The colour of a person’s skin is no more than a sign of the natural evolutionary response of his or her ancestors to the amount of sun they experienced thousands of years ago. Ascribing labels or “racial” characteristics to that skin pigmentation is folly. Rather we should use the knowledge about the evolution of skin colour, seen in the marvellous sepia range of human pigmentation, as a way to educate people about the diversity of humankind.

This is the call to arms of Professor Nina Jablonski, anthropologist and palaeontologist from Penn State University, speaking in Stellenbosch on Tuesday this week as part of the African Genome Education Institute’s (AGEI) 2010 lecture series celebrating the 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin.

H. Ekkehard Wolff, University of Leipzig: Chair of African Languages & Linguistics will deliver a FREE Darwin lecture on ‘The Human Journey out of Africa – a perspective from language studies’   on Thursday March 11, 2010.

This lecture takes issue with the ‘Out-of-Africa’ theory of the origin of MODERN (WO)MAN from a linguistic point of view by raising questions which ‘serious’ (mainstream) linguistics has always avoided to address, largely because they exceed the reach of established methods of historical-comparative linguistics. Based on combined recent evidence from climatology, archeology, paleoanthropology, biology (human genetics) challenging food for thought may eventually lead to revisions of ‘received wisdom’ among contemporary linguists. The lecture will raise a number of far-reaching questions from a linguistic vantage point without, however, being able to provide any final answers which, rather, still await focused interdisciplinary research involving Human Genetics as much as Linguistics, among others.

The Darwin series is a project of the AGEI in partnership with the Department of Human Genetics, University of Cape Town and funded by the Royal Netherlands Embassy.

• Date: Thursday 11 March
• Time: 5:30pm for 6:00pm
• Venue: New Learning Centre, Health Sciences Campus, University of Cape Town, Medical Faculty, Anzio Road, Observatory.
• RSVP: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it 021 557 0246

"To the growing list of people with fully sequenced genomes, two memorable names have now been added: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African civilrights activist, and !Gubi, a Namibian hunter-gatherer," reads the first lines of an article in the 18 February edition of Nature.

Please download the article and the scientific paper on which it is based.

9th March 2010

Anthropologist, Paleontologist and University Professor Nina Jablonski will discuss “Why human skin comes in colors”

Venue: Wallenberg Centrel, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study ( STIAS) Marais Street, Stellenbosch

Time: 6pm
RSVP: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
021 557 0246

Skin colour is about ancestry.  Our skin is the largest and most adaptable organ in the body and evidence from science tells us that the structure of the outer layer (the epidermis) and the inner layer (the dermis) of our skin can change rapidly.  Our skin thickens and alters its texture in months, tans in hours and burns in minutes.  But the basic colour of our skins is something that is much older and comes down to us from our long dead ancestors.

Why do humans from different parts of the world have skin colours that are so different?

On reading through some archival materials in preparation for a lecture on residential segregation it became immediately apparent that ‘group areas’ could not be understood in isolation of sex and marriage across the ‘colour line’ and that I was looking at a historical picture at the centre of which stood a government effort led by T.E. Dönges, apartheid’s first Minister of the Interior, to apply a programme of population engineering that built on and refined racial measures already enacted historically. What they tried to create was a breeding programme for human beings on a national scale.

To pursue their project, Dönges had to classify the South African population in law, which appeared in the form of the Population Registration Act of 1950. The legislation divided the population into four main groups along lines of appearance and social recognition: Europeans (meaning whites), Asian, ‘coloureds’ and ‘natives’ (meaning blacks). Of course, the designation European for the descendents of immigrants largely from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and France was a wistful reclaiming of an identity lost in time and trouble; the use of Asian for the descendents of indentured workers who came from certain parts of India, a small part of the Asian sub-continent, an admission of ignorance or indifference to areas of origin; ‘coloured’ was a fictional assembly of individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds living in one place and at one time; ‘native’ later replaced by ‘Bantu’, disposing an already troubled and misleading term to the language of offence.