Where do 'White People' come from? MN Historians, Researchers, Anthropologists, please come in.

[CantStayAsleep]

Forgive me, this may be a simple question. It's 4am, can't sleep and a million things have already raced through my mind. I need an answer to this and Google is flooding me with tons of information/articles that aren't getting down to the bottom line. Atleast I can't find the bottom line myself. So over to you MNers. Help me when you're up and can be arsed. Thanks

If Black people = African descent (as many forms state and a lot of people have said), I take this to mean Black people have African ancestry, regardless if it's dating 1 generation or 400 generations ago. So what is white descent? Where have White people descended from?

It’s amazing isn’t it. I love it too which is why I’m changing my career to pursue research in this field.

There are tools everywhere, the litter of prehistoric people.

I've read right through this thread - absolutely fascinating!
3 other theories that blow my mind:

• All humans are descended from one mother, the 'Eve'

• It is theorised that our human/ape ancestors lost their fur due to a significant period spent in water, the 'aquatic ape' theory

• I was watching Chris Packham's Animal Einsteins the other night, which showed that different species of great apes use the same sign language, despite significant separation in terms of geography and early branching of the family tree. And in fact humans can accurately read much of this sign language too, being great apes ourselves.

There's a rather nice dramatisation of the Out of Africa journey at the start of Andrew Marr's History of the World TV series. I've read Sapiens etc but somehow the images from that TV series have stayed with me more!

Eve = Mitochondrial Eve theory

- It is theorised that our human/ape ancestors lost their fur due to a significant period spent in water, the 'aquatic ape' theory

I think while that might sound nice, it's been pretty much discredited these past few years.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis

A good starting point is that seals have fur. So clearly there's no need to lose it for aquatic living.

Yeah, it was just a guy with a really good website earlier on in the days of the internet really.

Neotany on the other hand... Could we be the axolotls of the ape world?

I've only read the first paragraph (paywall) but this looked interesting.

www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/24/dna-from-neanderthals-affects-vulnerability-to-covid-19?utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_medium=social-organic&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2toahC7twAlPD_DsThBNkelNnngXtyL8Vkbgk7oL1q8T2p64o43rgMFwQ