How Did Ancient Humans Became White?

How Did Ancient Humans Became White? In 1903, workers in England dug up a 10,000-year-old skeleton. In 2018, scientists sequenced its DNA and found that Britain's oldest known resident had dark brown skin and blue eyes. So how did an entire continent turn pale? The answer involves lost fur, a grain-based diet, and a single copying error in three billion letters of DNA. In this video we cover how human skin lost its melanin — and why it took farming to finish the job. 00:00 — Cheddar Man and the question 00:45 — Why we lost our fur 03:05 — The problem with moving north 05:55 — Why dark skin survived 35,000 years in Europe 06:33 — Farming destroyed the backup system 07:41 — The mutation that changed everything 08:32 — Convergent evolution: East Asia did it differently Human skin color evolved over tens of thousands of years in response to UV radiation, vitamin D deficiency, and dramatic shifts in diet. The story begins in Africa, moves through the first human migrations out of Africa, and ends with a single genetic mutation in a gene called SLC24A5 that swept through European farming populations within a few thousand years. Melanin, melanocytes, and the Neolithic dietary revolution all played a role in one of the fastest genetic transformations in human prehistory.