The dark skin that we most often associate with people whose ancestry is largely not from the Out of Africa diaspora some 70,000 years ago is determined by genes, as is similarly dark pigmentation in people of south India and the indigenous people of Australia, both of whose ancestors left Africa millennia earlier. No one really thinks that the versions of those pigmentation genes in African people confer the ability to run faster or longer than others. Yet a common assumption persists that there is something implicitly associated with pigmentation that translates to physical abilities. Many
...more
