The oldest Brit

Quote: Pacomartin

I meant that the idea that the transition from dark skin to white skin was less than 10,000 years ago instead of much earlier. The traditional date of Noah's flood was roughly 4400 years ago, and the idea that the races developed from the son's of Noah has been around since the middle ages.

They don't believe any of their ancestors ever had or could have had dark skin. Regardless of what pseudoscintific trash they make use of in ratikonalizing this irrelevant belief.

Quote:

The hardcore racists who believe that the different races had nothing in common don't care what scientists theorize about the timeline. They reject the common ancestry theory entirely.

Yeah, that's what I just said :)

if they sued their brains for critical thinking rather than rationalizations against what is evident, they'd be winning Nobel prizes and making discoveries all day long. Alas, their brains are stuck on "moron".

Quote: Pacomartin

While Jablonski's theories of white skin developing as a way to combat Vitamin D deficiency are generally accepted, a timeline is much more difficult to establish.

If you think about it, 10K years ago the world population is estimated to be about 5 million. So there were probably only a few hundred thousand in Britain. Cheddar Man was discovered over a century ago, and no more intact skeletons have been discovered since. So it is difficult to determine if white skin became predominant 50K years ago or 5K years ago.

Is the transformation from black to white primarily a one way transformation? If it can go either way in response to sunlight/Vitamin D at the same rate then it can't be a time line of 5K or even 10K years. It is 10K years at least since the Asians have come across the land bridge to North America and down into South America. The people of the Amazon jungle are in a similar environment to the those in the African jungle but no where near as dark. Unless the transformation is primarily a one way change then it must have taken 10K plus years for the change. Maybe even the high end estimate of 50K years.

Our ability through technological means and through a generally better diet will eliminate the environmental pressure that may have allowed the skin color change to happen in the first place.

Our technological progress overall has halted our improvement through evolution anyway. No longer do you need good eyesight to survive - so those without good eyesight now survive and pass on those genes.

So yeah, I think the only changes to our skin color now will be through mixing and hybridization.

If there is no natural selection going on to better fit with our conditions, we'll just have tandoor genetic drift, with both random improvements and random unimprovements, for lack of a better word.

Quote: Dalex64

Our ability through technological means and through a generally better diet will eliminate the environmental pressure that may have allowed the skin color change to happen in the first place.

Our technological progress overall has halted our improvement through evolution anyway. No longer do you need good eyesight to survive - so those without good eyesight now survive and pass on those genes.

So yeah, I think the only changes to our skin color now will be through mixing and hybridization.

If there is no natural selection going on to better fit with our conditions, we'll just have tandoor genetic drift, with both random improvements and random unimprovements, for lack of a better word.

We will be a world of tan people in the not too distant future. I expect that natural selection will continue to operate. If it wasn't for Noloxone we would be well on our way to eliminating people with the genes that predispose an addiction to drugs.

Quote: Dalex64

Our technological progress overall has halted our improvement through evolution anyway. No longer do you need good eyesight to survive - so those without good eyesight now survive and pass on those genes.So yeah, I think the only changes to our skin color now will be through mixing and hybridization.

I think this comment is a good one. Ten thousand years ago we had a world of 5 million people, all of them on the cutting edge of survival. If Vitamin D deficiencies killed off a lot of dark skinned people in northern Europe where the population may have been less than 100K, the few with light colored skin could propagate quickly so their ancestors become dominant .

Even today, the most recent common ancestor of all northern Europeans may have lived less than a thousand years ago.

But in a world of 7 billion people, most of whom are not on the cutting edge of survival, then these kind of mechanisms might take a million years to produce a difference.

Maybe we'll all look like Dichen (Tibetan and German) . An odd mix that produced a beautiful actress.

Quote: Pacomartin

I think this comment is a good one.

What we have to take it's place is much
better, the startling evolution of technology.
It's moving lightening fast now, compared
to the snails pace of just a couple hunderd
years ago. Imagine living as most of humanity
lived for eons, knowing your kids would not
have it any better than you did, in any part
of their lives. Those days are long gone.
Just in medicine, nothing is the same as
it was 20 years ago. If you got sick in
1100, your chance of survival was the
same as getting sick in 1000, or 1300
for that matter. Grim.

Quote: Evenbob

If you got sick in 1100, your chance of survival was the same as getting sick in 1000, or 1300 for that matter. Grim.

I like this estimate of world population from the year 1 to the year 1500.
1 300M
100 300M
200 300M
300 300M
400 300M
600 300M
1000 400M
1200 450M
1300 500M
1400 440M
1500 500M

Reference: http://www.prb.org/Home.aspx

A professor in Britain tried to calculate the probability that a present-day English person descends from Edward III (1312-1377). Edward III (of Windsor) lost only one of 9 children to the plague, and because his family was very wealthy he had a lot of descendants in the first five generations. The conclusion was hat there is an extremely high probabilty that a modern English person with predominantly English ancestry descends from Edward III, at a very minimum over 99%, and more likely very close to 100%. The number of descendants of Edward III must therefore include nearly all of the population of England, and probably much of the populations of the rest of the UK and Eire, as well as many millions in the USA, former British colonies and Europe, so 100 million seems a conservative estimate.

Documenting one's own descent from Edward III is, however, another matter!
Reference https://community.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/EdwardIIIDescent.php