Here’s Ardy! So this is a picture of Mwake’s Dad. Who is Mwake you ask? She’s the lead character in my story of evolution! I tell how she adapted and changed as the Earth and her environments altered. She becomes a mitochondrial eve of sorts. I really wanted to tell how adaptation gave us different skin color and stuff. All those physical things we pretend is race, and judge each other on, when it’s really just adaptation. The trick was to not be too too scientific and more fun story. here’s the science-y part:

As the tribe grew in size, our friends wandered out of Africa and literally all over the world! We spread up through the Middle East and Europe. We went over small islands down Southeast Asia and Australia. Others traveled even further going very far and settled in Asia. And out of these, some continued to climb over a land bridge from Asia and into Canada and California and the Americas! We populated the world!

And as we spread out, we adapted and changed as we entered new environments in different regions of the globe. One of the most obvious changes was in our skin color. We all need vitamin D for healthy bones and we get it from sunlight. It’s absorbed right through our skin. So when we lived in Africa, which is by the equator and really sunny, we got all the vitamin D we would ever need and our skin was dark to protect us from too much sun. Then as we migrated north and further from the intensity of the equator, there was less sunlight but we still needed healthy bones so our skin color lightened making it easier to absorb that vitamin D. It all worked out! And that’s why we have different colors of skin. And why people in central Africa tend to have dark skin and people in Scandinavia tend to have light skin.