Esslar2

About a year ago, a fellow tennis player who had been in the US army and I were talking about how he had joined up (he's retired now and in his 60s.) He is black and came from an Eastern city not known for being wealthy. He said to me the one thing that really worried him about joining the military was that he might have to kill someone and that would make him a murderer. Just thinking about that boggles my mind. How have things gotten to the point where a young man trying to make a future for himself has to face something like that?

Now and then, I come across the claim that humans evolved dark skin in tropical regions to protect from UV rays. When humans moved to more northern climes, this story goes, they became more light-skinned so as to get more sunlight and thus Vitamin D. I wonder if the reason humans became lighter-skinned as they began to live in northern areas had little to do with sunlight and a great deal to do with camouflage when they hunted. Skin color evolved as camouflage in humans just as patterns in fur evolve in other animals to conceal themselves whether they are hunters or hunted. I first thought of this on reading about a very light-skinned Dutchman who had to blacken his skin or cover it with dark clothing when he went night hunting with Hadza hunters. If he hadn't done that, the baboons they were hunting would have seen him a mile away even at night.