Humans have always been attracted by white animals, tigers, elephants and crocodiles (BTW great melanosome pictures can be found at PLOS.
There seem to be also some evidence that light skin developed only recently as reported in a meeting report in Science by April, 20 based on sweeps around SLC24A5. This is somewhat in contrast to findings published more or less at the same time by the same group (but not mentioned in the meetings report) that a highly complex network is influencing skin color. So I am not really sure if I should believe a parallel development of white skin in East Asians and Europeans as SLC24A5, MATP1 and TYR have a dominant role in Europeans only (ASIP and OCA2 effects are found in all white populations). Some genes are even missing which makes the origin of the world wide distribution of skin color even more difficult to trace.
