An Alternate Evolutionary Thought Experiment: What If Dark Skin in Africa Emerged After a Great Ice Age Migration? Imagine a world in which one of the most fundamental assumptions about human prehistory is different. Rather than modern humans originating and diversifying across Africa over hundreds of thousands of years, suppose that an immense climatic catastrophe—the last Ice Age—triggered a massive migration of northern peoples into Africa. In this alternate evolutionary scenario, the ancestors of today's African populations would have arrived from colder regions and gradually developed darker skin in response to the intense equatorial sunlight, while populations already living around the equator elsewhere retained intermediate brown skin because they had adapted over much longer timescales. This article is a speculative thought experiment. It is not a reconstruction of actual human history, nor is it supported by current genetic, archaeological, or anthropological ...
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