Ancient Mediterranean and West Asian Phenotype-Genotype mismatch

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ToBeOrNotToBe

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The title is basically a fancy way of saying the following: How can we account for widespread reports of, for example, red hair in certain regions where rufosity is currently virtually absent? (This applies slightly to blue eyes too, and to a much lesser extent blonde hair)

This applies particularly to the Balkans and West Asia - as a few examples, we have the Thracians and Spartans (I don't care what ancient DNA says now or in the future, these guys were definitely red-headed, be it all of them or just the warrior class), and just ancient Greeks in general to be honest (many, many, many examples - if you want a comprehensive list, just look up what some Nordicist has to say about the topic).

It doesn't end with the Hellenic world though, which can clearly be best explained by Steppe-related populations ruling over Neolithic meds, a la Spartans and helots (yes, I saw the Mycenaean paper saying the royal tomb was no different, but the Steppe input was still there, and it was also a woman iirc not a man). You have lots of mummies in ancient Egypt dating before the Ptolemaic period with sometimes blonde but especially red hair (look up Ramses II), and indeed you have the puzzle of the Jews having levels of red hair that cannot currently be explained (and this is an old phenomenon - King David was described as red-headed for example).

How do we explain this?
 
Oh, and not to mention, for example, clear examples of red hair in the ancient Americas, and also things like the mtDNA X distribution which absolutely cannot realistically have gone all the way from the Middle East through Eurasia and across the Bering Strait. In defence of the idea of red-haired sailors travelling across the Atlantic, consider examples of, for example, Cocaine found in ancient Egyptian mummies (we explain it away by saying it had to be some sort of modern contamination, but this is only being said because of how shocking it seems).
 
This applies particularly to the Balkans and West Asia - as a few examples, we have the Thracians and Spartans (I don't care what ancient DNA says now or in the future, these guys were definitely red-headed, be it all of them or just the warrior class), and just ancient Greeks in general to be honest (many, many, many examples - if you want a comprehensive list, just look up what some Nordicist has to say about the topic).

I believe asking a Nordicist for an objective Balkan history won’t get you very far. Yes there were redheads there, yes they were likely very much (partially) ancestral to many of the modern populations of redheads today. No that doesn’t account for all redheads. No, Ashkenazi Jews having red hair does not necessarily denote common ancestry or common most proximal source for the genes. Not to mention there are many genes for rufosity and they weren’t dropped as a package all together by some aliens, despite what History Channel might have you believe.

Redhair genes are, for the most part, recessive. This means that such features will be especially noted for being exceptional. When a tribe is noted for having redhair, I don’t necessarily believe we should jump to the conclusion that 100% had it. 5% red hair would be noteworthy... 10% would no doubt be noted. 20%, they’d probably give them an exonym based in rufosity.

About these areas where it is supposedly absent... is it?
IMG_2352.jpg

I would also note that reddish-brown, red, dark red, blonde-red, ginger etc... are all very distinct hair color phenotypes that follow along all sorts of backgrounds and probably come from many different sources.
 
The title is basically a fancy way of saying the following: How can we account for widespread reports of, for example, red hair in certain regions where rufosity is currently virtually absent? (This applies slightly to blue eyes too, and to a much lesser extent blonde hair)

This applies particularly to the Balkans and West Asia - as a few examples, we have the Thracians and Spartans (I don't care what ancient DNA says now or in the future, these guys were definitely red-headed, be it all of them or just the warrior class), and just ancient Greeks in general to be honest (many, many, many examples - if you want a comprehensive list, just look up what some Nordicist has to say about the topic).

It doesn't end with the Hellenic world though, which can clearly be best explained by Steppe-related populations ruling over Neolithic meds, a la Spartans and helots (yes, I saw the Mycenaean paper saying the royal tomb was no different, but the Steppe input was still there, and it was also a woman iirc not a man). You have lots of mummies in ancient Egypt dating before the Ptolemaic period with sometimes blonde but especially red hair (look up Ramses II), and indeed you have the puzzle of the Jews having levels of red hair that cannot currently be explained (and this is an old phenomenon - King David was described as red-headed for example).

How do we explain this?

Maybe you should stop reading nordicist texts?

Either way, concerning ancient Greek use of the word πυρρός which is translated as 'red', the world literally have meant 'flame-colored' and usually meant something between 'yellowish-red' & 'tawny' (brownish yellow, reddish brown). For example the word has been used for lions, cattle, horses.

The ancient terms don't correspond exactly to modern terms.
 
Between when nordicists account on redhair ? People you should stop trying to found a guilt for trying to explain things in the world. And it's pretty certain that whatever people say, red hair or blond hair or blue eyes, have all a common denominator, whatever the ancestral sources and whatever it geographically was. The point is, if you feel clever by thinking that there was red hair in middle-east or egypt or afghanistan and thinks it's not related with the european red hair, you dont know too much about migration of population. Levant and Balkans it's like 3 weeks on a horse, it's not another planet. This is the same thing with archeology, in early 20's century, Gustav Kossina made a theory that the corded ware people, where some super race coming from germany and conquer most of europe. Even if Kossina theory had flaws and a racial ideological inclined idea, the thing is, some people totally neglected like those archeological studies where false. Now Harvard says pretty much the same thing of the CWC with some variations that the people aware knows, but at the end, it's the same story. The conclusion is : It's not because those are Nordicists that say so, that the idea must be wrong, because of the ideological implication.
 
And it's pretty certain that whatever people say, red hair or blond hair or blue eyes, have all a common denominator, whatever the ancestral sources and whatever it geographically was.

Many genes for light skin, rufosity and light eyes will have correlations, especially in modern regional populations whose recent ancestors were selected for all. This does not mean they have the same source. Even if two traits both evolved in two different parts of Europe and then traveled together to Egypt, that’s not the same source.
 
Many genes for light skin, rufosity and light eyes will have correlations, especially in modern regional populations whose recent ancestors were selected for all. This does not mean they have the same source. Even if two traits both evolved in two different parts of Europe and then traveled together to Egypt, that’s not the same source.
Ok we dont have the same notion as a " source ". By source i understand a biological founder effect happenned at one point in history. If what you means is that, for exemple, udmurts and scots both having a certain level of redhaired people, even if they have an ancestral relation, modernly they are not the same population, so i'm ok with that. But i dont believe that two totally different ancestral population both in their respective lands have developed those same phenotypical characteristics. So that said we have the exemple of the Melanesians, dark skinned people from oceania that have both blond and red hair founder effect. Apparently some scienticsts said that the genetic application for, for exemple european and melanesians in light hairs are not the same mutations. But, Melanesians having one of the highest modern amount of Homo Denisova an old hominin from the Altai mounts that interbreed with homo sapiens, it always let a door open that light hairs can be way-way-way more ancestral than previously thought and going through multiple genetic evolution.
 
if you want a comprehensive list, just look up what some Nordicist has to say about the topic).
Tobeornottobe? not to be.

There's already a thread on the Mycenaeans, and it clearly shows their phenotypes; they had brown eyes and hair. There's other threads that deal with phenotypes of those other groups. We're not going to promote Nordicist pseudo-science here.
 
I believe asking a Nordicist for an objective Balkan history won’t get you very far. Yes there were redheads there, yes they were likely very much (partially) ancestral to many of the modern populations of redheads today. No that doesn’t account for all redheads. No, Ashkenazi Jews having red hair does not necessarily denote common ancestry or common most proximal source for the genes. Not to mention there are many genes for rufosity and they weren’t dropped as a package all together by some aliens, despite what History Channel might have you believe.

Redhair genes are, for the most part, recessive. This means that such features will be especially noted for being exceptional. When a tribe is noted for having redhair, I don’t necessarily believe we should jump to the conclusion that 100% had it. 5% red hair would be noteworthy... 10% would no doubt be noted. 20%, they’d probably give them an exonym based in rufosity.

About these areas where it is supposedly absent... is it?
View attachment 10022

I would also note that reddish-brown, red, dark red, blonde-red, ginger etc... are all very distinct hair color phenotypes that follow along all sorts of backgrounds and probably come from many different sources.

Other maps give a little bit more:
red_hair_map_europe.jpg


Regardless, your point is correct. It is indeed present in Italy. My paternal grandfather was red-haired, really blazing red hair, and so were three of his daughters. The other eight children didn't get it. In the next generation, only three of the twenty-four grandchildren had really red hair although a lot of the men had reddish beards. It's recessive. The more inbred the population, the more of it you're going to have.

Fwiw, my grandparents lived in an area which some hold to be a refugium for the Celt-Ligurians, who were supposedly red-haired, but as you said, 10-20% of a trait is enough to become noted for it. That's the case in Ireland, Scotland, and with the Udmurts, I think.

@ToBeOrNotToBe:


As you've been told, the Mycenaeans were no doubt majority dark haired and eyed. We have the ancient dna to prove it. So, was Yamnaya. In fact, they were darker than any current Europeans. We also have the ancient dna to prove that.

Egyptian mummies have red hair because of degenerative processes after death. We have ancient dna from Egyptians and they were also dark haired and eyed, and darker skinned than a lot of the Anatolian farmers. Bronze Age steppe people, for whom we have a few mummies, did have some light haired people among them, but they certainly weren't all blonde and blue-eyed, and we have the ancient dna proving that as well. They picked up those traits in Europe, either from European hunter-gatherers from the north or central European farmers, not from Yamnaya.

Light skin and blue eyes appeared in both the Anatolian farmers and the far north-eastern European hunter-gatherers. Blonde hair may be an ANE trait that first also appeared in Europe in the far northeast, but we also have it showing up in a Central European farmer.

You obviously haven't been keeping up with the topic. You have posted typical old, Nordicist nonsense now disproved by ancient dna.

Please use the search engine and search for "pigmentation". There's a lot of threads on it, so I would start with the most recent. You really need to read the papers about it.
 
1st point: "red" in past accounts didn't necessarily mean "ginger red". Any reddish or even yellowish shade of brown hair, especially of the lighter sort, could've been named "red", and in fact in many languages the word for "light/mid brown hair" is some derivative of an adjective meaning "red, reddish". Many of those accounts of people with "red hair" possibly referred simply to people with brown, but not very dark hair.
nueva_tendencia_en_color_coloracion_de_pelo_cabello_melena_cinnamon_hair__251265120_1264x1800.jpg
Roasted-coffee-bean-brunette-hair-color-to-try-8.jpg



2nd point: Nordicists notoriously exaggerate the existing evidence. If 1 red-haired or 1 blonde-haired ancient individual was found among 20 people, they'll say that that ancient people had red/blonde hair".

3rd point: when ancient accounts of foreign, exotic people were done by people who had a different phenotype, they obviously paid more attention on the unique, surprising, not the common, features that they could find in that people. "Galego" even today means "blonde and very pale" in the region of Brazil where I live because of Galician immigrants, but of course we all know that though Galicians do have a higher rate of blondism than other Portuguese people, they are definitely far from being 100% or even 70% blonde. That same way, when people from places where blonde or red hair was very rare met people where those features were usual enough to be commonplace (in the case of red hair, it is so distinctive and rare that even a 5% rate would be immediately noticeable by any outsider!), you can make sure that they would probably tell others about how many blonde or red-haired people they had seen, and could even refer to that people as the "blonde ones" or "red-haired ones" even if these characteristics were not found in the entire population, but just a relevant percentage.

4th point: unless people mean that Egyptian mummies were red haired or blondee haired because they have the genetic or some other kind of scientific analysis that proved it, it's all nonsense. The hair of mummies change their color because of milennia-long deterioration, and many Egyptians of the past also seemed to have dyed their hair (they were notoriously advanced as far as cosmetic luxuries are concerned). Besides, I hope they don't believe that the mummy of Ramesses II has red hair. He died very old, at an estimated 90 years, so any trace of natural hair color should've been gone by the time he passed away and was mummified.
 
Oh, and not to mention, for example, clear examples of red hair in the ancient Americas, and also things like the mtDNA X distribution which absolutely cannot realistically have gone all the way from the Middle East through Eurasia and across the Bering Strait. In defence of the idea of red-haired sailors travelling across the Atlantic, consider examples of, for example, Cocaine found in ancient Egyptian mummies (we explain it away by saying it had to be some sort of modern contamination, but this is only being said because of how shocking it seems).

What are the evidences for "red-haired sailors" leaving a cultural AND genetic impact from the Middle East to the Americas, except in the wild speculation that tries to give a very easy and convenient explanation for the presence of one relatively minor, polygenic trait of some people's phenotype, i.e red hair? Because an American product was supposed to have been found in Egyptian mummies, so it necessarily came with these powerful "red-haired sailors" (it's interesting that somehow they didn't kill off the Amerindians en masse with their pathogens as Europeans did later)? This hypothesis seems to prove that cocaine was found not just in some ancient Egyptian mummies... LOL
 
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