The Jutes are remembered in Denmark.
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The human migration either first went south or began in west south Africa.
To this day, we humans are generally more closely related to Khoisan people than to each other.
Dinka people from east equatorial Africa are the darkest of all of us, northern Europeans most pigment challenged.
It appears that some of us got darker while others got lighter.
Anyhow, human coloring and ancestry cannot be represented as a tree.
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Not specifically. I’ve run into it repeatedly. The easiest way to find it would probably be googling around for “were the ancient Egyptians dark skinned or light skinned?” type articles. I think an article on the subject was where I first ran across it. If I get the chance I’ll look around for something. Badarcheology might be a decent place to check quick. The Egyptians not being African is apparently a big thing is psuedo-history and psudo-science.
The answer to the question is apparently “yes”. Egypt was a pretty cosmopolitan place pretty far back.
IIRC pale complexion didn’t pop up until around 7-5k BCE. So it’s pretty recent in terms of genetics.
Interesting that Romans seldom referred to skin color. I’ve often wondered if Bin Pantera’s Roman soldier biological dad was named for his skin color, which was not necessarily uncommon in Judea (look this dude up on Wikipedia and grin). Evidence in that direction could make the Mail’s readership howl and throw shit like a fight in a monkeyhouse.
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Don’t have a source at hand, but IIRC both in Irish and Old Norse, if you called someone “black”, it meant they had dark hair. Whereas dark-skinned people that modern American would call “black” were called “blue” instead. (Particularly since, again IIRC, the line between colors blue and black was not well-defined, and either word could be used for a variety of dark colors.)
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I don’t know that they didnt refer to skin color. It’s just that our modern ideas of race are pretty damn modern. They don’t map to the way historical and especially ancient cultures thought of things. Generally they were just less concerned about skin color. If I’m remembering correctly when they did refer to skin color it was explicit. “this guy had dark skin”. Where as when they just say “these people were light” they were referring to hair and eye color.
So more modern readers tended to assume all the descriptions included skin color, because that’s how we tend to think and speak about different cultures. And all those older interpretations cause some confusion.
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and
It’s more complicated. Human skin colour is due to both sexual selection and natural selection. Natural selection for a a melanin balance between Vitamin D production and UV protection played a role, but regional variations and exceptions to the rule exist all over the place, and those are due to sexual selection - this group’s ancestors thought golden skin was sexy, that group thought dark skin was sexy, etc. This is why you find widely different shades of people in different places at the same latitude. And when it comes to regional differences in typical hair colour/texture and eye colour, AFAIK it’s 100% sexual selection.
eta: reworded bit about melanin as per @lutherblisset’s suggestion.
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I’d say 99.999% for the last 5000 years or so. But there’s interesting sciencey stuff being done concerning the effects of diet - particularly in regards to fish.
I’d agree that Romans didn’t categorize humanity into white people and black people (like some folk today) but they, and other ancient folks, did describe skin colour. Tacitus’s description of both the variety of peoples inhabiting Britain and the swarthyness of the Silurians is pretty straightforward:
Habitus corporum varii atque ex eo argumenta. Namque rutilae Caledoniam habitantium comae, magni artus Germanicam originem adseverant; Silurum colorati vultus, torti plerumque crines et posita contra Hispania Hiberos veteres traiecisse easque sedes occupasse fidem faciunt; proximi Gallis et similes sunt, seu durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris positio caeli corporibus habitum dedit.
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The whole kerfuffle about whether the Egyptians were African is a strange one, and again one based upon more modern ideas about racial categories. Obviously they were African because Egypt is part of Africa. Whether they were what modern Americans would call black is a whole other kettle of fish, and that is a question that raised some scholarly attention in the 80’s and 90’s following the publications of Black Athena.
Of course, the idea that Africa has a unitary culture or identity flies in the face of science and history. There are a very large number of genetically diverse populations in Africa, most (although hardly all) have very dark skin. That we should care about how dark Egyptian people’s skin was says more about us than anything else.
For what it’s worth, we do know that the ancient Egyptians clearly differentiated themselves from the Nubians to their South, who they portrayed as looking different in art. But it’s hard to tease out cultural difference from genetic ones, at least without genetic material. For example, by the Roman period the ruling dynasty wasn’t genetically Egyptian (post Alexander they were Greek), but they kept presenting themselves looking the same. All the images were stylized, and stylized to represent cultural homogeneity not genetic variation (which presumably existed).
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Long, but extremely worthwhile.
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Yep. I witnessed an argument on Breitbart about this recently. (You can imagine what it was about)
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That really takes some next-level ‘willful stupidity:’
That means that they think all 20th and 21st century maps are false, except for that one that was fox news that one time;
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1st I neither read, nor speak Latin. And most people here don’t either. Its considered nice to provide a translation as well.
Here’s the wiki article, it quotes the same section:
(Silurians are a different thing)
I don’t know enough latin to know if “swarthy” or dark of skin is the proper translation/interpretation. But based on a google translate of the bolded phrase, there might be a little nuance that’s missing there.
But Tacitus’ account was 2nd hand. And your talking about a tribe in Wales that’s perhaps 50 miles from a group that’s apparently not swarthy. Point being Roman descriptions of people were weird. There was often a political motivation behind how a group was described. The more closely their description matched the Romans the less threatening they were meant to be. And the Romans tended to described themselves as dark as compared to Celtic and Gaulish peoples.
Such descriptions aren’t even neccisarily diagnostic today. Ever hear the term Black Irish? Purportedly Irish folk with dark hair, dark eyes, and darker skin than is typical of the Irish. My family are prototypical black Irish. And if anything they are paler than their neighbors.
Ther kerfuffle is not one of whether they are African. Because those motherfuckers were in Africa. Though that angle sometimes comes in. At base its a question of whether they were light skinned like North Africans or dark skinned like Sub-Saharan Africans.
The thrust is basically to say that the one major African empire/civilization westerners traditionally thought of as being important. Could not have been built or ruled by people with black skin. So there was a big thing about aguing over whether and which sort of African they were. The full on nuts take it further. Sometimes making arguments about European groups taking over from black locals. Others arguing the Egyptians, or at least their ruling class, were Antlantians or Space aliens.
At its base there is a legitimate anthropological question of which proportions of which classes of Egyptian society were Northern or Sub-Saharan African at which points in time. And how much movement of groups from outside of African into Egypt there was at various points. Since the ancient Egyptian empire, and its closely associated neighbors stretched from North Africa south to and through the Saraha. And even across the Red Sea into the Levant. But that’s more a question of how cosmopolitan a place it was, how deep its connections and control were outside the region etc.
What little info we have, since the people there at the time didn’t feel the need to comment much on this sort of thing. And artistic conventions being what you described. Is that everything was a lot more mixed than we’d assume. There were a lot of people from a lot of places moving through Egypt. A lot of people who may have started elsewhere historically were considered Egyptian just as anyone else. And we don’t have a lot of detail about the rest.
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In Irish, the phrase for dark-skinned persons is still “daoine gorma”, which translates to “people of blue”
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OTOH, “Ethiopian” translates as “people of the burnt face”, and was used as a general descriptor for African people by the ancient Greeks.
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But it’s possible that we don’t have any of her regular DNA, and we’re not related to our Ur-mom. That might explain why people today are such bastards.
Still disappointed in that Battlestar Galactica finale.
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Amusing how scientists analyse DNA to find that a prehistoric inhabitant of Britain was of the ancient race generally identified as ‘Western European Hunter Gatherers’ - and some people draw the conclusion that this means race somehow doesn’t exist!
