Mighty white of us

One of the more remarkable features of the human brain is its ability to look at an outcome and invent a self-flattering explanation for it.

Give a man a promotion and he’ll discover meritocracy. Give a nation an empire and it will discover destiny. Maybe even a manifest one. Give a subset of humanity a reduced concentration of melanin, and some percentage of that subset will decide that what they’re looking at is evidence of biological grandeur rather than what is, from evolution’s perspective, a highly specific troubleshooting patch.

This is the story of white skin, which turns out to be less the triumphal culmination of human development than the biological equivalent of installing a software update because the original configuration wasn’t working under local conditions.

The first thing to understand is that for most of human history there were no white people.

Not in the sense that modern racial mythology imagines them, anyway. If you could somehow assemble all your ancestors from 50,000 years ago into a convention centre and hand out colour-coded lanyards, nobody would be wandering around discussing the superiority of pale skin, simply because everybody’s skin would have been relatively dark.

This wasn’t an accident. Dark skin is humanity’s original setting.

Homo sapiens evolved in Africa under sunlight conditions that can be described technically as “an absolute buttload of sunlight.”

Melanin protects against ultraviolet radiation, and for hundreds of thousands of years it worked beautifully. Evolution had solved the problem. The software ran smoothly. The system requirements were met.

Then humans did what humans always do: they started wandering off.

Some groups moved north into regions where sunlight became less intense. This did not immediately produce pale-skinned populations. In fact, one of the funniest facts in all of anthropology — funny in the sense that it causes problems for simplistic racial narratives — is that people lived in Europe for tens of thousands of years without becoming what we’d now call white.

The first modern humans arrived in Europe roughly 45,000 years ago. Yet ancient DNA shows that many hunter-gatherers living there many thousands of years later still had predominantly dark skin.

Pause and appreciate what an astonishing inconvenience this is for racist folklore.

Imagine spending your life believing that whiteness is some ancient badge of superiority only to discover that Europe’s earliest inhabitants spent a period longer than all recorded history looking at one another with considerably more melanin than the average modern Middle Easterner.

It’s rather like discovering that a self-proclaimed aristocratic family actually spent 98 per cent of its history running a taco truck.

The next important point is that pale skin wasn’t invented all at once. There was no grand unveiling. No ribbon-cutting ceremony. No evolutionary press conference where Pete Hegseth could drunkenly flex his protein-powdered biceps, run his predatory fingers through his gelled hair and demote all the Black officers.

Instead, somewhere between about 22,000 and 28,000 years ago, a few extremely unglamorous mutations appeared in populations stretching across West Asia and among groups archaeologists call Ancient North Eurasians. These mutations affected genes now known by the wonderfully evocative names SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, which sound less like the keys to a major chapter of human history than discontinued Epson printer models.

These genes gradually reduced skin pigmentation.

Now, if one wanted to construct a racist fantasy, this would presumably be the moment where nature selects its master race.

Unfortunately for the fantasy, the actual explanation is far less cinematic.

The reason lighter skin became advantageous had very little to do with superiority and quite a lot to do with not developing vitamin deficiencies.

Evolution is profoundly indifferent to human vanity. It does not ask, “Which population deserves glory?” It asks, “Can this organism successfully reproduce before dying?”

Very different questions.

For a long time, Europe’s hunter-gatherers obtained substantial Vitamin D from fish, game and other foods. Then, around 10,000 years ago, agriculture spread from Anatolia — modern Türkiye — into Europe.

Agriculture was a revolutionary achievement, especially for those of us who enjoy a sprinkling of Bob’s Red Mill Wheat Germ on our Cheerios, but it came with nutritional trade-offs. Grain-heavy diets generally provided less Vitamin D than the diets they replaced.

As part of a familiar pattern seen throughout human history: new technology, new problem.

People living under weaker northern sunlight now had fewer dietary sources of Vitamin D while still needing enough ultraviolet exposure to manufacture it.

The body, displaying all the romance and dignity of a municipal engineering department, responded by gradually favouring lighter skin because lighter skin synthesizes Vitamin D more efficiently in low-UV environments.

And so one of the central markers of modern European appearance likely owes much of its success to a dietary bottleneck.

Not exactly the stuff of Mein Kampf or The Birth of a Nation or the Great Replacement conspiracy theory trumpeted by Tucker Carlson types.

Imagine a nationalist monument whose inscription reads:

OUR GREAT AND GLORIOUS ANCESTORS ADAPTED TO A SHORTAGE OF VITAMIN D INDUCED BY AGRICULTURAL CHANGE.

(Not as catchy as, say, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” Or “white man’s burden.” Or “separate but equal.” Not much clunkier, though, than the “14 words” slogan coined by terrorist David Lane, a favourite catchphrase among the white supremacist oligarchs and thuggish ne’er-do-wells of today: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”)

People would not travel internationally to photograph such a nationalist monument.

Yet it is closer to reality than fabricated racial mythology.

Light skin was not created by God to differentiate descendants of Abel (who, by the way, didn’t have any if the Bible is to be believed) from those of the murderous Cain. Nor did it instantly sweep across Europe.

The process took millennia. Multiple migrations mixed populations together. Different regions changed at different rates.

Widespread pale skin, archeologists tell us, became dominant in much of Europe somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago — a period so recent that the Pyramids of Giza were either under construction or finished monuments by the time many Europeans acquired what modern observers would recognize as predominantly white complexions.

This creates a rather awkward chronology for white supremacist thinking.

The ideology typically imagines whiteness as an ancient, foundational essence. The science instead describes a recent adaptation assembled through migrations, genetic mixing, environmental pressures and changing diets.

Anthropologists believe social and sexual preference also heavily accelerated the process. As in many societies today, ancient populations often preferred lighter-skinned mates. A quick scan of matrimonial pitches on South Asian dating apps will demonstrate that this cruel and irrational bias continues to thrive.

And this is exactly the kind of messy interconnected human story that racists dislike. Because the deeper lesson here isn’t merely that white skin evolved recently.

It’s that every supposedly “pure” human category dissolves upon inspection.

The ancestors carrying key light-skin mutations were connected to populations in West Asia. Farming spread from Anatolia. European populations mixed repeatedly with incoming groups. Human history resembles less a collection of separate branches than a giant bowl of spaghetti someone dropped down a flight of stairs.

The people most obsessed with racial purity often place enormous symbolic importance on a trait that emerged relatively late in human history, spread through migration and became advantageous largely because some agricultural communities needed help producing Vitamin D under cloudy skies. Especially in northern Europe, with its short summers and long winters.

White skin is real (though not really white, of course). Evolutionary adaptation is real. Human biological diversity is real.

But the fantasy that pale skin represents some timeless pinnacle of human achievement survives only through ignorance of the very history that produced it. And the bully boys who boast most about the vaunted colonial conquests and cultural history of the West are the very people who need to sit down and read their Herodotus and Thucydides and Tacitus and continue from there before shooting off their ignorant mouths.

The actual story behind lighter skin is simultaneously more complicated and more interesting than the puerile blood-and-soil rhetoric of the primeval hooligans of the heartland, spoiling for a race war: a story not of superiority but of adaptation; not of purity but of mixture; not of destiny but of contingency.

Evolution, as usual, has a much better sense of humour than we do.

But here’s the punch line. You cannot coherently claim to be both a democratic beacon of freedom for the world and a white Christian republic. There’s no getting around the fact that the Jesus revered as the Messiah and the Son of God was a brown Jew who wouldn’t have looked remotely like the light-eyed, light-haired, Charlton Hestonesque Head of Christ portrait by Warner Sallman that has served as the defining visual for generations of North American congregations.

And since we all know how much segregationist Jerry Falwell’s conservative evangelical heirs like to get metaphorically biblical: The self-seeking association of dark skin with the biblical “Mark of Cain” to justify the transatlantic slave trade, segregation and the rampant anti-immigrant persecution of today — the whole stinking, risible myth of white supremacy — has never amounted to more than a sere moult shed by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, bleached whiter than white by the pitiless sun.