Black skin color and body styles are an evolutionary result of living in a hot, high UV, often arid climate. The skin
color prevents damage by UV waves.**
Actually, the dark skin color is to prevent vitamin D production, which in excess leads to a condition known as “hypervitamintosis” which essentially causes the joints to lock up from too much bone production. This is demostration of a syncline, the variation of a physical trait over a geographical distance. Also note that the skin of people who live near the arctic also have a brown tint to their skin. That’s because those who eat lots of fish take in plent of vitamin D, so their skin developed a tint to prevent any extra being produced.
The fat deposits on the buttocks store additional water and nutrient supplies. The broad nose provides more protection by filtering and humidifying the air. The larger lip surface encourages the radiation of excess heat to cool the body.
Actually, the nose of most low latitude dwellers is broad and flat, it’s the nose of people of high latitudes that are higher and bigger. The nose warms, filters and humidifies the air for the lungs.
My references: Human Variation; races, types and ethnic groups by Stephen Molnar. My physical anthro text book.
I saw some white supremacists on some talk show saying this too. The funny thing is, the deepest blush I ever saw was on a black man. He was dancing for “amateur night” at a ladies’ club. He was very cute and a good dancer, but I think that shakin’ it in his undies in front of a room full of women was just too much for him. He turned positively maroon.
According to most of the scholars that I have seen address the issue, Eden was thought (by the ancient Israelites) to have been located in a section of Ur that was at the head of the Persian Gulf.
I work with digital photographs of people of all races, and I can tell you that we are not all the same color, and we are certainly not all brown. We all are a blend of different tones, including everything from very dark browns, to the palest cream colors, to pinks and yellows. Believe me, when you are trying to take the glare off of someone’s head in a digital photograph, the exact color of his skin is tremendously important.
If you asked to have your house painted the same color as the skin of a very dark-skinned African person, and instead it was painted the color of a very light-skinned Scandinavian, you would probably not say, “That’s O.K., it’s all brown to me.”
That said, problems arise when people are judged based on their skin color. I believe that we all belong to the human race, and that race comes in an amazing variety of designer colors.
IIRC, it was said to be between the Tigris and Euphrates, which is the “Fertile Crescent,” or Mesopotamia (meso: between; potamus: river), where the city-state of Ur was, and civilization as we know it began.
One of the more-Fundamental explanations is thus: In Genesis, it says that God placed a mark on Cain to show the world that he murdered his brother (or something to that effect). This “mark” is supposedly the darkening of his skin.
This sounds suspiciously like another one of the White-Supremacy explanations (“All black people are descended from the first murderer, so all black people are yadda yadda yadd”), so I take it with a HUGE grain of salt. I’ve also heard that the “Mark of Cain” was a jutted forehead (thus explaining the existence of Neanderthals). Again, taken with a grain of salt.
I can attest to this, I have worked as a photo retoucher in a photo lab for several years. (But we were not digital yet - and this was just a few years ago. We did it all with photo dyes and itty bitty paintbrushes!) Some people have tints of blue or green in their skin tones. We are not all merely “brown”.
SPOOFE wrote:
Yes, I’ve heard this as well. It troubles me. However, (and this is part WAG, part an explanation I am pretty sure I’ve heard from a Christian standpoint) all the “mark” stuff ended with Christ, who died for everyone’s sins. He basically cancelled of all of that out. So what we have left is a bunch of people of different races. But no stigma is attached to any particular skin tone. (Unless you are a Supremacist, of course…)
From my own hobbyist work with digitally retouching photos I also know that skin comes in many colors. However, there is only one skin pigment: melanin. A lot of melanin means dark skin, a little melanin means light skin. That’s probably what Annie-Xmas meant.
Just because there’s only one pigment doesn’t mean that all skin tones look like different shades of the same color, though. According to Uncle Cecil’s column on eye color (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/971205.html), melanin is also the only pigment in people’s eyes. Somehow it manages to look blue if there’s a little of it in the iris and brown if there’s a lot of it. The heck if I know how that works.
There are also factors other than melanin that affect a person’s coloring, like how much blood show through their skin (there’s that “blood in the face” again!).
according to what i have read in a few places, it would be far easier to evolve white people from black people than to evolve black people from white people. although i do not believe in adam and eve, genetics seems to indicate they would have been dark skinned.
Actually the creation myth of Genesis 2 is horribly confusing about the thing. It states that the four great rivers of the ancient world came out of Eden. This is either symbolism or terrible geography since the Gihon/Blue Nile which flows around Ethiopia is nowhere near the mouth of Tigris and Euphrates, which is in fact on another continent.
None of this was probably taken terribly literally, even then. I mean, an earth-shaking cataclysmic flood occurs, and the rivers are still there afterwards?
It is absolutely true that the description of Eden is unclear. However, the directions to it clearly identify it as “east” (presumably of Judea and Canaan) and refer to the Tigris and Euphrates by name (or to the Tigris by its Hebrew names of Hiddekel). As to the Pis[h]on and the Gihon, they are not clearly identified. The association of the Gihon with the Nile is a later reconstruction based on the reference to Ethiopia in the verse. However, there are two rivers that flow into what had been Ur from the east and west. The one flowing from the west has dried up and is known only as a wadi, now, but was a strong river in the days of the Sumerians. One speculation has been that since it led off to the west, it was used to indicate the river that extended back all the way to Ethiopia.
Clearly, this is not based on any actual geography. Identifying Eden with the deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates, however, is still probably the closest we can get to an identification of where the Israelites thought it would be.
There’s no question that the geography is based on where the israelites thought it should be.
However, I think it is likely the person(s) who developed the story knew of the Blue Nile since the description of the Gihon is that it encompassed the whole land of Ethiopia. The last issue of National Geographic has a nice story on the Blue Nile including one of the usual maps that shows it doing just that (according to the article, that is what made the river sacred).
Point is, I don’t think the Garden can be said to be any real place. The idea of four major rivers of the ancient world having one head which merges in the Garden seems to be just too mythical for any real location to have ever been attached to it.
Ok. That was probably a bit confusing.
What I meant was it seems that the Garden was almost some central point to the world in an ancient geography (brings in mind old maps of the world, centered around the holy city, or somesuch). While they may have felt it had a very real existence, it seems unlikely from the description that it could be based on any familiarity with a particular location by the mythmakers.
Just my opinion anyway, it’s not like I’m a historian…
Another speculation which I have read is that the supposed identification with Ethiopia is a mistranslation. The name used in the original Hebrew is Cush or Kush, which corresponded to the Greek Aethiopia (which by the way was modern Sudan- present day Ethiopia did not change its name from Abyssinia until the 1930s).
Some scholars have suggested that the supposed reference in Genesis to Kush was actually a mistake by the writer. The lands to the east of Mesopotamia were once inhabited by a people called the Kassites. Since the Hebrew alphabet did not have vowels, and Hebrew often had an “Sh” sound where other Semitic languages had “S”, the hypothesis suggests that what was originally “the land of K/Sh/T” got mistakenly copied as “land of K/Sh”.
I’m not a linguist, I don’t pretend to know if that is even reasonably plausible, but if you look at a map of the Iraq/Iran border area you can see that the Karun River with its tributary the Karheh does almost completely encircle the area as the Gihon was said to encircle the Land of Cush.
And just one more comment on the “mark of Cain”- if someone who believes in the literal truth of the Bible tries to equate that with a black skin, point out that Genesis says that only Noah and his family survivied the Deluge. Thus nobody around today can be a descendant of Cain, if you rely on scripture.
I don’t think anyone asked the OP directly, so here goes:
Dignan, why do you assume that Adam, Eve, and Jesus were fair-skinned people? Do you have some sort of direct, divine knowledge that they were? Is it possible you existed when they did, and therefore know fist-hand that they were fair-skinned? Why the <trying to avoid the r-word here> assumption?
And you appear not to have READ the OP. Dignan does NOT believe this. He is looking to see how the fundamentalists explain race, based on the fact that A&E HAD to have been of some race.
His friend had asked him the question. Dignan is merely repeating it.
Also, why is that a racist assumption? It’s an odd assumption, probably rather naiive, but certainly not racist. Racism is the beleif that one race is, in some way, inherently superior to another. I don’t see how being the same race as A&E makes one “superior” to another race. I mean, IF there was an A&E (obviously a ridiculous assumption, based on modern science), they had to be of SOME race, right? That doesn’t make that race (whatever it was) superior to anyone else.
The person who asked the question obviously doesn’t “buy” evolutionary theory, so it’s a perfectly reasonable question when looked at from that angle.
How is it reasonable, even if looked at from a biblical inerrancy angle? andygirl and kiffa have already raised the question of why should anyone presuppose Adam & Eve were white rather than black, or anything else. As far as I know there is none; that Blood in the Face rubbish has already been refuted by OpalCat. “Why are there different skin colors?” might be a reasonable question from the A&E story- “Why are there black people?” implies the questioner is bringing in some extra-biblical baggage re race- probably unintentionally and not maliciously, but present all the same.