Why Are All Ancient Humans Black?

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:59:57 +0200

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For over a million years, every human on Earth was dark-skinned — and the reason will completely rewire how you think about the human body.

If you shaved a chimpanzee, the skin underneath would be pale pink. So why is human skin bare, exposed, and — for 99% of our species' history — uniformly dark?

The answer isn't really about color at all. It's about fur, sweat, endurance running, and a single evolutionary "design package" that built the body you're using right now.

In this video, we trace how losing our fur forced our ancestors to evolve a biological sunscreen on the African equator — and why dark skin, not pale skin, is the true human default.

Dans cette vidéo :
• Why every great ape has pale skin under its fur — but humans don't
• How losing body hair turned us into the planet's best endurance machine
• The brutal biology of UVB, folate, and why pale skin near the equator was a death sentence
• How melanin became the keystone holding the entire human body together
• Why light skin is a recent "edit" that only appeared after we left Africa

📚 Sources :
— Skin pigmentation and UV radiation correlation (Jablonski & Chaplin, Journal of Human Evolution) :
— Evolution of fur loss and parasite avoidance (Pagel & Bodmer, Proceedings of the Royal Society B) :
— Endurance running and human evolution (Lieberman & Bramble) :
— Persistence hunting among the San (Liebenberg) :
— MC1R gene and the fixation of dark skin in the human lineage :

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