Since archaeologists and scientists claim that Mankind started in Africa and Journeyed "Out of Africa" about

Question

200,000 - 250,000 years ago BP - wouldn't this make all of us Americans actually Afro Americans?

And when in the scheme of things or History did "White People" start appearing?

Answer 1

Large-scale genetic research have proved that mankind originated from a very small group of people. Common ancestors have been discovered for the entire population of many billions inhabiting all five continents of the Earth: these are two thousand primeval hunters-gatherers who used to live in Africa more than 100,000 years ago. New data has been also obtained about the rates and directions of human beings’ prehistoric evolution, and the way the continents got inhabited.

The researchers have applied the recent achievements of molecular-biological technology which allow to concurrently analyze multiple DNA characteristics of a person. 377 DNA characteristics (markers) of the currently living nations from all the continents - 52 populations from Africa, Europe, Middle, Central and Eastern Asia, Oceania and America - were studied.

Having processed the accumulated data, the researchers came to the conclusion that all people on the Earth had originated from a small group of ancestors – their quantity not exceeding 2 thousand people.

Excerpts from their study:
“...the number of people in major territories of settlements, including Africa, was relatively small and probably underwent significant fluctuations – a lot of people died due to the limitations in food and severe living conditions. However, about 35 thousand years ago, steady growth began in the quantity of African “farmer” populations, and ten thousand years later, quantity of populations started to grow in Eurasia.

It is known that at that time in particular our ancestors started to use new technologies – they produced more sophisticated stone and bone tools. The tribes succeeded in procuring more food and in coping with unfavorable conditions - bad weather, predators. As a result, more children survived in each generation, and the quantity of people on the planet grew up continuously – thanks to achievement of the mind, the human species was winning the “evolutionary race”. It is interesting to note that the populations of hunters-gatherers of Africa, aboriginals of Oceania and American Indians do not have “DNA-signals” of quantity growth. Indeed, these groups of people remained at the level of previous primitive technologies and due to that they can only support their quantity at the minimum level, which, as thousands of years ago, varies significantly from generation to generation, depending on weather conditions, successful hunting and other “favors of gods”.

However, maybe the most important finding of the research is as follows. All of us, people of the Earth, are genetic brothers and sisters: if we are not “cousins from Adam and Eve, at least we descended from the children of the same tribe.

Answer 2

There is a good article on the origin of skin coloring in Wikipedia (see below). Look at the section headed: "Origins of light skin in humans".

Regarding the "When?" part of your question, the same article proposes the following timescale:

[1] from 1.2 million years ago for a million years, the ancestors of all people alive today were as dark as today's Africans,

[2] for that period of a million years, human ancestors lived naked without clothing, and

[3] the descendants of any people who migrated North from Africa mutated to become light over time because the evolutionary constraint that keeps Africans' skin dark generation after generation decreases generally the further North a people migrates.

Apparently nobody has yet figured out how long the process in [3] took. So we don't know when some people ceased to be dark-skinned and became "white" or "yellow". All we know is that it must have taken a very long time.

Answer 3

Africa is only one possibility. Scientists blieve that human life had to begin in a tropical climate, because there is no scientific evidence that humans were ever covered by thick hair, which would have been necessary in a cold climate.
The warm belt, the tropics circle the earth. Human evolution had to take place somewgere along this belt, not necessarily Africa. A great many bone fragments of very early humans are found in Asia.
Whatever color the very early humans were, they began to lighten up after the last ice age. This is when people depending on herd animals followed the herds North as the ice melted, and lush grass covered the land.