Did whites evolve from Africa

Answer 1

Human beings evolved in Africa, everyone of every race, creed or color is the same species with the same line of ancestry. And furthermore all mammals have the same (extended) line of ancestry, and eventuall all life, including plants and animals, have the same family tree.

Your immediate family tree goes back hundreds of years. Your family tree branches off from africans, Japanese, European people etc thousands of years ago. Your family tree branches off from other mammals millions of years ago, and your family tree branched off from the ancestry of plants and insects hundreds of millions of years ago, about when the first multicellular life evolved.

A more detailed response:

People of European descent (i.e., those with fair-skin) only make up a small portion of the world's population. Most of the world is comprised of darker-skinned people. This is tied to human evolution. Both chimps and humans share a common forest-dwelling ancestor who lived around 7 million years ago. Once the individual chimp and human lines split into separate evolutionary paths, we left the forests for the savannahs, switching from walking on all fours to just walking on two legs. Two-legged walking affords a more upright posture, which provides less surface area for the sun to warm the body. This is obviously a good thing if you are covered in a thick layer of coarse hair. Overtime, our bodies began to lose the hair in order to more efficiently cool down. Many scientists believe this pre-human form most likely had lighter skin just like the modern Chimpanzees. Then our bodies began to respond to living on the sun-drenched savannahs by producing large amounts of melanin, thus darkening the skin. When "anatomically modern" humans, those with skulls and bones similar to modern proportions, appeared around 150,000-200,000 years ago, they would have looked a lot like someone of African descent. The next stage in human skin color change is tied to mass migrations out of Africa. What is known as "behaviorally modern" humans, those with the behaviors that we know today, began to leave Africa around 50,000 years ago. They simply left in search of better food resources and more territory in which the individual families could grow. Over many millennia, they spread into what would later be deemed Saudi Arabia, India, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Some groups split from that in India and spread into what would become Central Asia, the rest of the Middle East, and Europe. Over the course of many thousands of years, the skin of humans living in areas that afforded less sun exposure began to lighten in order to better process vitamin D, which is important to our immune system. The sun is our best natural source for vitamin D, so it is important that humans absorb it so we can fight off infections, flu, and some cancers. Obviously, someone living in the cold, rainy climate of Europe would need very pale skin because it would soak up the small bits of light that would make it through the clouds just like a dry sponge in water.

For more about this, please see Before the Dawn (2006) by Nicholas Wade.

Answer 2

No, all humans, regardless of race, share a common evolutionary origin in Africa. The migration of human populations out of Africa over thousands of years led to the development of different physical characteristics in different regions, including variations in skin color.