The Development of Ethnic features

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At what point did Homo Sapien Humans who entered Europe from North Africa and the middle east, go from being just plain "white people" with generic facial features and no modern biological ethnicity...

To having genetic markers (called Halplotypes) and facial features making people (who are 100% one ethnicity) identifiable as French, Italian, Greek, Russian and Polish, and German, and Swedish, and English and Irish, and Jewish and so on ?

We were probably "generic black people" originally.

That's already proven false.


so try answering the question, or suck it.

Offensive content removed.

Krafty actually gave a pretty good answer.

The first anatomical moderns who entered Europe during the Ice Age were much taller than modern Europeans, and had long limbs like modern tropical Africans. Probably had darker skin than modern Europeans. They didn't really look like "White people" as we know them today.

Giving any answer to your question is difficult because its a rather meaningless question.

Humans spread out around the globe. And then local populations accumulated local genetic mutations as markers. And at the same time there were subsequent migrations and mixings of peoples. And at the same time tribes and "ethnic groups" formed and then disappeared, and people regrouped into new groups. Cultural groups sometimes coincide with local genetic markers.

It didn't happen the way you describe it: first White people were invented one day as a distinct group, then they invaded Europe, and then at the stroke of midnight on some later date: modern European ethnic subdivisions of the "White race" suddenly appeared.

Like with any other animal - natural selection(you don't need dark skin in north Europe but it's needed in Africa or else you burn easily and develop all kinds of infections and skin cancer) and gene strengthening due to slow mixing of genes(people didn't travel far so they generally mixed with people genetically related). Also remember that human race spreads - a small tribes travels, some people stay, others go further west, others east, others north or south...
Earth wasn't so populated a few thousands years ago like it is now. Pretty much almost every society started with a small tribe spreading over a bigger territory and eventually mixing with other tribes.

In Poland we have at least 4 tribes mixed in - people in northeast are much different than people in the middle and we also have silesians and mountain dwellers at south-west and west. All of them have distinguishing features and even speak different languages(all can speak Polish but some have local languages too which people from other parts of country barely understand especially when it comes to specific words).

Just look at dog breeds - it's the same mechanism. If you mix few fellows long enough they will develop individual features compared to wide population. That's why we have dachshunds, dalmatians, bulldogs and so. Except in case of dogs the whole thing is strengthened because of human interaction - human choose dogs to breed in a way much more restricting than natural selection is (letting only dogs with preferred features breed) and it gives more distinctive results.

Yes. Possibly Racial ethnicities emerged when H.Sapiens started shacking up with H. Neanderthalensis. If I recall correctly, White people have the greatest amont of DNA that corroborates with H. Neanderthalensis, followed by Asian people, while African/Black people have the lowest amount.

H. Neanderthanensis was a species that was adapted to cold weather. H. Neanderthalensis died out during the Ice Age, possibly as a result of interaction with H. Sapiens.

The humans who migrated out of Africa were dark skinned folks. Dark skin is an adaptation to tropical climates with lots of UV. Lighter skin was an adaptation for people in the more temperate and polar climates. Dark skin does not absorb sufficient sunlight in the temperate zones to produce enough vitamin D. Lighter skin promote vitamin D production in the temperate and polar regions which is a survival characteristic. That is why this mutation "caught on" in the temperate zones.