“The aura is thermal radiation of the skin. It shows how you lie to your cells.”

According to evolutionary biologist Henry Gree (May 7, 2013) …

“Last week the aquatic ape idea was gently lampooned by the hypothesis that humans evolved in space (see Kate Wong’s summary). Evidence included the benefits of zero gravity (which is why we all suffer from back-ache), why we mate face-to-face (because otherwise our jet packs would get in the way) and so on. The space ape idea is deliberately ridiculous — but no more so than the aquatic ape scheme, the reason being that there is absolutely no evidence for either. Apart from the methodological flaws inherent in such cocktail-party theorising, the aquatic ape idea is plagued by several other problems.

“First: none of the features proposed to support the idea evolved together. The ancestors of humans became bipedal at least five million years ago, but our fondness for seafood is much more recent, emerging, as far as we know, with the origin of our own species around 200,000 years ago.

“Second: basing deep evolutionary hypotheses on superficial details of soft-part anatomy is always risky, partly because we know little about when that anatomy evolved. It is possible, even likely, that the distribution of body hair and subcutaneous fat in modern humans evolved very recently and is influenced by sexual selection. This would explain why men and women differ so dramatically in these two attributes. As I discuss (with tongue firmly in cheek) in my forthcoming book The Accidental Species, sexual selection could explain other things too, such as the prominence of female breasts, the size of the penis, and even why we are bipeds.

“Third: some of the features proposed to be relics from our watery past aren’t unique to humans. The air-spaces in our skulls, the sinuses, might have been buoyancy aids — but as Paul Z. Myers explains, sinuses are found in all mammals, aquatic or not.

“Fourth: you’d be surprised how difficult it is to use anatomy to infer the behaviour of an animal. You’d never guess from their anatomy that goats, with their spindly legs, lack of opposable digits or prehensile tail, are experts at climbing trees. Or that my golden retriever, Heidi, with her relative lack of fat and her copious amounts of body hair, is a strong and capable swimmer.”

Yes, No, Maybe.

Melanin is not the only protection so-called “skin” has evolved to stop sunburn.

Don’t try this at home, folks, unless you know what you’re doing!

Re: Is that a good thing?

Yes, No, Maybe! If you know what you’re doing!

Fire is a good thing, but if you sit in the fireplace, it’s not.

Grafting a large chunk of white skin on a black man’s body will turn it black.

Or grafting a large chunk of black skin on a white man’s body will turn it white.

So the answer is, “No, it’s not the only way to tan skin.”