Taylor Martin

Biology-6
May 1, 2008

1. Nina Jablonski is an anthropologist

2. Any theories advanced before the 1970’s tended to be racist
3. White skin tended to be more resistant to cold weather.
4. Inuit are both dark and particularly resistant to cold.
5. Connection between skin color and strength of sunlight across the globe.
6. Skin color is largely a matter of vitamins.
7. Our ancestors had fair skin just like chimpanzees.
8. Between 4.5 and 2 million years ago, early humans moved from the rain forest
and onto the East African savanna
9. A change in only five or six degrees can cause a heatstroke, so our ancestors had
to develop a better cooling system.
10. The more they could forage, the better their chances of having healthy offspring
and of passing on their sweat glands to future generations.
11. A million years of natural selection later, each human has about 2 million sweat
glands spread across his or her body.
12. Hairless skin is particularly vulnerable to damage from sunlight.
13. Examined the effects of ultraviolet light on folate, a member of the vitamin B
complex. An hour of intense sunlight, the study showed, is enough to cut folate
levels in half if your skin is light.
14. Low level folate levels are correlated with neural-tube defects such as spina bifida
and anencephaly, in which infants are born without a full brain or spinal cord.
15. Children’s neural-tube defects were linked to their mothers’ visits to tanning
studios during early pregnancy.
16. Skin color is determined by the body’s need for vitamin D. The vitamin helps the
body absorb calcium and deposit it in bones, and essential function, particularly in
fast-growing embryos.
17. Vitamin D depends on ultraviolet light for its production in the body.
18. people who live north, where daylight is weakest, evolved fair skin to help absorb
more ultraviolet light and that people in the tropics evolved dark skin to block the
light, keeping the body from overdosing on vitamin D, which can be toxic at high
concentrations.
19. !!!!You can never overdose on natural amounts of vitamin D; there are only rare
cases where people take too many cod-liver supplements.
20. Until the 1980’s researchers could only estimate how much ultraviolet radiation
reaches Earth’s surface. But in 1978, NASA launched the Total Ozone Mapping
Spectrometer.
21. The weaker the ultraviolet light the fairer the skin.
22. People living above the 50 degrees latitude have the highest risk of vitamin D
deficiency.
23. People in the tropics have developed dark skin to block out the sun and protect
their body’s folate reserves. People far from the equator have developed fair skin
 to drink in the sun and produce adequate amounts of vitamin D during the long
winter months.
24. Jablonski hopes her research will alert people to the importance of vitamin D and
folate in their diet. Dark skinned people who move to cloudy climes can develop
conditions such as rickets from vitamin D deficiencies. More important, she hopes
her work will begin to change the way people think about skin color.