harrisondejong :
Dark skin is made to absorb more sunlight and lighter skin developed in northern populations to absorb the same amount of light, but in places where there were less sunlight and UV available, e.g. Scandinavia and England. When African populations started moving out of Africa and into northern Europe, the skin also had to adapt because in northern climates, the sun was much less harsh, and humans with lighter skin were favored in natural selection because they got slightly more UV radiation and vitamin D, making them much healthier than their darker counterparts. Over thousands of years these mutations piled up and were perfect for northern areas because they allowed people in areas with much lower sunlight to get the same amount of vitamin D as they did when they were still in Africa. Keep in mind, these mutations were crafted for VERY northern places with rainy, cold, and dark weather, but as humans started to develop more and civilizations began to get more advanced, humans started moving elsewhere, e.g. when people from England (a place with naturally occurring fair skin) started to move to places like Australia (a place with aboriginals with naturally very dark skin) in the 1770’s, skin cancer cases exploded, because all these fair skinned people randomly started moving to an extremely high UV environment with little to no protection, which is why skin cancer is only a recent thing, which threw natural selection completely off-balance. Even in the US, when the Europeans arrived, all the Indians had very dark skin, because that’s how they adapted to the high UV environment that America is over thousands of generations, just like how Europeans did the same, but for lighter skin. So, if you are a fair skinned person living ANYWHERE that’s not northern Europe, your skin is not properly adapted to your environment, and sunscreen is a must to have healthy skin and avoid skin cancer from UV.
2026-07-28 13:09:52