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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ForceUser" data-source="post: 1692041" data-attributes="member: 2785">Well, look at it this way. IRL, the closer you get to the equator the darker skin tone becomes in indigenous groups. There is something called the Vitamin D Hypothesis to explain this: in latitudes near the equator, the sun is in the sky for more hours in the course of a year, inundating people with solar rays & UV energy. Vitamin D is essential for life but our bodies don't produce it, in fact, we absorb most of it from solar radiation. Humans from those regions developed large amounts of melanin (the biological device that blocks harmful solar rays and determines skin tone) as a way to handle elevated durations of sunlight, filtering out harmful UV rays while absorbing Vitamin D. As man spread to more northern latitudes where the sun is in the sky for fewer hours over the course of a year, the level of melanin in his skin fell so that he could absorb more Vitamin D in those fewer hours of sunlight. Thus, the skin tone of humans who settled in those far northern latitudes lightened over time. One has only to look at a map of Eberron and find the equator and the poles to determine roughly the distribution of the skin color of indigenous peoples. Pretty fascinating stuff. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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