Scientists find that the first Britons had black skin:

[Subduction Zone]

Scientists Reveal One Of The First Britons Had Black Skin And Racists Are Hilariously Confused

The reactions of some Brits are all too predictable. It is worth reading at least until you find the post by Somegreybloke. I am pretty sure that this is the same man:

 

[Skwim]

Kind of goes against the principle of geographic adaptation.

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[Altfish]

Kind of goes against the principle of geographic adaptation.

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Yes, I'd assumed we'd come out of Africa (as black) but as we had headed north to colder climes the skin pigmentation had changed.
Interesting.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Yes, I'd assumed we'd come out of Africa (as black) but as we had headed north to colder climes the skin pigmentation had changed.
Interesting.

Of course, but not instantaneously. With England's weather the need for more vitamin D could speed the process up a bit. What surprised me is that the person had blue eyes. I thought that mutation arose in the Germanic regions of Europe.

 

[Valjean]

Silly evolutionists.

The original Britons were obviously primitive. They lived in caves and pit houses. And what do you find underground in Briton? Coal! That's why the stained skin.

Everyone knows the Brits have always been pale and blue-eyed.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

Scientists Reveal One Of The First Britons Had Black Skin And Racists Are Hilariously Confused

The reactions of some Brits are all too predictable. It is worth reading at least until you find the post by Somegreybloke. I am pretty sure that this is the same man:

One of the first Britons after the last Ice age, just to be correct. Boxgrove man predates Cheddar by IIRC 490,000 years!

 

[Jumi]

Nothing surprising about this. There's some interesting studies on what kinds of groups lived in Britain, prehistorical times.

 

[Twilight Hue]

Yes, I'd assumed we'd come out of Africa (as black) but as we had headed north to colder climes the skin pigmentation had changed.
Interesting.

Yes. Unfortunately evolution is the root of all racism.

 

[Kirran]

I think this has been known for some time. Right up until around the Neolithic Revolution much of the population of Europe was dark-skinned. Blue eyes I think originally appeared around Ukraine or the Volga somewhere, and then spread from there.

Interestingly (for some people!) the genes encoding pale skin in Europeans are different to those in East Asians. That's because when Homo sapiens left Africa they interbred with Neanderthal populations in Southwest Asia, but those Neanderthals were dark-skinned. So their Homo sap descendants remained dark-skinned, and eventually over thousands of years became paler-skinned to adapt to the light levels of Europe and Western Asia. However, as Homo sap spread further into Asia, there was another interbreeding event with a Central Asian Neanderthal population who were pale-skinned. Those hybrid kids who had pale skin did better in the low light levels, wouldn't so easily get rickets etc, and so from that interbreeding the East Asians inherited their pale skin. You can see that it's the same gene responsible as in Neanderthals. Europeans had to do it the long hard way and evolve it for themselves, so you can see a different gene at work.

There are a few examples of other genes, involved in keratin production etc, which have been inherited from Neanderthals across all non-Sub-Saharan African populations which have been selected for, however, although they don't have such obvious visible phenotypes.

 

[Loviatar]

Huh, this is interesting. The idea that pre-Neolithic Northern Europeans didn't look like modern ones has been widely known for some time, but from what I've read most anthropologists assumed they looked something like the Sami. Slightly Asian-esque features adapted for snowy weather, and hair and skin tones also more akin to modern East Asians, both due to climatic differences in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age.

That reconstruction still has broad features and what looks like epicanthic folds, which fits the prediction of adaptation to a very cold snowy environment. But the skin tone seems much darker than what was expected.

 

[metis]

Kind of goes against the principle of geographic adaptation.

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Maybe not. Due to the lack of strong sunlight because of that area being heavily treed and it's northern location, evolution would favor lighter skin so as to better produce vitamin D because that vitamin is largely destroyed through the heat of cooking our food.

 

[Skwim]

Maybe not. Due to the lack of strong sunlight because of that area being heavily treed and it's northern location, evolution would favor lighter skin so as to better produce vitamin D because that vitamin is largely destroyed through the heat of cooking our food.

Which was my point.

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[Loviatar]

Which was my point.

I believe, and Metis can correct me if I'm misinterpreting him (I probably am), he's saying that the residents reconstructed off these remains probably arrived in Britain with dark skin. That their descendants then gradually selected for lighter features, over the course of generations.

 

[OtherSheep]

Scientists Reveal One Of The First Britons Had Black Skin And Racists Are Hilariously Confused

Battle for the Red Lady of Paviland: Welsh politician asks Oxford University to return 30,000-year-old skeleton to its homeland | Daily Mail Online

https://www.heritagedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/CroMagnon-772x1024.jpg

They look a lot like the man on the street. Unlike the Neanderthals. That's the thing about history, you can find anything you want to find to support your viewpoint. What you find says more about you than that with which most people are entirely comfortable, when this fact is pointed out to them.

Judge not that ye be not judged.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Battle for the Red Lady of Paviland: Welsh politician asks Oxford University to return 30,000-year-old skeleton to its homeland | Daily Mail Online

https://www.heritagedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/CroMagnon-772x1024.jpg

They look a lot like the man on the street. Unlike the Neanderthals. That's the thing about history, you can find anything you want to find to support your viewpoint. What you find says more about you than that with which most people are entirely comfortable, when this fact is pointed out to them.

Judge not that ye be not judged.

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The image that you loaded of people has the heading "Cro-magnon" in the title. And I wonder if they took into account diet when the did the C14 dating of the Red Lay. You might want to check out the "reservoir effect". The problem with carbon dating sea life is that much of the carbon in the ocean is old. That gives the sea life an anomalously high age since they consume old carbon. Since he (the Red Lady) had a diet of fifteen to twenty percent fish his date may be anomalously high. He is still probably far older than the 10,000 year old example I linked, but I would take the 33,000 year date with a grain of salt. Also the example that I used was still "young" enough so that they could analyze the DNA. Older examples may have undergone to much decay to give such useful information.

 

[metis]

I believe, and Metis can correct me if I'm misinterpreting him (I probably am), he's saying that the residents reconstructed off these remains probably arrived in Britain with dark skin. That their descendants then gradually selected for lighter features, over the course of generations.

Pretty much so but my theory is not one of cultural selection, which hypothetically could account for the change no doubt, but more one of basic biology and the absorption of sunlight for the body to produce vitamin D.

 

[Skwim]

I believe, and Metis can correct me if I'm misinterpreting him (I probably am), he's saying that the residents reconstructed off these remains probably arrived in Britain with dark skin. That their descendants then gradually selected for lighter features, over the course of generations.

The Cheddar Man only goes back 7,100 years, whereas "the migration away from the tropics [was] between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation."
Source: Wikipedia.

So, with skin as dark as illustrated, I seriously doubt he was part of the migration. That those in Great Britain had already evolved lighter skin.

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[Loviatar]

Bear in mind, the Ice Age rendered much of northern Eurasia uninhabitable for a large stretch of that time.

There was clearly a movement northward in Asia, which is what's cited in that quoted Wikipedia passage. There are a ton of fossils in China, with no breaks in the record that coincide with ice sheet expansion like we can find in Europe. But there's very little evidence of continuous human habitation in Northwestern Europe before around 10-14,000 years ago, so it's entirely feasible that the reconstructed skeleton this thread's about is from one of the earlier waves of continuous human settlement in Britain.

 

[OtherSheep]

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The image that you loaded of people has the heading "Cro-magnon" in the title. And I wonder if they took into account diet when the did the C14 dating of the Red Lay.

Did you not know that Wales had Cromagons and the same genetic prehistory as did Ireland? Black Irish are said to have black hair and blue eyes... but they don't look at all like that strange lumpy-faced man with squinty blue eyes, either... which many people are calling Cromagnon, but I call Photoshop.

Silly evolutionists.

The original Britons were obviously primitive. They lived in caves and pit houses. And what do you find underground in Briton? Coal! That's why the stained skin.

Everyone knows the Brits have always been pale and blue-eyed.

The people who mined the Scilly Isles were the Silureans... not Spanish.
But beehive huts belonged to the Picts, just as they had in France. Tattooing came also from Thrace and any other place Kelts called home... from as far away as the roof of the world.

 

[OtherSheep]

That those in Great Britain had already evolved lighter skin.
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They didn't evolve light skin, they married Nordics.