Nina proposes susceptibility to harmful radiation and absorption of Vitamin D as the simple explanation for why people have different skin colors, a product of evolutionary adaptation.
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TIMESTAMPS FOR THIS WEEK’S INTERVIEW
Jean interviews biological anthropologist Nina Jablonski about the evolution of skin color
Jean 0:11
Intro to Nina Jablonski to answer the question, why do people have different skin colors?
Nina: 03:14
I am a biological anthropologist, and I'm interested in all aspects of human evolution, and especially how humans and their close relatives have evolved relative to the environment. And skin, human naked skin, is our primary interface with the environment.
The primary pigment in skin – melanin or the long form eumelanin – is a superior natural sunscreen.
All people living in equatorial environments, whether they're in Africa or in Southeast Asia or wherever, have darkly pigmented skin.
Nina 11:24
In some East African groups, as a friend said, “Yes, we have this idea in our folklore that people rolled in the mud, and that's how they got dark.” But, you know, in the Americas, we have the common biblical derived – or pseudo biblically derived – fallacy, that humans have their conspicuous color because they are descendants of the sons of Noah and the so-called curse of Ham.
People want an explanation; they want to understand how this came to be. People are carrying around these folklore ideas, regardless of where they live in the world. And if we can do better through science then we should do it.
Nina 15:34
These fallacies about skin color all supported the transatlantic slave trade which, at the time in the early 1800s, was beginning to come under fire from abolitionist forces.
On the face of it, the curse of Ham, a biblical story doesn't sound particularly nefarious or sinister. But in fact, the way it was marshaled, along with scientific racism, to reinforce the transatlantic slave trade by basically saying, you know, it's okay, according to this system of beliefs, for us to treat some people as less good or less human than others.
Jean 18:06
And so skin color was used to justify slavery.
Nina 23:02
Yes, that's right.
And so that area of the world receives really strong sunlight year in and year out. And our ancestors who evolved, all of them in Africa, were subjected to very strong sunlight with a lot of UV days in and day out.
Under those conditions, when we lost most of our body hair in the evolution of the human lineage about 2 million years ago, what happened to our naked skin was that we evolved the ability to make this beautiful natural sunscreen called eumelanin, or simply melanin, in our skin.
It's a really, really important pigment that imparts color. It protects all sorts of animals, including our primate relatives, from strong sunlight because of its ability to absorb harmful UV rays.
As people dispersed outside of these equatorial environments with strong sun, they were going into environments with much weaker sun and weaker UV. And that had a real impact on their biology.
Jean 33:51
How did the lighter skin people come to claim superiority?
Nina 34:06
A historical accident. People in Western Europe had control of language and the ability to disseminate language; they also were traveling more to other parts of the world than were, for instance, East Asians, or people in the Americas.
The combination of having language being transmitted and people moving around, especially on sailing ships, meant that ideas from Western Europe were traveling far, and these ideas about who is better and who is worse in the world traveled farther than most.
Jean 39:02
You have this book, “It’s just skin, silly!”
Nina 39:37
I want kids to understand that their skin is really important to them, that it's a really wonderful interface with the world, and that our skin does a lot of work for us.
Jean 47:59
On the one hand, race is really not biological, it's socially constructed, it's social race. But on the other, the epigenetics folks are now saying that trauma can be transmitted across generations –
Nina 48:34
What we are seeing evidence of is that people who live under, let's say, the chronic stresses of racism in a segregated neighborhood with poor access to food, and people who are stressed out and feeling anxious all the time, they will develop such chronic biological stress that we will see evidence of this in their DNA, in the molecules that regulate the activity of their DNA, and that these traces of regulatory molecules will actually be inherited from one generation to another.
We are creating new subsets of people who are divided according to epigenetics, as opposed to sort of baseline human genetics.
Nina 53:19
You know, and this is a long-term project, it has taken us hundreds of years to get into this particular mess. And it's not going to be easy to get out even with all of modern communication and social media. But that doesn't mean we can't start and try very hard.
 Nina Jablonski Nina is a biological anthropologist, recognized for her contributions to the understanding of primate and human evolution, especially to questions not answered directly from the fossil record. Fascinated increasingly over the years by the important but unheralded roles of skin and skin pigmentation in evolution, she focused her research on the origins of mostly naked human skin and diverse human skin colors. In 2000, Jablonski and her collaborator husband, George Chaplin, put forward the dual cline theory (or vitamin D-folate theory) for the evolution of human skin pigmentation that accounts for why dark skin evolved under conditions of high ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in the tropics while lighter skin was favored under conditions of lower UVR nearer the poles. Jablonski received her A.B. in Biology at Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Washington. She has held academic positions at the University of Hong Kong, The University of Western Australia, the California Academy of Sciences, and The Pennsylvania State University. She is an elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and has received numerous fellowships and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to a body of more than 200 peer-reviewed scholarly papers and book chapters, Jablonski has written two popular books for adults: Skin: A Natural History (2006) and Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (2012), and has co-authored two books for children, Skin We Are In (2018) It’s Just Skin, Silly! which will be published at the end of 2023. Her 2018 children’s book is currently a featured theatre production at the Windybrow Arts Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. From 2013-2018, Jablonski collaborated with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many other scholars and educators to produce a curriculum for teaching human diversity in middle schools. This curriculum was featured in the PBS production, “Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings,” which was awarded two Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards. A dedicated public scientist and science educator, Jablonski received an honorary doctorate from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa in 2010 for her contribution to the worldwide fight against racism. Her website is Skin We Are In Media |
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