How do light-skinned people exist?

It seems kind of weird that someone who's half-black half-white will look closer to black than white, yet there are billions of people with lighter skin tones out there. If lighter skin is 'recessive', how did it end up so prevalent in the first place? I read that it has something to do with sun absorption and that people with darker skin obviously fair better in sunnier areas closer to the equator. But that doesn't really explain how there was any evolutionary pressure to favor lighter skin over darker skin in less-sunny areas. It's not like modern day dark skinned people have a hard time at all adjusting to less-sunny northern regions.

This question might do better on Veeky Forums I guess, but let's see Veeky Forums take a crack at it.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Evolution_of_skin_color
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>It seems kind of weird that someone who's half-black half-white will look closer to black than white

Will they? Compare Obama with a white person and an actual African black with no white ancestry. I don't think Obama's skin color is any closer necessarily to the former than it is to the latter.

What exactly are you asking?

>want to fap to this
>feel like i shouldn't because it's probably a trap
i-i'm gonna bite the bullet guys

Any latitude above Egypt you stupid fuck.

People evolved blonde hair, blue eyes, and lighter skin because cavemen went getting enough vitamin d or some shit like that
Scientist would probably say it's not an "advantage" by any means it's just the body changing to better suit it's environment. However fact that whites have certainly taken the dominant position in the world.
>inb4 /pol/

generations of adaptation to the sun that makes your body produce melanin.

Regions that are normally cold and dark will produce light skinned people over the generations, and regions that has blistering sunlight will make people adapt to produce melanin over the generations. But given enough generations and you'll see people's skin adapt to the environment they are in.

best example is that African Americans are comparatively lighter than people from the Sub-Saharan African Continent after 350+ years in North America.

for more subtle differences, people of European descent in the US will be comparatively lighter in darker, colder climates. A person who's family lived in Boston for 400 years will probably be a little bit lighter than a person whose family lived in Phoenix Arizona for 400 years.

His skin tone certainly looks closer to his father than his mother. He also has the nappy black hair and dark brown eyes typical of African heritage. I mean he's obviously not straight out of the Congo, but most of his mother's European features are pretty thoroughly suppressed.

But even if Obama was exactly half way between his mother and father for the sake of argument, what implication does this have for early humans? I mean, that would still mean there would have to be some kind of concentrated effort by the lightest skinned humans to breed together to create lighter skinned children. What evolutionary pressure would cause that? Was it simply for cosmetics?

>How do light-skinned people exist?
I don't know how much more clear-cut I can make the question. How did white features evolve out of pre-historic humans on such a large scale?

But...that's not how evolution works at all

We are Gods

I'm fapping to the very idea that it's a trap

Because light skin isn't "recessive" you dumb fuck.

just for a quick reference

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Evolution_of_skin_color

>This was the genotype inherited by anatomically modern humans, but retained only by part of the extant populations, thus forming an aspect of human genetic variation. About 100,000–70,000 years ago, some anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) began to migrate away from the tropics to the north where they were exposed to less intense sunlight. This was possibly in part due to the need for greater use of clothing to protect against the colder climate. Under these conditions there was less photodestruction of folate and so the evolutionary pressure working against the survival of lighter-skinned gene variants was reduced. In addition, lighter skin is able to generate more vitamin D (cholecalciferol) than darker skin, so it would have represented a health benefit in reduced sunlight if there were limited sources of vitamin D.[9] Hence the leading hypothesis for the evolution of human skin color proposes that:

>1.From about 1.2 million years ago to less than 100,000 years ago, archaic humans, including archaic Homo sapiens, were dark-skinned.
2.As Homo sapiens populations began to migrate, the evolutionary constraint keeping skin dark decreased proportionally to the distance north a population migrated, resulting in a range of skin tones within northern populations.
3.At some point, some northern populations experienced positive selection for lighter skin due to the increased production of vitamin D from sunlight and the genes for darker skin disappeared from these populations.
4.Subsequent migrations into different UV environments and admixture between populations have resulted in the varied range of skin pigmentations we see today.

What's the difference between fapping to a woman, and a man who you think is a woman?
When you fap to drawn porn are you sexually attracted to paper and ink? No, you're attracted to the idea depicted.
Fapping to traps is only gay if you know (or suspect) they are traps.

Here's Obama with his brother.

When you look at pics like that, he definitely looks closer to his mom's skintone.

>How do light-skinned people exist?
Hmmm, maybe it's because light-skinned men and light-skinned women reproduced, therefore more light-skinned people came into existence, and then they reproduced, etc. I think I'm on to something here.

>It seems kind of weird that someone who's half-black half-white will look closer to black than white
Who is Stephen Curry? Jason Kidd? Klay Thompson?

>3.At some point, some northern populations experienced positive selection for lighter skin due to the increased production of vitamin D from sunlight and the genes for darker skin disappeared from these populations.
This is what I'm asking about. What kind positive selection for lighter skin are they talking about? Is darker skin that much worse at generating vitamin D that darker skinned people would be unable to cope in the north?

>Is darker skin that much worse at generating vitamin D that darker skinned people would be unable to cope in the north?
Yes.

But this seems to have no bearing on the modern day. It's not like darker skinned people in the north are at extreme risk of vitamin D deficiency to the point that it will affect their reproduction.

Because white people haven't mixed with black people, not to a large scale anyway.

For example, some ethnic groups that are very isolated in Afghanistan and Pakistan have a lot of people that are very fair, because they haven't mixed with other people and so the recessive genes are more expressed

Pic related, Nuristani from Afghanistan

>how did it end up so prevalent in the first place?

It's not unless you count East Asians, which I do.

>that doesn't really explain how there was any evolutionary pressure to favor lighter skin over darker skin in less-sunny areas.

Vitamin D can be hard to come by during an ice age or during a volcanic eruption. Not having melanin, being able to synthesize dairy past infancy, and having no pigment in your eyes helps make the most of the little sunlight you can get.

Also sexual selection seems to be a thing working in their favor for whatever reason.

>It's not like modern day dark skinned people have a hard time at all adjusting to less-sunny northern regions.

check them osteoporosis rates though.

>But this seems to have no bearing on the modern day.
Bullshit. Just using the US as an example, and they not quite a northerly climate in the southern half, you'll find that niggers have massively more vitamin d based issues than whites. This in a society where you can integrate every single required material from artificial sources extremely easily.

Source on her, I've only seen a short video

>best example is that African Americans are comparatively lighter than people from the Sub-Saharan African Continent after 350+ years in North America.

you know whites were fucking them the whole time, right?

>His skin tone certainly looks closer to his father than his mother. He also has the nappy black hair and dark brown eyes typical of African heritage. I mean he's obviously not straight out of the Congo, but most of his mother's European features are pretty thoroughly suppressed.

He actually looks a lot more like his mother than his father, which you'll see if you look at pictures of them.

>But even if Obama was exactly half way between his mother and father for the sake of argument, what implication does this have for early humans? I mean, that would still mean there would have to be some kind of concentrated effort by the lightest skinned humans to breed together to create lighter skinned children. What evolutionary pressure would cause that? Was it simply for cosmetics?

No, the differences would arise while populations were physically separated. Light skin is probably an adaptation for places with little sunlight.

>But this seems to have no bearing on the modern day.

The climate changes over time. The climate was different back when generally Caucasoid genetic traits developed.

It was a much darker planet, and you can bet your ass the vitamin d issues negroids still have in higher latitudes today would have been worse back then.

This, the average black American has about 25% European ancestry.

that picture is overexposed.

shoddy work desu.

Would vitamin D based issues kill you before child-bearing age if not supplemented?

I guess we were in the midst of an Ice Age until a few thousand years ago.

>Would vitamin D based issues kill you before child-bearing age if not supplemented?
Not directly, but you'd be generally weaker and frailer, so that's not gonna help you find a mate.
Shit immunitary system is a pretty damning handicap in premodern times.

>until a few thousand years ago.

technically we still are. Ice caps continue to exist, it's just not as severe as it was 10,000 years ago.

Genetic mutations

Huh okay, thanks

Also higher cancer rates for all types of cancer.

>Would vitamin D based issues kill you before child-bearing age if not supplemented?

maybe if severe enough. Even if this is not the case even a small effect becomes increasingly significant over the span of generations.

She's not a trap. I have more, but they're a lot lewder.

Dark skin meant that it was harder to get enough vitamin D from the sun, especially if you're covering you body with clothes to keep the cold out. Vitamin D lets your body process calcium to make strong bones.
Your average prehistoric black man would likely develop a terrible case of rickets growing up in, say, Great Britain.

The exception to this is when you can find a source of vitamin D in your diet, such as eating a shit-ton of fish, like the inuit.

It's just natural selection, dude.

Oh god damnit, yet another /pol/ bait thr...

...D-dat ass.

You know, if you're afraid someone here is enough of a fag to report you, you could just link them (or at least name her).
No reason to deny her to us.

That's because most foods nowadays are fortified with all the vitamins that the average person needs, including vitamin D.
It's just like how sunscreen lets modern white people survive in areas they previously would've struggled in.

The good news is i've found the source immediately with reverse image search and it leads to /soc/
The bad news is that the webms in the archives are dead
She doesn't show her face though so i'm not going to bother