How the goat got the color

Over thousands of years of evolution, the pigmentation of human skin has changed to better regulate the amount of ultraviolet radiation that penetrates the skin and damages cells. It is known that the color of each person's skin is decided by a unique combination of ancestral genes, and that it is a hereditary trait. While some people's cells contain more melanin pigment, which gives the skin a darker color, in lighter people with pink skin, the color varies mainly due to the difference in the color of the connective tissue just below the skin, as well as the amount of hemoglobin in the blood vessels.
The global map of the levels of native skin pigmentation clearly shows the differences in shades, starting from the lightest in people from the north of the planet, through the middle shades of people from the area around the 20th parallel (20 degrees north of the equator), to the darkest - such skin they mostly live between the equator and 20 degrees south, in an area with a constantly high degree of ultraviolet radiation.

In 2017, research teams from several American universities published a study in the journal "Cell" on genes that determine skin color. Research has shown that skin color is "almost 100 percent" hereditary, and that, in general, a relatively small number of genes decide on it. However, the closer people are to the Equator, and the darker the color of their skin, the more genes are involved in the regulation of pigmentation and each of them has a small contribution that further darkens the skin.

The division of people into races according to skin color - which has brought terrible disasters across the planet - has been largely abandoned. However, it is interesting that Hippocrates in the 5th century BC concluded that skin color and temperament of people vary depending on the environment, and Aristotle and his followers developed a "climate theory" according to which dark skin is associated with strong sun and heat. In the middle of the 18th century, maps were already known showing how the color of the skin varies depending on the proximity, ie the distance of the Equator.
Charles Darwin himself studied variations in human skin color on a Beagle voyage between 1831 and 1836, but flatly rejected the idea that they could be the basis for dividing people into races because, he said, people had different skin colors. there are no clear differences.Some research suggests that it takes about 100 generations for skin to change color - the heirs of dark-skinned people who moved north 2,500 years later had fair skin; The opposite also happened in migrations from north to south.