[slver]

If you look for racism, you'll find it, even when it's not there. Skin color is a function of two things:

1. Amount of environmental sunlight (latitude).

2. Amount of circumstantial exposure to sunlight (lifestyle).

If the assumption is that early humans have lived more outdoors than sitting in caves all day like the modern human does in practice, then yes they'll have darker skin overall.

Is it racist to just state basic facts, or should we brainwash everything to be uniform and average across time and space?

[inglor_cz]

It is not so simple. Tasmania has a climate similar to Europe north of the Alps, but the locals were among the darkest people known.

We do not really know how dark or light early hominids were.

[Gibbon1]

The essay I read on skin color says that dietary sources of vitamin D and folate plays a big role. As well as prehistoric population migrations.

There are dietary sources of Vitamin D and it's produced via Sun exposure. Folate levels are reduced by sunlight exposure. And there are dietary sources. So the two are in conflict vis sun exposure.

Because of the mild climate you can grow grains in northern Europe. That diet is low in Vitamin D and high in folatess. As a result Northern Europeans rapidly lost the ability to produce melanin over the last 5000 years.

On the other hand there are no black skinned native Americans because the founding population had already lost some of the genes needed.

[shmageggy]

The "basic facts" are that the early humans the article refers to lived in Africa and probably looked very little like the final frame of that image.