa.
Is there a cite you can point us to to back up that assertion?
I’m confused about all this talk about skin color.
Most Blacks are not literally black. OJ Simpson ain’t black. But he’s black.
If first man looked like OJ and came out of Africa would there really be an argument as to whether they are black?
This discussion is about actual skin color, and not the social construct “Black” as in African-American. Most American “Blacks” would look out of place in sub-Sahara Africa precisely for the reason you note-- most have a significant genetic component from Europe along with their African heritage.
Now, it is true that sub-Sahara Africans are not of uniform skin tone (even if you exclude the smaller, unusual groups like the Khoisan). But for the sake of this discussion, I think we can ask: Were the first humans more like sub-Saharan Africans in skin tone or more like Western Europeans in skin tone?
Are you sure that’s what this discussion is about? I understand that’s the direction the thread has moved in, but I don’t think its obvious that the OP was talking about skin color as much as he was talking about race (which has more to do with geographical origins than whether your skin is literally black, very brown, medium brown, or light light brown).
This is what he stated in the OP:
The pride of which the OP talks about is not because African American are caught up in how dark first man’s skin is. It’s their relationship to Africa. If first man proved to be a dark-skinned skinned Asian (as commonly seen in India), this pride would not exist. But if first man proved to be a light-skinned African, I suspect it would exist.
Thus, debating about skin tone differences between African populations to show that first man was not black but rather brown, when such distinctions have nothing to do with racial classifications anyway, strikes me as irrelevant. I didn’t read the OP’s question in literal terms, because rarely is “black” used as a literal description of color when applied to people.
Well, that assumes that “what this discussion is about” is defined by what the OP had in mind. As you say, that’s the direction this discussion has moved in. Unless the OP chooses to return, we may never know what he was talking about.
It would be odd, though, if anyone thought the first humans were “Black” in the sense that that term is used in the US-- ie, someone who has some genetic heritage (although not necessarily all) from Africa. Of course, if we go back far enough (ie, before we were humans or even apes), we probably have a genetic heritage from every place on earth, land or sea. 
But that’s usually how black is used when we talk about people, right? It’s a shorthand for “person who has a African ancestors”. Actual skin color is an incidental. So it wouldn’t be odd to me at all if that’s exactly what the OP meant, especially in the context of African-American pride.
Well, if it wouldn’t be odd, it would be a nonsensical question. I doubt that the OP would cling to that notion, if that was in fact his intent. Did the first Humans have an African ancestor? I would say that every biologist, even those few who subscribe to the Multi-regional Hypothesis, would answer “yes” to that.
Sweet Zombie Jesus! Don’t let the Creationists hear about that one! 
We have Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam, why not throw in “Identical Ancestors Noah and Family” into the mix!
What’s so unscientific about that? If “living group A” is the set of all my cousins, and “living group B” is the set of my aunts and uncles, it works just fine! 
Even stronger than that. If you go back 15 thousand years, then everyone has exactly the same set of all their ancestors. If you only want one common ancestor, it’s more recent yet.
Yes, that would be the Most Recent Common Ancestor– which you would find at an estimated 2-5K years ago. I should have left that last sentence out, as it dilutes the meaning of the Identical Ancestor Point.
However, I would be careful to add the following, so as not to over-interpret the significance of that statement: Person A may reach common ancestor X via hundreds of ancestral lines whereas person B may reach that common ancestor via only one ancestral line. Thus, Common Ancestor X will have contributed much more genetic material to person A than to person B.
A native Australian and a native European may have the same set of common ancestors from 15K years ago, but the degree or relatedness between the European and Australian to those various ancestors is going to be quite different. It’s not as though all those common ancestors contributed equally to the genetic make-up of all the people living today.
As an interesting side note, does anyone know what the Identical Common Ancestor point for living chimps or bonobos is? I did some googling, but came up empty. Given that the chimp/bonobo split was about 2M years ago, one would assume that it would have to be sometime after that, even if it ends up being much further back in time than it is for humans (which I suspect it would be).
OJ Simpson is only black because he’s an American. People like Derek Jeter, Grady Sizemore or Nicole Richie share very little in the way of features with most Africans, but are classified as such due to cultural/societal constructs.
There’s no subjective reason to lump someone with the features of OJ Simpson with Hakeem Olajuwon over Bjork .
I’ve oft-heard* that in Brazil, racial classification is somewhat reversed than it is here: any noticable white ancestry in a person removes him from being considered ‘black’.
*I may have just gotten this idea from John Updike’s “Brazil”, however. I’ve got no real cite.
This is a concept I struggled with awhile past, and let me see if I can address your question. Groups like the Khoisan and the so-called African Pygmies have high frequencies of what are considered to be the oldest Y-chromosome Haplogroups in human populations. A Haplogroup is just a whole bunch of alleles on a chromosome that are transmitted as a block. We look at the Y-chromosome because it gets handed down (more or less) unchanged from father to son. When there is a mutation, that creates a new Haplogroup.
You can divide all the human populations into two groups: Haplogroup A and BR (which is subdivided in B and CR). Khoisan have a high frequency of Haplogroup A, which is found only in sub-Sahara Africa, and the Pygmies have a high frequency of B, also found only in Africa. Haplogroup CR is found both in Africa and outside Africa, so everyone outside Africa is part of some small group of Africans who carried the CR Haplogroup with them when they left Africa. You can then continue to break populations down further by looking at other mutations on the Y chromosome.
Similarly, you can look at mt-DNA haplogroups and you will find a high frequency of the oldest Haplogroups among the Khoisan and the Pygmies. I recently had my DNA analyzed as part of the National Genographic project, and my mt-DNA Haplogroup is “H”, which is petty common in Western Europe (not a big surprise, since that’s where my maternal ancestors come from).
This I know. All I’m saying is if we could go back in time and we saw that First Man looked just like OJ and resided in Africa, the general consensus would be that he’s black, even though literally he’s not black. Just as if we went back in time and saw that First Man looked like a Robert Dinero and resided in Europe, most people would call him a white man and not worry about trying to classify his complexion as ivory, cream, or beige.
There’s no point in ignoring common usage of the word “black” to answer the OP’s question, is what I’m saying.
He’s been even blacker at times.
Sailboat
The general consensus of whom? Not of scientists, and I think that’s the criteria we should use here even if your average Joe might say: OMG, he’s Black!!
I have to say I’m a little confused as to why you want to bring that societal misconception into the discussion. We all know it exists, but since we’re supposed to be fighting ignorance here, let’s just acknowledge that it does exist and then move onto the objective debate.