Why Are Filipinos So Dark?

Repost from the old blog. Explains why people in hot climates evolved melanin protection of their skin. Guess what? It’s not so they won’t get sunburned.

If they hardly have any Negrito genes, that is. If so, what explains their dark skin?

From a question in the comments on the old blog. I’ve been over this on the blog before, but since hardly anyone knows about this stuff, we may as well go over it again. The commenter asks, if Filipinos only have .02-.1 The suggestion here is the common popular anthropological notion that Filipinos are part Negrito. The truth is that Filipinos have few Negrito genes, but Negritos have lots of Filipino genes. That is because the Filipinos simply swamped the Negritos genetically. Various Filipino tribes have been surveyed and the Negrito percentage is given at .02-.1 All of the Austronesians are dark. The Austronesians are the Filipinos (mostly Austronesian), the Indonesians (2 One of the biggest lies around is that all of these SE Asian groups are part Australoid. In particular, Chinese are very fond of this notion. It is true that many Indonesians are partly Australoid of unknown origin, probably Papuan. The Indonesians closer to the Philippines and Malaysia are much more Austronesian. Getting towards New Guinea, we see a lot more Melanesian introgression. In the case of the Filipinos, the big lie is that Filipinos are very heavily inbred with Negritos. This is not true, and there is no evidence of it. However, some Filipinos are part Negrito. You can recognize them because they are noticeably darker and they tend to have woolly or frizzy hair like Negritos. It was common knowledge 100 years ago that Filipinos had little Negrito in them, and most Filipinos know this to this day. In between, somehow the notion among amateur anthropologists got started that Filipinos are heavily Negrito. The Filipino group is very closely related to the Ami aboriginals of Taiwan and the Guangdong Southern Chinese from around Hong Kong. In fact, this group is so taut that I lumped it into a race called the South China Sea Race, with those three groups included. Filipinos are, for all intents and purposes, a Chinese (Taiwanese) people, even though they live outside of China. Some commenters have hollered about this, saying that Filipinos look nothing like Southern Chinese. Well, that may be so, but looks deceive. In genes, they are remarkably close, and nowadays we prove relation by genes. The vast majority of Filipinos came from an outward ocean voyage by the Taiwanese Ami aborigines about 900-2,200 years ago that ended up in the Philippines. This was part of the Lapita culture. About 900 years ago, a large infusion of Southern Chinese came to the Philippines, but only 2 Much fewer have significant amounts of Spanish genes. The Filipino mestizo is largely a myth, though Filipino politics and especially the entertainment industry is heavily populated by mestizos. Even in the Philippines, Whiter is apparently better. Why are Filipinos so dark? The Philippines lies from 0 to 20 degrees in latitude. Let us look at the nations in at that latitude and who the indigenous people are. In that latitude range, we find northern Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, southern Burma, South India, Sri Lanka, Oman, Yemen, far southern Arabia, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Cote d’ Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, the Guyanas, all of the Caribbean except Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, all of Central America except Mexico, Hawaii and the Mariana Islands. If you notice, almost all of these countries are populated by indigenous people with pretty dark skin. Dark skin is selected for in hot climates because otherwise UV rays will destroy folic acid stores in the woman’s body, which will cause a lot of birth defects. There may also be a protective effect for sunburn and melanoma, but this is uncertain.

UV radiation chart along with zones of skin color. Zone 1 has the darkest skin of all. Note that the Philippines is in Zone 1. Zone 2, which includes Italians and Spaniards, has skin that tans easily. Zone 3 contains light skin that enables residents to absorb as much Vitamin D as possible from the sun due to lack of sunlight at higher latitudes. So it’s not just latitude, but it’s also intensity of UV radiation. UV radiation is extremely intense in Africa, so Africans have some of the darkest skin of all. Pale, light or white skin is nothing special or superior. It is simply an evolutionary adaptation to low levels of sunlight. Melanin went off the skin in order to pick up as much Vitamin D as possible. Otherwise, people had Vitamin D deficiencies.

Almost all native peoples at latitudes like that have pretty dark skin. The only exception is the Vietnamese, and they have only been there for 2,200 years or so, being products of a massive movement of Southern Chinese into the area around that time. Anyway, a lot of Vietnamese are relatively dark. So the dark skin of Filipinos is to be expected, and there is no need to postulate Negrito genetic ingression. Filipinos aren’t really that dark anyway. A lot of native peoples at that latitude are a lot darker than Filipinos. Some Australoid genes related to Papuans have been found in Malays, Southern Chinese and coastal Vietnamese, but the numbers are very small. So really Southern Chinese need to be quiet about SE Asians being heavily Australoid. It’s not true, and they have a few of those genes anyway. Keep in mind that the question of Negrito genes in any SE Asians is somewhat academic. After all, all of SE Asia was populated mostly by Negrito or “Melanesian” Australoid types until about 5,000 years ago or so, at which point they fully transitioned into the types that we see today. NE Asians were also Ainu aborigine Australoid types until 9,000 years ago, when they fully completed progression into the Mongoloid types that we know today. Negrito or “Melanesian” types were generalized throughout Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia until 2,000-3,000 years ago, when they were rapidly displaced by movements from South China. They were also generalized throughout Thailand and Malaysia until about 5,000 years ago, when they were largely replaced by movements from Taiwan and South China. They have only survived in large numbers in the Philippines, but that is merely accidental. So, in the background of all SE Asians is a Negrito, and in the background of all NE Asians is an aborigine Ainu type.

References

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. 2000. The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution.

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626 thoughts on “Why Are Filipinos So Dark?”

  1. Filipinos never interbred with Negrito and it’s been like that for thousands of years and up to this day, Every Filipinos knows this. They came on the Island first around 30,000 yrs ago based on our textbook. But there is a strong disconnect between Filipinos and Negritos both culturally and genetically.

  2. One Chinese-Filipino explained that Malays and Chinese preferred to “jerk off”-a crude way of saying that later Southeast and East Asian immigrants found the Aieta primitive.
    Malays were warlike and chased the Aeta up to the hills of Baguio or wherever to cultivate the land. Indonesian early settlers who built rice terraces shot arrows through the Aeta like dogs.
    When Filipinos complain about Americans and Spanish it must remembered they to colonized the island.

      1. They’ve ancient Tiawanese ancestors like the Polynesians. . Some Flips want to be Polynesian or are just into the culture. Even a pure ancient Tiawanese in the Phillipines would be smaller than a Polynesian. So just use smaller coconuts for bras.

  3. If you ever go to the Phillippines you will see all different shades of people. With different facial features.

  4. I went to the Manilla, Philippines and some smaller countryside towns. I was so amazed at how peoples looks, skintones and featurs differed. These people are descendants of all the previous nations who came and inter-mixed.

  5. By the wayvI am a Filipina American myvhusband was Irish,German American. My daughter looks Brazilian or South American go figure. My family now in America is totally international. We have Mecican, Puerto Rican, Italian,Lebanese,French,Romanian,indian from India,African,German,Tahitian,Guamanian,Chinese and Irish bloodlines now. Truly a America is a melting pot. So as the Philippines were.

  6. I live in HK where 48% of the 320,000 foreign domestic maids are phillipinos making HK$4410(HK$7. 8 to US$1.0) in salary/month. Adding other expenses would put the cost at US$800-900/month. I guess the average pay in Phillipines is much lower than that.
    The average HKers don’t bother what racial background they have but they are easily recognizable. I don’t mean to hurt the pride of the pinoys who claim white or partial white genes,they’re usually darker and shorter(females in Phillipines are below 5′ tall on average according to: http://globalnation.inquirer.net/102688/filipinos-second-shortest-in-southeast-asia)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_domestic_helpers_in_Hong_Kong
    ……
    As I said before, don’t bother. Before the last ice-age, all human were black

    1. LIN
      Spanish Mestizos and Chinese Filipinos will never be seen outside the Philippines. They own land/run businesses in the Philippines.
      So the dark Filipinos are basically squatters from the pure Malay classes.

      1. I am not sure that is 100% true. For example, my ex-boyfriend (in Canada) was a Filipino-Spanish mestizo. He could easily pass for Hispanic or Italian; in fact, people found it hard to believe from his physical appearance that he was Filipino. As well, I read an essay from a Filipina mestiza who was a student at the University of Toronto who said that while she identified as Filipino and wanted to claim the Philippines as her homeland, in her own words her “appearance got int he way” because she looked more like a Latina due to her Spanish ancestry.
        On the other hand, I would say my ex was an exception among the many Filipinos I’ve known in Canada – which is not surprising because Filipinos in general don’t have a high level of Spanish or other European admixture. Perhaps I may have mistaken some light-skinned Filipinos in Canada for Latin Americans, but I still hold my conclusion that the Spanish didn’t have a major genetic impact on the Philippine population.

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