Talk:Human skin color/Archives/2009/November

Inaccurate map

The map in the beginning of the article is obvsiously fake and not reflective of reality about North-Africa and the Arabian peninsula at least.

Indeed, according to this map Saharan Maghrebis (Northwest Africans) are as light skinned as Scandinavians, they even appear on the map to be lighter skinned than Northern Maghrebis and Southern Europeans like Iberians, Italians, and Greeks.

As for Yemen and Western Oman in Arabia, their people are not known to be as dark as Sub-Saharan Africans or darker than them as the map pretends.

i agree the map is very dubious and as stated underneath it may be inaccurate so why have it up?--Wikiscribe (talk) 04:50, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the image is inappropriate. It says in the caption that it's based on pre-1940's data, and is "not entirely accurate". In the image description, it says the following:

Use with caution; The best known of these maps is that composed by the Italian geographer Renato Biasutti, which was based on von Luschan's chromatic scale. This map has gained broad circulation in several widely distributed publications (Barsh 2003, Lewontin 1995, Roberts 1977, Walter 1971), despite the fact that, for areas with no data, Biasutti simply filled in the map by extrapolation from findings obtained in other areas [1].

So why is it presented in this article as an image that it is out of date, rather than non-scientific, which is what it seems to be? Ketsuekigata (talk) 14:48, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

it seems there is starting to be a consensus for removal of this outdated map--Wikiscribe (talk) 16:29, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The map is a joke, take it down. Nippler998 (talk) 00:17, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I removed it. Ketsuekigata (talk) 18:11, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Von Luschan's chromatic scale and map

This map is wrong. I am from spain, a spaniard. How, suspiciously, this map shows that only catalans and basques have the lighter skin? this is FALSE ¿racial/politics purpuses?. Catalans and basques are not lighter than any other region on average.

We can read in The Von Luschan's chromatic scale page (on wikipedia) :

Though the von Luschan scale was used extensively throughout the first half of the twentieth century in the study of race and anthropometry, it was considered problematic, even by its practitioners, because it was very inconsistent. In many instances, different investigators would give different readings of the same person. It was largely abandoned by the early 1950s, replaced instead by methods utilizing reflectance spectrophotometry.

Then, why are u using this map tat uses an inconsistent method when there are better methods. U can read in the "white skin" page (wikipedia)  :

Europeans have lighter skin (as measured by population average skin reflectance read by spectrophotometer at A685) than any other group that was measured. Southern Europeans (measures taken from Spaniards) show a skin pigmentation in parts of the body not exposed to the sun similar to that of Northern Europeans and, in some cases, even lighter.

So, i repeat the question. ¿why this page use this map? A wrong map based on incosistent method, and abandoned.

I know that von Luschan's scale is a "de facto" scale. So is spected that we spaniards are a bit darker on average because of sun compared to, lets say, germans. But, again, ¿why catalans and basques are lighter than castilians, asturians or galicians by giving you some examples? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.145.16.10 (talk) 07:07, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Racial politics are very much playing here. We are dealing with this in other articles. The scale is antiquated and obsolete. The jump from the first four groups are by a factor of four ones (4x4=16), where the last two for black people is 7 (7x2=14). Since the fourth is considered part of the Caucasian group, it's clearly indicative of bias on the part of Von Luscan, simply by the numbers alone. It's also an indicator that the Caucasian group itself is arbitrarily made, through racial politics, to seem more diverse or more numerous than the black race, despite the fact that socially speaking, black people incorporate various mixtures, have a wider variation of skin color. --68.41.101.63 (talk) 18:54, 15 November 2009 (UTC)