From black to white: is calcium really that important?

The majority of us are at ease with Darwin's concept of evolution and understand how the 'survival of the fittest' has led to the vast abundance of life on Earth. Obviously, humans are no exception to this rule and evolution has moulded us into what we are today. Evolution, for example, selected for the first of us who began to move on two legs as this freed up our hands for better tool use; and selected for those who chose to live in social groups, which provided much more protection and help than did living alone. Without evolution it is doubtful that any life would exist on Earth at all, especially not in the form of hugely sophisticated organisms like humans.

Life on Earth began sometime around 4 billion years ago. It is believed that single-celled organisms first evolved on the shores of primordial oceans, which were abundant in the resources needed for life. Over time, these cells eventually evolved into the countless forms of life that we see on Earth today.

Most of you won't be surprised by any of this; it makes sense, after all. Something you might find surprising however, is why scientists believe that the early humans settling Europe evolved from being black to white. Obviously the sun's rays are less intense in Europe than they are in Africa, meaning that European settlers wouldn't have needed to produce as much of the pigment melanin in their skin, which absorbs ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Producing less melanin then would have provided such individuals with an advantage as they wouldn't have been wasting energy producing proteins their body didn't really need. This saved energy could then have been dedicated to more important processes (like keeping warm in the colder climate, for one thing).

Although this theory makes sense logically and saving energy by producing less melanin could quite plausibly have been the difference between life and death in the harsh European winters, is it really enough to have driven the evolution of one of our most noticeable racial polymorphisms?

Many scientists believe not, at least not by itself anyway, and research into this question has provided a rather odd alternative. Simply put, many scientists now believe that Europeans evolved from having black skin to white skin due to calcium!

Calcium is an fundamental resource for our bodies, with its ions having essential roles in muscle contraction; in propagating nerve impulses; and, arguably most importantly, in forming our skeletons (via binding with phosphorous to form a very stable salt called calcium phosphate). Despite its importance, calcium is rare in nature and is extremely difficult to acquire naturally as part of our diets. As always however, Nature provided early man with an ingenious way around this and all humans are able to make vitamin D in their skin when it is exposed to sunlight (in much the same way as plants photosynthesise sugars from sunlight to use as energy). Vitamin D greatly increases the affinity of calcium absorption in the gut, allowing the body to absorb much more of any calcium that it consumed than it would otherwise be able to.

Due to this ability, most people are able to acquire enough calcium (especially during the summer) to lead normal and healthy lives, and indeed, our African ancestors would have had strong bones and efficient muscles. The problems arose however, when early explorers entered Europe where the sun's rays are much less intense. This meant that the melanin pigments in their black skin were able to absorb much more sunlight than they could while in Africa and, as a result, vitamin D could no longer be produced.

Fossil evidence suggests that it was not long before the health of these explorers deteriorated, and many adult skeletons from the period show symptoms of osteomalacia (a disease where bones soften due to lack of calcium and deform under the weight of walking), and many may have suffered from a range of muscle weakness and epileptic disorders as their reserves of calcium were depleted and less and less could be replaced from bone stripping. Obviously such ill effects greatly reduced an individual's chances of survival and those with slightly lighter skin would have been more likely to live longer. Being healthier and living longer meant that they would have been more likely to survive to reproduce and slowly, the 'lighter' genes (which produced less melanin), would have spread through the population. In each generation the palest individuals would have been most successful at surviving and breeding so, over time, European humans would have got paler and paler until their skin was as white as it is in their descendants now.

As if this selection pressure wasn't enough to drive for whiter skin, having low levels of calcium and brittle bones had another major problem for women in particular - it hindered childbirth. Many women had such brittle pelvises that they broke under the strain of labour, virtually guaranteeing that both the infant and the mother would die. Furthermore, many children suffered from severe rickets due to a lack of calcium during childhood and puberty. This meant that such individuals were physically smaller than they should have been and many women suffered from underdeveloped hips that were too narrow for a baby to pass through. As a result, such a mother and her baby would have died during labour. Thus, many of the darker individuals would have been unable to give birth so that the darker genes disappeared from the European populations very quickly - being strongly selected against by Nature!

The degree of deformity that rickets can lead to can be very extreme, almost completely debilitating a child suffering with the condition throughout their entire life.

Scientists also believe that this explains why the vast majority of Europeans (and those in their descendent colonies such as Australia and the USA) can eat dairy as a stable component of their diet. This is actually quite abnormal, both in the animal kingdom and among other ethnicities of humans, as rennin (the enzyme required to digest milk) usually stops being produced by the body in infancy after the individual has been fully weaned. Thus, most humans are lactose intolerant and experience unpleasant symptoms if they drink milk or eat too much dairy-based produce. Humans evolving in Europe however, needed as much calcium as possible and would have been under strong selection pressure to continue producing rennin throughout their lives as milk is an unrivalled source of calcium.

Thus, the importance of calcium to the human body has made it an invaluable component that we need to survive. Too little calcium leads to severe health conditions that are so extreme that they can even drive evolution into turning black humans, who have very active melanocytes (melanin-producing skin cells), into white humans who have very little sun-protective pigments in their skin (allowing them to produce more vitamin D).