why are some people black and others white? How did the two races begin?

Answer 1

Species that tend to do better in an area will survive to reproduce. In hot areas, people with dark skin do better than people with light skin (who burn). As humans spread around the world, the ones that were best suited to the environment became the dominate race/species/whatever in that area.

The Indian explanation is the best one though. The creator fashioned man out of clay and went to bake the newly modeled creatures in the fire. Some weren't baked long enough and became the white men. Some were overbaked and became the dark-skinned men. The ones that were done perfectly had the deep, reddish color of the earth and were the chosen ones.

With the conveniences of modern society, the differences in pigmentation mean far less than they did thousands of years ago. I'd like to think we can judge each other by who they are, not what they look like.

Answer 2

Current data suggest that modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens primarily in East Africa. A 160,000 year old skull from the Herto site in the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia seems to be at the beginning of this transition. It had the rounded skull case of modern people but retained the large brow ridges of archaic Homo sapiens. Somewhat more advanced transitional forms have been found at Omo in Ethiopia and Laetoli in Tanzania dating to about 130,000 and 120,000 years ago respectively. By 115,000 years ago, early modern humans had expanded their range to South Africa and into Southwest Asia shortly after 100,000 years ago. Evidently, they did not appear elsewhere in the Old World until 60,000-40,000 years ago. This was during a short temperate period in the midst of the last ice age.
As to the color of skin;
There is no biological basis for racial classification. While we can all discern different races at a glance by skin color, biologists and geneticists do not make the same distinctions. Most people still have some sort of conception that as humans migrated around the world, some significant genetic change took place and that this change resulted in races, which are almost like subspecies. This is not true for one simple reason: there hasn't been enough time. (OK, two reasons: humans are wildy promiscuous.)

Answer 3

The short answer is that there were not "two races" to begin with. Most modern anthropologists believe that ALL humans began in the same area (the "cradle of humankind" in South Africa) and simply spread out from there. In this theory, that means that all physical difference between people from different areas are a result of natural selection of the best characteristics to allow humans to survive in a particular climate. The melanin in black skin is a natural protection from the sun, and white "European" type skin is a response to a need to absorb enough vitamin D from the weak northern sun. Simple as that.

Answer 4

Ok you obviously don't have access to the discovery channel so the easy answer short of watching any discovery channel documentary that answers this question at least once a week is that there is no black and white. This is a mental construct created to perpetuate race and the superiority of one race over another. The only race is human white and black or brown or red has only to do with the amount of pigment in your skin and the way your ancestors adapted to their environments to protect them form varying amounts of sun etc...

Answer 5

Some anthropologists say that in european nationalities they developed bigger noses to help take in more air, since in some areas they are in high elevations where the air is thin. That follows along with "Black" people in African nations. The greater sun exposures would lead to a needed darker skin to protect them from burning.
Religiously, I think most believe that the dark skin was given first with Cain as a mark after he killed his righteous brother Able. The curse was the loss of the priesthood the dark skin was the mark of the curse. The dark skin was passed on by Ham's (son of noah) wife Japeth.

Answer 6

Well admittedly I'm pretty damn white bread..I live in a town of about 5k people and about 4995 of them are white. But I would date a woman of any race given the right qualities and what-not. So to answer your question yes I would, and do I really need a reason other than I'm not a racist prick?

Answer 7

Melanin.

In Scotland, which lies at a northern latitude, descendants of the Britons have white skin. When their skin is exposed to the meager sunlight, the scant amount of melanin their skin produces is unable to block the sunlight. Therefore, their bodies are able to make Vitamin D with the help of sunlight. Vitamin D, a vitamin found in fish oil, is necessary to prevent rickets, a bone disease caused by too little calcium.

In contrast, in Africa, which is near the equator, humans require intense sunlight to penetrate their dark skin to make Vitamin D. This is all well and good. However, when blacks lived in England during the Industrial Revolution, they were the first to develop symptoms of rickets, such as retarded growth, bowed legs and fractures because not enough sunlight was available.

Fortunately, in 1930, Vitamin D was discovered and dispensed as a supplement to add to the diet.[10] Now many common foods like milk and bread are Vitamin D fortified.

Answer 8

The origin of the species says the humankind was created in Africa, and from there spreaded around the world... so the original color was black... people who moved to the north, along the years became whiter cause their skin didn't need all that protection from the sun that dark skin is. Changes is diet too.
Some moved to asia, some to europe, from asia it is thought they came to america through bering strait and from there down to south america.

Answer 9

This is one excellent question ...You deserve a STAR...

It is SUN RAYS behind the darkening of a the SKIN...

In certain areas around the Equator and some other areas of this world, where the sun gets closest to earth, people's skin started getting darker with the days... This was eventually taken into their genes, composing as such a race with darker complexion, until it became part of those people's genetics...and became inheriting in nature...

With the passage of time, Sun rays' effect continued as such, resulting with even darker skins, until it reached to the black status we see it nowadays...

I'm sure my answer is incomplete, but I know that much of it out of memory; based on a Radio Station Pro gramme I once heard talking about that issue, and I was amazed with the scientific opinion on it...

Answer 10

there are different theories from different cultures. I had a conservative protestant upbrining where I was taught that after the flood, Noah's son's ham, shem, and jephath's (sp?) genetics provided the differences in skin color (traits becoming dominant from future generations inbreading..

I'm sure other cultures and religions have other stories.

My personal input would be to point out that if race is constructed of skin color and ancestry combined, that it is common sense that "race" is socially constructed as opposed to biologically determined. "how is this?" one might ask. No two people have exactly the same skin color, and people have been traveling, raping, intermarrying, mixing for thousands of years to such an extent that if each of us traces our ancestry back far enough, our ancestry is from all over the globe.

"Race" is a socially constructed concept because something (human social ideas) that can be deconstructed and reordered in another way is socially constructed. Meaning, as far as the color gradient (scale of light to darker shades), different cultures and even the same culture over time, will shift the significance of one shade/set of shades in defining one's race. So, in some countries they might have a scale that registers 10 different shades of "black" where each shade is considered a significant marker of different meaning. In bringing this up, we could also notice the invisability of "whiteness" in this example, meaning, I did not highlight different shades of whiteness, because that is the underlying priviledge, or advantage of whiteness, in that it is not often highlighted or examined as closely as "blackness" to those who are considered white.

Social construction is how the two (some cultures, as i pointed out, have MANY more than two because of the significance they apply to different shades) races began.

However, where differeing skin colors began is as a response of genetics, to many factors.