Talk:Hama/@comment-166.250.109.15-20120531163514/@comment-98.228.102.141-20120831061359

The Inuit peoples of Canada, Alaska, and Russia have dark skin. The north and south poles get the endless summer days, and the poles have a thinner ozone layer. It is not only the south pole but the north pole. People in certain climates will evolve to have lighter skin, eventually. But it is not temperature that determines this, but rather solar radiation. Swedes actually have darker skin than Danes, even though Sweden is north of Denmark. Irish and Faroese people have significantly lighter skin than Swedes or even Danes. Why? Because Ireland and the Faroe Islands have some of the cloudiest skies on earth. They are the worst places to put solar panels because they get a pitiful amount of solar radiation. That is despite the fact that their winters are significantly warmer, on average, than those of Chicago. And their ancestry is less mixed with the Inuit peoples, who are more recently descended from darker skinned Asians and Mongols.

Selective breeding based on human behavior can also be a factor. In India, people of higher castes tend to have lighter skin, and often lighter eyes than people of lower castes. This is because people in India have long seen fair skin as a sign of beauty and status, so those who had the highest social status and had the first selection of partners could and did always choose fair skinned partners. Then they isolated themselves among that same group. Those of the lower castes were isolated within their groups. Hence the incredible differences in skin tone and physical appearance within the same geographic location.