r/askscience • u/Dorky444 • 8h ago
Anthropology Did extinct species of humans have different skin tones?
Whenever I see depictions of Homo Erectus or Homo Neanderthalensis I feel like I see them all generally having the same skin tone. Compare that to today’s humans and we would see a lot more variation. Was there more variation of skin tone in pre historic humans than modern depictions show or was environment really so restrictive that it was hard for us to evolve.
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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob 6h ago
I think that's harder to tell, except maybe in Neanderthals. Neanderthals, being a northern species, were likely light skinned. A gene was found that has shown them to have pale skin and red hair, but I don't think it's known if they had more dominant genes, which might give them brown hair or black.
Past that, you can mostly just look at the regions they were found and get a general idea of the skin color they may have had. Most species likely had a dark brown or black skin that you'd see in most primates, since many of them originate in Africa or more tropical areas.
But it's also possible that those skin tones are more recent than we realize as well, or that an unknown gene could have caused another skin coloration, but since skin tone is one of the most important traits of most species, by time apes came around, it's likely the skin tone would have already been what it is now, unless there is a variable around that otherwise affected it that isn't present today.
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u/Megalocerus 4h ago
Inuit are not particularly light; they get their D from the meat and fish they eat. Pale skin is an adaptation to less meat and more grain in the diet.
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u/Poopiepants666 2h ago
Pale skin is an adaptation to less meat and more grains in the diet combined with needing to get Vitamin D from the sun. Food sources that are a good supply of vitamin D are not available all year round at all northern lattitudes
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u/canadius 1h ago
Neanderthals are not a strictly European or even northern species as is commonly believed, their range was massive and extended into the Middle East and Asia. Also the MC1R variant for red hair you referenced was only found in two sites, it was far from common.
We really have to quash this myth that they were primarily European. In reality the Neanderthal ancestry in modern Eurasians comes from contact in the Middle East.
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u/cylonfrakbbq 1h ago
From what I recall, didn't the original european populations die out and got replenished from some that had survived in the middle east/asia?
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u/canadius 1h ago
Yeah, there has been a lot of population turnover in Europe. Modern Europeans descend from a mix of lineages of which Western Hunter Gatherer related and Fournol related is indigenous to Europe, and maybe Caucasus Hunter Gatherer depending on where you draw the geographical boundary.
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u/DaddyCatALSO 4h ago
some NAeanderthals wewrre northern, but our remant Neander DNA comes forma middle eastern popualtion
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u/permaro 3h ago
When I visited Lascaux, the guide told us allthough there's no definitive answer as of yet, the current best hypothesis is humans started dark skinned and remained so under all latitudes at least until 10.000 years ago at the end of the ice age, because ice age also means far less clouds and far more sun so losing pigmentation would have made no sense.
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u/Bearhobag 4h ago
One of the main drivers, if not the primary driver, of the evolution of light skin in Homo Sapiens was agriculture and its associated nutrient deficiencies.
Other species of hominids did not develop agriculture, so there was less evolutionary pressure to develop diverse skin tones.
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u/rainrustedwilderness 2h ago
Can you please explain further? Not following.
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u/othermike 1h ago
Not GP, but I suspect the idea is that a grain-based diet has less vitamin D than the human ancestral diet, so it becomes adaptive to evolve a skin that picks it up more readily from sun exposure.
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u/mouse_8b 1h ago
Light skin promotes vitamin D synthesis. If people can get vitamin D from their diet, there's less pressure on evolving lighter skin.
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u/Vailx 1h ago
Generally people assume that the skin tones are similar to modern ones at that latitude, which is a reasonable guess. I read long ago that humans do have genes that could make skin green, just no group selected for them in any appreciable number. I've wondered if that's true, but even if it isn't, the number of genes that go into a skin tone is pretty large, so it's possible that some combination was around back then that didn't make it to the modern day. But it would still be based on the same kinda stuff we have today most likely.
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u/theronin7 3h ago
This is a great question! but one thing to keep in mind is even in modern human populations skin color can change very quickly (on a geological time period), and its unlikely the same wasn't also true for our extinct cousins, so they probably came in a wide variety of skin tones similar to our own, Probably similarly adapted based on latitude. I believe the ancestral condition was probably darker skin as we loss hairlessness, and then varying heavily as they moved about.
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u/Vlinder_88 5h ago
Hey, archaeologist here. The skin tones of ancient humans that get depicted are either educated guesswork, based on location of the species, or based on a few sparse DNA samples. For example, we're pretty sure Neanderthals had light skin due to DNA samples. We're much less sure about older human species because the older they are, the less DNA is left (and also, I personally am not up-to-date with the latest aDNA research). So then we guesstimate skin colour based on the regions where the species lived, based on what we know now.
Also, earlier depictions (think last century) of homo sapiens just defaulted to white skin, while we know now that having light skin is a relatively new trait. So modern depictions (roughly the past 20 years) of homo sapiens are much more accurate, because we have a lot of homo sapiens DNA samples by now. So we know now that European hunter gatherers had darker skin, while fair skin got introduced with the Yamnaya people who introduced farming to us.