If a tribe from africa moved to siberia and lived in isolation, how long would it take them to evolve into ...

Question

white people?

Answer 1

In theory, it takes 20,000 years, to go from dark skin to light skin, from brown eyes to light-colored eyes, and from black hair to light hair...

This would mean that within 1,000 generations, successful mutations would occur, during gene replication, favoring a different external appearance, which would be better suited to the environment...

And providing this tribe was isolated for this long, yes, something like this would happen, and did, with the Eskimos & Inuit...

Answer 2

Very interesting!!! If you consider the evolution of the Asian/Native American transmigration across pangea some several hundred thousand years ago...the characteristics and skin tone changed over the course of thousands of years. Although theoretically there were tribal peoples that comingled. BUT none-the-less the characteristics changed. Also, considering the oldest AND first inhabited continent was Africa than we could likely assume ALL of us started dark skinned and have evolved over the course of several dozen milleniums.

I love the concept here!! It's fun to see a "brain stimulating" question for a change. The "favorite food" question is really irrelavent and pointless. Your question has substance! YAY!

Answer 3

It really depends on how quickly someone had mutations to the genes that lighten skin color and other environmental factors. I would assume in a population of 100,000 you might get 10 mutations per hundred years that would be beneficial. In order for them to become dominant, you need to have a very high death rate from competition. That is likely in humans as we tend fight and kill each other. Humans tend to have tribal leaders that act like super alpha wolves so a dominant member could have ten times as many offspring as a normal person. Assuming that lighter skin gave this individual a distinct advantage and leaders were based on strength and health, I could see it happening in as little as 1000 years.

Answer 4

Im not sure where this 20,000 year number comes from?

but yes it is very possible, but i dont think we will ever know a good estimate becasue we have no way to recreate this in a controled enviorment to observe the changes...


though i expect in the near future we could, and even speed the process up, to where days could represent years, and so on...


great question!!!

Answer 5

Not factoring in the extreme climactic change....

or the lack of genetic diversity of a single tribe....

I would expect changes fairly quickly for somethings; like height & weight. Pigment would take a few thousand generations to take hold.

Answer 6

They probably wouldn't. There would need to be enough people dying of vitamin k deficiency for that to have a selective advantage. These days, that's not considered to be an extreme problem that would selectively shift a race like that. If it were a big problem, the entire population would die out.

Answer 7

They would ADAPT not EVOLVE. Evolution means turning into a different species. They would still remain , like white people, human beings.

Answer 8

I think it takes somewhere between 20,000 to 30,000 years for skin to change due to climate.

Answer 9

they wont, we never evolved... Just because they say we evolved from monkeys doesn't mean we do! If they say we started off from darker skinned people then why are their white people? White people have been in America for centuries and they haven't even had one change in their bodies

Answer 10

I'd guess about a million years.