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[DizzyCrash]

Well I am impressed!
It was a while since i picked up DF and when I did I was pleased to find that every repeated civilization had 1 skin color and hair color or Eye color.
Thus making each country its own ethnic group, Dark skinned brown haired gray eyed people from the mountains discovering the pale skinned blond haired blue eyed civilization in the Desert or Steppes!
This is neat and all but my only gripe is when you make a fortress your people don't stand out as much... I once had a dwarf with a bright red beared and pale skin and named him fire beard! but he was only unique cause he was surrounded by many others each with there own contributing features.

[Loud Whispers]

Mine are cinnamon skinned and green eyed with charcoal hair. Pretty awesome mix in my opinion. As for the standing out and all that, a Dwarf's merits come not from where they were born or the colour of their beard (beard dyes would be amazing though), but their contributions to the Fort. Plus, how else will you notice genetic mutations?

[DizzyCrash]

Mine are cinnamon skinned and green eyed with charcoal hair. Pretty awesome mix in my opinion. As for the standing out and all that, a Dwarf's merits come not from where they were born or the colour of their beard (beard dyes would be amazing though), but their contributions to the Fort. Plus, how else will you notice genetic mutations?

haha... well I went in and added more peach skin tones and others to balence out the perportions.. it seems like the game has like 15 deffrent shades of brown but only like three peach and no skin tones for native american style asian or Polynesian.

[weenog]

What's america?  Is that a rare ore?

[Loud Whispers]

What's america?  Is that a rare ore?

I think it's a crop. You know, america cloth socks and all.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Hmm, a thought just struck me that I haven't really thought of before concerning this. Does the skin colors of various groups (at least as far as humans go) correspond to what's actually logical concerning longitude (not that I'm sure that's even a valid term with how the df world may work), ie darker skin color in areas with longer periods of and more intense sunlight and vice versa? Dwarves obviously work somewhat differently since they're still colored and not albino-like from living mostly beneath the ground, but it'd still be a nice touch to have it somewhat correspond to the environment outside for when they do leave the safety of their mountains.

[Loud Whispers]

Dwarves obviously work somewhat differently since they're still colored and not albino-like from living mostly beneath the ground.

Humans have always kept themselves on the food chain, Dwarves... Not so much. This means that skin tones may really honestly not be a big factor for such unusual entities as the Dwarves. Plus melanin makes for good eyesight.

That, and I'm not sure if DF and computers are ready to simulate natural selection outside of Fortress mode just yet!

[weenog]

That, and I'm not sure if DF and computers are ready to simulate natural selection outside of Fortress mode just yet!

DF may not.  Computers certainly can.  Check out Gene Pool for a very simple one.

[Mel_Vixen]

Hmm, a thought just struck me that I haven't really thought of before concerning this. Does the skin colors of various groups (at least as far as humans go) correspond to what's actually logical concerning longitude (not that I'm sure that's even a valid term with how the df world may work), ie darker skin color in areas with longer periods of and more intense sunlight and vice versa? Dwarves obviously work somewhat differently since they're still colored and not albino-like from living mostly beneath the ground, but it'd still be a nice touch to have it somewhat correspond to the environment outside for when they do leave the safety of their mountains.

Nope it depends purely on which skin-colors your seed-groups have. Iirc (i am not sure if already fixed) DF handles gene in a somewhat buggy manner. As you see in the raws the colors are sorted into lists. The placement in the list determines which color is dominant. So if Green comes before blue it (green) will be dominant. This way your population tends to homogenisize. That you have different ethnicies stems from the fact that the starting-groups all have a narrow set of genes.

If you would into ethnicy A a more dominant color from Ethnicy B you would change A in a few generations.

[NW_Kohaku]

That's not exactly it...

DF currently uses a shortcut for its "ethnicities" when it creates non-historical figures.

That is, it just picks one hair, skin, and eye color, and copy-pastes it over everyone that isn't a historical figure so that it doesn't have to track that data across thousands of individual characters, and because Toady hasn't taken the time to figure out how to properly abstract that concept yet.

[finka]

Hmm, a thought just struck me that I haven't really thought of before concerning this. Does the skin colors of various groups (at least as far as humans go) correspond to what's actually logical concerning longitude (not that I'm sure that's even a valid term with how the df world may work), ie darker skin color in areas with longer periods of and more intense sunlight and vice versa?

It's not clear that that's even the whole story with humans.  It turns out light skin doesn't have too much of a natural selection advantage; failing to block UV radiation doesn't become a good idea just 'cause there's less of it at your latitude, it still increases your chance of melanoma and whatnot.  On the other hand, skin colour is such a stand-out unmissable feature that it wouldn't be surprising if sexual selection has had a large impact.  This is the view of Peter Frost on where light skin came from in Europe, for instance.  Another treatment.

[NW_Kohaku]

Hmm, a thought just struck me that I haven't really thought of before concerning this. Does the skin colors of various groups (at least as far as humans go) correspond to what's actually logical concerning longitude (not that I'm sure that's even a valid term with how the df world may work), ie darker skin color in areas with longer periods of and more intense sunlight and vice versa? Dwarves obviously work somewhat differently since they're still colored and not albino-like from living mostly beneath the ground, but it'd still be a nice touch to have it somewhat correspond to the environment outside for when they do leave the safety of their mountains.

Ah, well, what finka just said aside, there's this graph relating skin color to geography.

I also know from Guns, Germs, and Steel that there's basically five races of humans, of which three are almost exclusive to Africa, but where the black Africans essentially wound up invading and intermingling with the non-black Africans to the point that the other two types of races are a tiny minority.  Everyone else is Caucasian or Asian, and the Mediterranean Coast of Africa is Caucasian as well. 

Of course, even within the same race, there are differences in skin pigmentation, and there is, of course, mingling of the races.  The races themselves basically only developing because the Sahara and Caucuses Mountains largely segregated the races so that they would differentiate.

Skin color can change relatively rapidly, however, which is why Australian Aborigines are so much darker-skinned than their relatively close-by relatives from places like the Philippines.  (And the Philippines had contact and intermingling with Chinese merchants and Caucasian Arab traders while Aborigines were relatively isolated.)

[Manveru Taurënér]

Not sure if I'm much inclined to agree with Mr. Frost (then again, a wiki page will ofc not give that great an insight on his views), I think it more reasonable to assume that for those not getting enough Vitamin D from their diet, producing a bit more at the end of autumn from having paler skin to last through winter would have been a highly beneficial trait. There's obviously been no conclusive research as far as I know and I'd wager sexual selection among other things is involved as well, but stating that there's not much of an advantage feels a bit odd. Have to take vitamin D supplements myself. Oh, if only Sweden was a bit further south, much too dark and cold for my liking

As for Kohaku's map, it still feels like it corresponds to latitude quite well if you also take a bit more of the environmental differences into account, such as level of forestation, no landmasses far south enough on the lower hemisphere connected to Africa or Australia where fairer skin might have been selected towards from which such genes could be exchanged further north among other things :>

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, again, according to Guns, Germs, and Steel, you have to take into account the fact that there were large conquests/migrations that blur those lines one way or the other. 

That map shows "indigenous populations", but that basically only means "what the population was like a century or so ago".

The darker-skinned Africans from just south of the Sahara actually made a major invasion into southern Africa, relatively soon before the Age of Exploration brought colonialization, in much the same way that Saxons invaded England or the Huns invaded what became Hungary. 

You have to take into account the fact that any culture that trades together will intermingle, and you'll occasionally get large population shifts when you're talking about why skin colors stratify in different areas.

The Arabs traded from the east coast of Africa to as far as China, and the Chinese (often led by the ethnicity from northeastern China) traded back across essentially the same range by sea - they were relatively lighter-skinned and traded and intermingled freely with the peoples of Southeast Asia, which would keep them lighter-skinned, as well.

Conquest can play some role in creating that "selection" idea finka was talking about, as well, however.  In India, the caste system was essentially based upon skin color - the conquering paler-skinned people put themselves in the top caste, and gradiated society by what skin color they had.  Of course, that could also play the other way around, with a preference for darker skin when you deal with conquering darker-skinned Equatorial Africans invading lighter-skinned Africans from further south.

Of course, I would also kind of point to how that map paints the palest-skins with too wide a brush - all of Europe, half of Asia, and even a fair chunk of North Africa are all just plain "white", which implies that Sicilians, Mandarin Chinese, and Scandinavians are all as pale as one another, which kind of hurts attempts to look at that and find where the population migrations took place.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Indeed, truly fascinating when you think about it. If only there were time machines so one could go back and study it in action ^^