Douglas Schorr

Colour: painting by sunlight.

Imagine the scene: about 6 million years ago, on the sun-drenched eastern beaches of Equatorial Africa, our earliest ancestors are soaking up the rays. These naked apes—our “grandparents,” if you will—sported jet-black skin, a perfect shield against the blazing sun. Unlike their chimpanzee cousins, who hid pale blue-white skin under fur, early humans were pretty much hairless and uniformly dark. It wasn’t just a fashion statement; that deep melanin was a survival tool, protecting them from UV damage in a world without sunscreen or hats. Back then, humanity was a small, tight-knit crew, all rocking the same dark vibe.

Fast forward to around 500,000, or perhaps as recently as 300,000 years ago, and the plot thickens. Success on the African savannah sparked a wanderlust bug. Some of us stayed put, while others started trekking—south toward what’s now the Cape, or north into Eurasia. As these groups spread out, their skin began to tell a new story. Those who drifted south, like the ancestors of the Khoi and San, saw their jet-black fade to a rose-brown over generations. Meanwhile, the northern explorers—think Neanderthals (and lesser-known others) and early modern humans—faced weaker sunlight. Over time, their skin lightened, adapting to soak up more vitamin D in those cloudy, cold climates.

From that original black baseline, the human palette exploded. Picture it like a rainbow spinning out: light black, dark brown, creamy brown, Mediterranean tan, yellow-brown, yellow-white, tanned white, light-brown white, piggy-pink white (hi, that’s me), and up in the far north, white-white white. Every shade was a stepping stone, shaped by where people landed and what their environment demanded. Dark skin stuck around where the sun still scorched; lighter skin thrived where it didn’t. Whites had to be all colours to end up white—it’s not a straight leap but a slow, adaptive remix of that first dark hue.

Before planes and ships scrambled the map, your skin tone was a dead giveaway of your recent roots. Black in the tropics, brown in the mid-latitudes, white up north—it was like a geographical barcode. Today, though, it’s more about family and choice. Migration and mixing have blended the lines. Take South Africa’s “Coloured” community (capital “C”)—a vibrant blend of black and non-black ancestry where “Us and Them” blurred for a moment. Compare that to North America, where “colored” still means black folks, or in white-majority places where it stretches to anyone not white. Still, the core truth holds: every shade we see traces back to that black starting point. It took half a million years of roaming and tweaking for nature to paint this spectrum, with white skin just one stop on a long, colourful journey.

So next time you spot a piggy-pink like me, a white-white, a honey brown glowing in the crowd, remember they’re the coloured ones: we all began as black. The diversity? Just nature’s paintbrush, working overtime.