Shouldn't Neanderthal be black?

Ive watching a lot of Man to ape type documentaries lately. While doing this I noticed that almost all depictions of mans relatives are white or tan at best.

Considering we all came out of Africa and the latest discovery, I heard about atleast, puts pale skin at less then 8,000 years old. ( they found a dark skinned, blue eyed" caveman" in Europe that dated to 7,000 years ago. Leading scientists to believe pale or white skin as a pretty recent development.) wouldn't that mean that all earlier Homo's ( how often can you use that word and not becalled a bigot lmao jk :p ) were brown or what we today call black.

Obviously I'm a science guy who believes in the obvious ( evolution).


Is this? For once a real example of political correctness going wild? Is it that the producers of such shows and museums are afraid to becalled a racist if they made an African looking ape-man black? Or maybe they were trying to sell evolution and Neanderthals link to humanity to Europe, a mainly white community that might have rejected the theory if they couldn't see themselves in the recreations.

I personally know African Americans who are smarter, stronger and faster then I am. I'm quite sure you could find someone who beats me in all categories from all races. So there quite literally isn't a racist bone in my body. Hell I've always found lite skinned black women by far the most attractive, even beating out Asians. Lol. So I hope no one takes this a way I don't intend. This is only about the science and the reason for the powers that be to fudge the dipictions . To make them look like white guys.



Just thought this was interesting. What's the verdict?

Actually recent scientific discovery has discovered that neanderthal genes are prevalent in caucasians, The only race that has any trace of that gene.

What difference does it make as all skin pigmentations are a results of genetic mutations.

overanocean
Actually recent scientific discovery has discovered that neanderthal genes are prevalent in caucasians, The only race that has any trace of that gene.

Asians also...

Mating between Neanderthals and the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians gave our forebears important evolutionary advantages but may have created a lot of sterile males, wiping out much of that primitive DNA, new genetic studies suggest.

The comparison of Neanderthal and modern human genomes, published online Wednesday in the journals Nature and Science, identified specific sequences of altered DNA that both Neanderthals and several hundred modern Europeans and Asians had in common.

Neanderthal genes helped modern humans evolve, studies suggest

reply to post by dollukka


I agree.
Mabye If the humans can stop trying to identify their self worth thru their color , and realize its much bigger than that , we can all get past this racial hic-up that the people are stuck in.

reply to post by overanocean


But according to the most recent find Caucasians weren't white untitled between 8,000 and 7000 years old. So Neanderthals should have been dark skinned as well... OMG!!! What if we got the pale skin mutation from the cross breeding with Neanderthals!!!! It's in Caucasians and Asians and native Americans are descendent a from Asians. That's a big chunk of the pale races and all have Neanderthal DNA.... Interesting.

reply to post by xuenchen


Actually I really want to clear up my personal beleif with the post I read about which made me respond to this thread.

Humans are not neanderthal at all. We are Humans , a new creation single all upon itself.

I fell strongly that our creator made mankind different from the days of really old, we are the newest of Gods creation much more like Himself.
We are not monkeys , sub human neanderthals at all , were an entirely different species.

reply to post by dollukka


It doesn't make any difference. It's just an observation

reply to post by overanocean


No one said we came from Neanderthals.... People said we crossbreed with them. Which is proven.
Evolution is also proven. The bible has been mainly disproven. This isn't a religion thread. This is a science thread. Not a faith thread.

reply to post by ArtemisE


Science has looked into the DNA of us and neanders and found that they were actually lighter skinned than our African ancestors. It was after we left Africa that we began having kids with Neanderthals. The thinking goes that they were already adapted to colder climates and had lighter skins so when we began mating we inherited their lighter skin and became more suited to life in temperate conditions.

Despite their different approaches, both teams converged on similar results. They both found that genes involved in making keratin—the protein found in our skin, hair, and nails—are especially rich in Neanderthal DNA.

For example, the Neanderthal version of the skin gene POU2F3 is found in around 66 percent of East Asians, while the Neanderthal version of BNC2, which affects skin color, among other traits, is found in 70 percent of Europeans.

The Neanderthal version of these genes may have helped our ancestors thrive in parts of the world that they were not familiar with but that Neanderthals had already adapted to. "Neanderthals had been in these environments for hundreds or thousands of years," says Sankararaman. "As modern human ancestors moved into these areas, one way to quickly adapt would be to get genes from the Neanderthals."

Nat Geo source

Whether the TV shows knew any of this *before* the scientists is doubtful so your point about giving Neanders lighter skins (pre-DNA evidence) was probably artistic licence.

S&F

overanocean
Actually recent scientific discovery has discovered that neanderthal genes are prevalent in caucasians, The only race that has any trace of that gene.

Not quite. Neanderthal genes are found in any "non-African" population, which is a somewhat different issue. The idea is that current Africans never left Africa (or left in quite recent times) and therefore were not influenced by Neanderthal.

In terms of skin color, Neanderthal may have been either light or dark. Insofar as Neanderthal populations were in northern climes where cloud cover was prevalent, they would have tended light. Insofar as they were in Semi-tropical climes, they would have tended dark. It doesn't take all that long for pigmentation for a given population to change, particularly in relative isolation (compared to now, for example).

And yes, skin color and pigmentation are legitimate subjects for scientific inquiry. It's only when we get into social perogatives that we can pretend to ignore race and say it doesn't matter.

reply to post by Kandinsky


So the human species evolved out of an ice age?

reply to post by ArtemisE

The real question in your OP, which everybody seems to be ignoring, is why the makers of TV documentaries show our ancestors as having white skins.
I think the answer is that it depends who's making the documentary. I've seen some where the skins were more realistically darker.

They came in all colours is as good an answer as any...polymorphic. There have been some indications that even in the species, there were mutants, just to muddy the waters a bit more, as well as genetic changes over long periods of time. Some studies indicate red hair, but with not so many Neanderthal specimens available in general, you can say that hair colour, skin pigmentation, and a 100,000 year run would be as variable as today.

reply to post by ArtemisE


I think right after the last ice age God created a new special form of creature known as the human being.
Obviously from discoveries of bones of long ago , cave man , dinasaurs, and elongated head type things, Humans are Gods new creations , something he was very proud of , mabye.

reply to post by ArtemisE


Modern humans would have had olive (mediterranean) complexions before the recent mutation for pale skin. Neanderthals had at least one MCR1 mutation which would have caused ginger hair, so you safely assume that they would have had paler skin than that.

Modern humans variants for fair and brown hair, green grey and hazel eyes can go as far back as a few hundred thousand years estimated time depth. We can safely asume they came from Neanderthals or other archaic human races we mingled with.

Modern humans that moved out of Africa would have stopped looking African a few tens of thousands of years after leaving (you find modern human remains outside Africa 130,000 years old) a tropical climate. Neanderthals as a type would have never looked 'black', as they evolved from Heidlebergensis in Europe.

If anyone is really bothered, ask me and I'll post up the studies that show the huge time depth for the hair and eye colours.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


The blue eyed dark skinned caveman they found. Has lead scientists to believe pale skin prob evolved thru social evolution, not from the lack of direct sun light. We were in that part of the world for tens of thousands of years before the change so they're thinking it became attractive for some reason.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


Mabye,
Think about it , if you were to reverse the population from our present 7 billion , take into effect major wars and catastrophes, I find it very interesting that the human population seems to begin around the end of the last ice age. I know we have discovered bones of man like "things" roaming around the worls for millions of years , but they were sub human neanderthals , mabye some genes God wanted to reuse for his new creation , but they were mabye a little better than the monkeys ,, they were not from Adam.

DISRAELI
reply to post by ArtemisE

 

The real question in your OP, which everybody seems to be ignoring, is why the makers of TV documentaries show our ancestors as having white skins.
I think the answer is that it depends who's making the documentary. I've seen some where the skins were more realistically darker.

Well, no. Neanderthals would have been very pale, and we used to keep seeing them with dark skin on old tv documentaries. Which was a bit racist.

Humans at the point of colonising Europe would have been out of Africa for about 90,000 years (remains 130,000 years old can be found in Skul in Israel). So modern humans by then would have integrated Neanderthal/other archaic lighter skin and hair genes. We know from their crania that their faces were pretty similar in shape to modern Europeans, and art from the earliest colonisation of Europe shopws straight hair.

There's some misconception about how the paler skin gene changes European skin tone. You are talking a 'tan to pasty' change, not from 'chocolate-brown to pasty' change. Basically, think of a french farmer in summer and you'll get the right kind of pre-paleskin skin tone you'd have found in Early Europeans

ArtemisE
reply to post by AfterInfinity

 

The blue eyed dark skinned caveman they found. Has lead scientists to believe pale skin prob evolved thru social evolution, not from the lack of direct sun light. We were in that part of the world for tens of thousands of years before the change so they're thinking it became attractive for some reason.

No it didn't. And no they don't think that.This blue eyed guy was right on the southern part of Spain, no real need for super pale skin there. His diet would also have had a lot of natural vit D from fish. For the same reason, Inuit never developed pale skin (wasn't needed).

It was very necessary to have pale skin from the Neolithic on, as the human diet had a lot less vit D in it from that point. Farmers don't get that much vit D unless they eat a lot of dairy.

Skin colour shows a gradient that matches UV output.