Evolution bottleneck event leading to color changing humans

How to get humans that can change their skin color?

Approximately 1.6 million years ago, hominids lost their hair and gained dark skin (so says the New York Times). Evidence shows several several population bottlenecks where the number of hominids dropped to less than 100,000. Every population bottleneck is an opportunity for radical and broad transformation in any population.

Let's assume that in one of these early bottlenecks, a very large ground-bound avian predator (think terror bird) was introduced that preyed on early hominids, drastically reducing the hominid population. Since avians almost always hunt by sight, it's advantageous for humans to camouflage themselves. During this bottleneck, a mutation appears that permits a group of hominids to mottle their skin color to match the background much like octopuses (video). While the ability is primitive at first, it conveys sufficient survivability that chromatophores spread to all hominids.

The giant avian predators disappear (extinction from whatever cause) but the color change capability remains in hominids. Sexual selection takes over and those with the prettiest and/or most extensive color range mate more often ensuring that chromatophores stay in the population while also increasing in complexity and color range. Assume that after the giant killer birds go away, that the evolutionary path to get to modern humans resumes.

Now granted, the communication methods of these early hominids will be very different compared to how this all happened on Earth.

Is this a reasonable series of events to explain humans with color changing abilities? Have I missed something?

posted about 8 years ago

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