The best answer to your astute comment came from Cris Lee on Quora:
Inuit are not northern Europeans. Neither are they Americans and Indians like south Americans. They seemed to come from a later wave of migration that was from Asia.
They don’t have the mutation for very pale skin like northern Europeans and they didn’t need to.
Unlike the northern Europeans that developed a grain and cooked livestock based diet , the Inuit had a diet very high in seafood, and sea animals that are very high in Vitamin D, including their particularity of eating raw meat, which also provided them with Vitamin C, which is present in raw meat but not cooked meat. ( And also vitamin A, associated with vegetables like carrots but present in raw meat sources.)
That is why, even though they have no citrus or greens or vegetables to eat, they do not contract scurvy.
Of course the westerners that visited them turned down their offerings of raw meat in disgust and cooked it. And as they had no fresh greens or citrus to offer, the westerners in their care still became sickly and died and suffered from scurvy.
RECAP: (If some northern humans had a mutation to have paler skin, to better absorb Vitamin D synthesis in the skin,through sunlight, Inuit people had high amounts in their diet and so did not need that mutation.As they had in diet, they ingested vitamin D, from eating high fat, raw meat sources to have supplies of vitamin D. Other northerner humans that started to have a grain or cooked beef diet, needed to have less melanin in the skin to support Vitamin synthases in the skin. It is a biologic and evolutionary explanation of it. )So they needed less melanin in the skin to support Vitamin D synthesis from sunlight. To produce it from their skin.
Many animals do from cats to dogs. People evolved in northern climes to produce vitamin D from their skin, as an adaptation to their environment.
Very northern humans adapted to have a lack of melanin in the skin to have native vitamin D production as an adaption.
(Edit: Many animals do from cats and dogs. To explain further, many cats lay out in the sun that then, from exposure to sunlight they produce the substance in their skin, they then ingest by licking. So it is animal cruelty, to have cats and not have them have exposure to high UV rays so that they produce it in the skin.) For Vitamin D production.
Every animal is different in how they evolved to eat, or adapt or biosynthesis these compounds they need. It is not a “ONE and one deal.” Every organism is different in their needs, to respect that.
Recasp; that the Inuit or Eskimo species of humans had direct dietary sources, of vitamin A and vit d and vit c from consuming raw meat and raw fish.
(So there was NO evolutionary pressure, to have less levels of melanin in the skin to absorb sunlight for VIt D production. Or rather it is a more complicated thing to explain production of VIt D in the skin, as there was no pressures there as they had adequate levels from their diet. of raw fish and raw meat of sea mammals, even though they had no agriculture or fresh fruits or vegetables. Their diet of raw fish and raw meat provided them.)
European explorers had deficits because they cooked raw meat, where fresh raw meat did provide vit c, a and d ingested in raw forms.
Raw muscle meat DOES contain VIT C, Most Europeans do not eat raw meat.The European explorers cooked the meat offered and did not eat it raw, and so suffered from scurvy. The native Inuit and populations did not suffer from as they ate those sources raw.
Inuits do eat raw meat and so consume VIt C in muscles, they eat it and seal meat and whale meat as part of their diet they have for many years, Unlike people beliefs, that vit A and vitamin C are contain purely from vegetable sources, actually, RAW meat contains VIt C and vitamin A, that populations can consume that from raw meat sources and not need vegetable sources, that do not grow where they live. Other countries should not restrict it, as it is part of their native diet. that have subsisted upon for millennia.
Just like evolutionary adaptations, those from asiatic populations that came through the bering straight eons ago populated the northern parts of the Americas that became the Indians and Inuit, and those that traveled more southward, from an original Asiatic background became the civilizations and peoples in Mexico and south america. (Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, many more, not recorded)
Evolutionary, they all came from the Asia continent and peoples, way back in time.
Not much in common now, but a way back link of transmission of peoples.
YES, weird to think of it, but the colonization of the Americas of original humans come from the Asiatic and Asian continent. Not Europe, or the middle east, or directly from Africa.
Now a days, does K pop, or Japanese technology, or the Chinese, or Mexicans doing lifted cars and Brazilian crimes have much a like? Any commonality? Not much at all!!
Forgetting, it all came from the Bering strait, these people doing ther own, being a “migrant” along the western shores of the Americas to survive and populate those regions. Way back in an ice age of the planet and doing it!
Know your history and be proud of it!
Go way, wayer back to it!
You got it! Turn it around!!!!!
In this SUPER BORING universe
In contrast and to compare, there are the native part asiatic and part European race that lives with the caribou.
They have epithatic folds to their eyelids, but white, light skin. Living in a northern clime, very much livestock and animal based food source as vegetable sources do not grow there, reliant upon the animal source of the caribou, but MUCH less ingestion of raw fish and animal sources than the Inuit or native Canadian first peoples.
They live on the northern edges of the European continent.
Those are, (driven into extinction, for many reasons, the ) Sami peoples.
As they ate less raw meats than the Inuit or the native peoples of Canada, they did develop the adaptation of lighter or less melanin production, resulting in the appearance of lighter or whiter skin.
Wow!
Seriously though, this attraction between those who are similar is very natural. "Birds of a feather flock together".
