I also happen to be a medical doctor who graduated from the University of Cambridge.
More importantly, I like neuroscience. I like explaining things.
I like engaging with people.
Hence, here we are… I make videos about neuroscience on RU-vid. I also write about neuroscience on Substack, and recently I started making illustrations about neuroscience. My goal is to make neuroscience accessible and present ideas in such a way that you’re able to apply what you learn from reading and watching everything I create in a meaningful way.
Hopefully, I can have a positive impact on your life.
This is a work in progress - just like each one of us.
Think of it as a journey that I’m inviting you to be a part of.
Light skin symbolizes the humans fall from grace, when they left the rules of nature, deciding to play god and descending into sin. Agriculture, civilization, domestication, slavery, kings that rule over the rest of the peasants and the creation of social classes. The first pharoahs were actually lightskinned europeans who brought civilization to africa and destroyed the natural order of things. "The three African great apes, with whom we share this rather recent Common Ancestor, are notably hierarchical. Reproductively fortunate are the high-ranking males or females, while those relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy fare less well. The same can be said of most human political societies in the world today, starting about five thousand years ago. At that time, people were beginning to live increasingly in chiefdoms, societies with highly privileged individuals who occupied hereditary positions of political leadership and social paramountcy. From certain well-developed chiefdoms came the six early civilizations, with their powerful and often despotic leaders. But before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian (Knauft 1991). They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators." -Christopher Boehm
Bruh, I don't know how to tell you, but you are light-skinned yourself. Also yes, humans started light-skinned. Don't believe me, shave a chimpanzee or a gorilla and find out for yourself. We evolved by losing our hair, thus making us susceptible to the sunlight. Before we lost our hair, we were pale as a ghost and at best we were Olive skin. It took hundreds of thousands of years of evolving hairless in these regions to gain our modern features.
It makes sense, the only thing I would like to point out is that this did not occur because of leaving the savannah nor because of agriculture. A mutation like this occurs by accident during cell replication, both hypotheses 1 or 2 are valid because the evolution of a new characteristic will not necessarily occur at the same time a new selective pressure apears. It would also be possible that the mutation occurred earlier but did not spread so much for many centuries, or we just did not found the evidence (1 ancient body is not enough). It is an interesting hypothesis, but so far there is no enough proof to consider either one as a fact. And probably there willnever be (Even if half a dozen corpses are in a ways, that's not suficient to affirm it did not spread earlier).
I think it's because of the colder climate required humans to wear more animal skins covering their own skin. This caused them to lose their pigment since they didn't need the protection from the sun like the humans that remained nearer to the equator.
What about Scandinavian people? Their land is pretty shitty for farming and as a whole lived on fish and meat, the schythians? They lived off milk, butter, meats and maybe wild veggies. So, not to be rude. I fimd this flawed.
New sub enjoying your content. I did my DNA through 23andme back in 2013, back then they came out and told you how much Neanderthal DNA you have. My is 3%! They even said that it was higher than the average. They used to even sell you a t-shirt with your percentage of Neanderthal. I regret not getting one! Otherwise I am 77% British Isles and the remainder Scandinavian/Viking (I don't recall the term they actually used). Unfortunately, I also have horrible genetics health wise. Not sure if that's due to the Neanderthals or the British Isles or both, but I wouldn't wish my genetics on anyone. Glad I never had children. Multiple Sclerosis, suspect EDS, methylation issues galore, B12 transport issues, NON-SECRETORY FUT2, and more. I actually did 23andme for the raw data for health reasons... Anyway, thanks again. Keep up the informative content!
This doesn't make any sense Vitamin D doesn't come from diet It comes from the Sun they would have had plenty of that. I mean possibly the mutation occurred at that time but they didn't need to compensate for a diet deficient in Vitamin D. The sun gives you all the vitamin d that you need, You don't need any at all from food
What this really shows is just how poor of a diet early Neolithic farmers had and how agriculture was initially a downgrade with a lower quality of life than the hunter gather societies. Unfortunately for the hunter gatherers agriculture sustained larger communities so while they were stronger and healthier they were also outnumbered.
What about the San people (aka bushmen) who were hunter gatherers? They were much lighter than the rest of Africa. Conversely, the Kemet and Nubian people had agricultural but still very dark
Thank you for your work! I had heard about the updated theories on skin colors in the documentary Lady Sapiens (even though skin color was not the main subject: it was women during the prehistoric era). And there are some really cool facts in this documentary, far from how we portray them. Thta could be another subject to delve into 👍
We are supposed to believe that 8000 years ago, snap, like a light switch, people turned white. This is nonsense. It was interbreeding with nathandrtals.
No it would have taken 100,000 years for that bodily change to happen. It was the neandertals that pre-existed homosapiens that interbread to cause the light skin.
This is like Epstein's principle where you say something factually wrong but give good enough context that someone who knows what you're talking about can correct your mistake. It is a roundabout way to get an answer you can't find yourself. Or maybe you're just too lazy to find it?
Fortunately, humans aren’t polar bears… otherwise aboriginal Australians would be sandstone yellow, Africans would be lime green, and indigenous Amazonian people would be a dark green.
We don’t have nearly enough evidence to perform a fair comparison of the nutrition quality of Western Hunter-Gatherers versus Anatolian Farmers. That said, it’s likely that even if we concede that the Anatolian Farmers had the poorer quality diet… the numerous advantages brought on by agrarian human settlements far outweighed any nutrition disadvantages.
The most recent research indicates the genes for pigmentation, both light and dark, were present in early man in Africa long before migration took place. Evolution and environment still play a role in skin color, but not in the manner we tend to think. As early man migrated north mutations occurred to skin tone to adapt to the lower sun levels, but the light skin genes were already present, so the mutation was in addition to this default condition. Likewise, light skin tones in equator regions of Africa also mutated but to adapt to the increased and intense sun exposure. "But as this study shows, the genes for light skin have been there since the beginning. “If you were to shave a chimp, it has light pigmentation,” Tishkoff says in a press release.[lead researcher from the University of Pennsylvania] “So it makes sense that skin color in the ancestors of modern humans could have been relatively light. It is likely that when we lost the hair covering our bodies and moved from forests to the open savannah, we needed darker skin. Mutations influencing both light and dark skin have continued to evolve in humans, even within the past few thousand years.”
I could respond to you with a book, but I’ll just mention one piece evidence (for now), as to why you’re massively off the mark. Both East Asians and Europeans have alleles for light skin, which is why they’re considerably lighter than Africans. However, the alleles for light skin that each group carries are not the same. The alleles for light skin tend to fall into three groups. Group A are a small number of alleles shared by both groups. Group B are alleles only found in Europeans and Group C are alleles only found in East Asians. None of these groups of alleles are observed in Africans today at any significant levels. What this tells us is that the humans who left Africa were dark skinned and that a handful of mutations for light skin occurred before the humans who left Africa would diverge into the two populations that headed east (becoming the East Asians) and west (becoming the Europeans). Once they were settled in their new territories, each of these groups then developed their own set of mutations (Group B & Group C) for light skin. The evidence clearly suggests that mutations for light skin occur in human populations frequently, but they almost always get eliminated if conditions are unfavourable (as was likely the case in Africa). The alleles for light skin that we see today did not appear in Africa… though it’s likely that alleles just like them did appear all the time and were almost always eliminated from the gene pool… but instead appeared in their respective continents.
There's literally no evidence Cheddar man had dark skin - it's been debunked so many times it's laughable people still go around claiming he was basically Nigerian lmao Talk about agenda.
Why does it provide an advantage to not have a source of vitamin D in your diet and then to live in a low light region of the world for thousands of years? A part of the world that can only really function with lots of population numbers if there is a source of fuel to heat homes? I just need someone to explain to me what the advantage is
That makes so much sense because our bodies are healthy or get more ill usually from the inside out and oftentimes it's from diet or preservatives or smoking and drinking alcohol... I thought of this but only after he brought up the subject.. the thing that I don't understand is why people in Asia and the Middle East have different color skin but perhaps it's the change in their diet as well... People in the Hawaiian Islands in Samoa eat a lot of seaweed.. the only type of sushi I ever liked in my life was made in Hawaii and I could eat the crap out of seaweed and it's very high in ginkgo which is good for your brain. I will guarantee that fewer people in the Polynesian Islands have Alzheimer's or dementia compared to the mainland USA because I never noticed anyone having Alzheimer's in Hawaii the 3 years I lived there.
One thing people often forget is that when examining a genome, many of the genes in said genome are non-active alleles, meaning they have been inherited but are non expressed in the person (for example if you were the son of a dwarf but didn't have dwarfism yourself, the genes that lead to dwarfism could still be identified in your genome). For this reason, examining people of the past genetically only gives you all the skin tones they COULD have expressed, not the skin tone they did express. Because of this, it is not justified to say with confidence that any group that we can't observe today had any particular skin tone without further evidence. Ancient Europeans had the genetic potential to be everything from pale white (think Icelandic) to mid-brown (think central or southern Indian), it likely varied across the spectrum depending on the population, region, and exact time period. For example, among modern Europeans blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes are strongly linked with Yamnaya ancestry despite the Yamnaya themselves generally possessing tan skin (think Sicilian) and dark brown hair. Also in what is now Xinxiang/East Turkestan (specifically Dzungaria) there existed a population closely related with the steppe-inhabiting proto-europeans that make up the bulk of modern Europeans' genetic makeup. These people lived long enough with little genetic or environmental change that they ended up being recorded by others. They resembled modern Europeans. All this to say that possible doesn't mean probable, thus those in the field that seek to promote the darkest tone out of the wide range that were possible are doing so with no more backing than those that look at the same data and decide that Aryanism is the angle to go by.
