Hilary and Janette Deacon note: ‘All living humans are members of one “rainbow” species, Homo sapiens. Not surprisingly, some trivial differences have developed because of our wide geographical distribution.’
The differences, like skin colour, are tiny and superficial. Skin colour, for example, is a perpetual concern in racialised discourse. Our earliest forbears, some six million years ago, probably had lightly pigmented skin covered with dark hair, much like chimpanzees of today. As we evolved, hair was lost and sweat glands developed to help control the body’s temperature. By 150 000 years ago we were all probably darkly pigmented. Melanin in darker skins protects against the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which cause cancer.
As humans left Africa and moved into less sun-drenched regions, natural selection for lighter skins probably occurred to assist with the synthesis of vitamin D. So skin colour is simply linked to the geographic area of recent origin.
Race has not always been perceived as an ‘illusion’. As Saul DuBow has shown, physical anthropologists in the early decades of the twentieth century were shaped by their times: ‘[In] charting the paths of evolutionary development they helped confirm – by implicit analogy if not outright comparison – the intrinsic superiority of the white races and the inexorable progress of European civilisation.’ However, this was to change over time.
After 1945, there was a new discourse that moved away from thinking in terms of rigidly defined ‘races’ or ‘tribes’, and instead adopted ideas like gene ‘pools’ and ‘flows’. This reflects the move away from thinking about classifying people in terms of unchanging ‘types’ and signalled a fresh emphasis on the dynamic flexibility of human population groups.
Fat-tailed sheep painted on the wall of a rock shelter in the Clanwilliam district. The San and Khoikhoi obtained fat from eland and other wild animals, as well as sheep. They ate it and rubbed it on their skin.
