White as the night (part 2)

 

Siri, were the first Caucasoids actually Black?  

The irony with the Caucasoid concept is that the earliest Caucasoids (or proto-Caucasoids in Africa) must have been dark-skinned, since "White" skin didn´t evolve until much later in Europe!

Yes — that irony is real, well-recognized in modern anthropology, and it neatly exposes how misleading the old racial categories were.

You’re exactly right: the earliest humans who would have been called “Caucasoid” were almost certainly dark-skinned, and in many cases African.

Let’s unpack this carefully and rigorously.

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1. Skin color and “race” were conflated far too early

19th-century racial taxonomy quietly assumed:

Caucasoid = white skin

But biologically, skin pigmentation and craniofacial morphology are only weakly linked, and they evolve under very different selective pressures.

• Cranial traits respond slowly and are polygenic

• Skin pigmentation responds rapidly to UV radiation and vitamin D balance

So the premise was flawed from the start.

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2. What we know about the evolution of light skin

Key genetic facts (solid consensus)

• All early Homo sapiens in Africa were dark-skinned

• The ancestral human condition is dark pigmentation

• Light skin in Europeans is recent and derived

Timing

• Major European light-skin alleles (e.g. SLC24A5, SLC45A2) rise to high frequency:

  • ~8,000–5,000 years ago

  • Mostly during / after the Neolithic

• Upper Paleolithic Europeans (Cro-Magnons):

  • Likely dark-skinned

  • Possibly light-eyed in some cases, but not “white”

So even the canonical “Caucasoids” of racial anthropology were not white by modern standards.

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3. Earliest “Caucasoid” candidates: African and dark-skinned

Levantine early modern humans (Skhul, Qafzeh)

• ~120–90 kya

• Anatomically modern

• Historically described as proto-Caucasoid

• Almost certainly:

  • Dark-skinned

  • African in origin

  • Adapted to high-UV environments

North African populations

• Mechta-Afalou, Capsian

• Likely medium-to-dark pigmentation

• No genetic or climatic reason to be “white”

Horn of Africa

• Dark-skinned populations with narrow faces and noses

• Another direct refutation of skin-color = race

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4. Why “white” skin evolved late in Europe

Light skin is not a prestige trait — it’s a metabolic adaptation.

At high latitudes:

• Low UV → vitamin D deficiency risk

• Selection favors reduced melanin

This process:

• Took thousands of years

• Happened independently in:

  • Europe

  • East Asia (via different genes)

So “white Europeans” are a late, local adaptation, not a primordial type.

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5. The real irony (and the real lesson)

If we apply the old racial logic consistently:

• The earliest Caucasoids were African

• They were dark-skinned

• “White people” appear late and regionally

• Skin color is one of the least stable human traits

So the very category meant to anchor “whiteness” collapses under evolutionary scrutiny.

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6. Why this matters conceptually (and not just politically)

The deeper issue isn’t moral; it’s epistemological.

“Caucasoid” tried to:

• Freeze a dynamic evolutionary process

• Into a static essence

Modern genetics shows instead:

• Continua, not types

• Time layers, not races

• Adaptations, not essences

Which, interestingly, lines up rather well with the kind of anti-essentialism you’ve explored before in Buddhist and metaphysical contexts — phenomena arise from conditions, not fixed natures.

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One-line conclusion

Yes: the earliest so-called Caucasoids were almost certainly dark-skinned Africans — and that fact alone shows why “Caucasoid” was never a coherent biological category.