6.5 ka Levantine chalcolithic DNA

Ramesses II was a New Kingdom pharaoh. Noticeably late in Egyptian history. You'll need to find First Intermediate and earlier samples with such hair to support a claim of red hair being indigenous to Egypt. Especially when one Pontus Skoglund has expressed interest in testing within the the time period of Predynastic to First Intermediate.
 
about Ramses II you say
"It's possible, I suppose, but I'd like to see the examination done again, and I'd like to see some snps."


I 'm tempted to have the same caution, so many affirmations have been made about ancient people's hair colour or other traits; I red some time ago (but I don't find the link again) a surely old enough anthropologic study about pharaons or other Egyptian mummies where "appeared" some diverse brown not black haired people, without genetic analysis; not impossible, not proved at the genetic level (of course); + as already said, the fact that Egypt has been ruled by more than an ethny.
 
one can google:
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN HAIR AND WIGS
Joann Fletcher

But it's still non-genetic at first sight
 
one can google:
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN HAIR AND WIGS
Joann Fletcher

But it's still non-genetic at first sight
 
One ancient Egyptian sample has shown red hair, as well as one ancient Jordanian sample, so I don’t see why it is so far fetched for Ramses II.

The real clincher though is that an Egyptian god was associated with red hair, and with foreigners (the god Seth). Why would an Egyptian god be associated with redheads if redheads didn’t exist in sufficient numbers? Why were redheads sometimes burnt in ancient Egypt on the accusations of being vampires, as is on record, if they barely existed? Is it a coincidence that Ramses II and his father were both associated with the same god Seth? And is it just some kind of mistake that Ramses II was determined to have natural red hair, just like another mummy called Ginger?

Occam’s razor leans in my favour here, there’s too much evidence, circumstantial and direct, needed to be explained away.
 
Ramses II was ninety years old when he died.
He was lucky to still have some hair left, He would have been Super Lucky if his hair didn’t turn gray.
If they didn’t, Good for him, red hair or not. :)
 
On Wikipedia discussions i've read that:

"
C’est une falsification qui fut véhiculée par les pseudo-egyptologues francais avec l’aide de l’oréal.

La momie de Ramses II a été irradier en 1977 pour la prevenir d’une décomposition due a un champignon. C’est de la

que vient la couleur brune ou rousse, et les malins petits falsificateurs français ont voulu profiter de ca pour

le blanchir mais c’est connu maintenant, Ramses II était bel et bien Noir.

Des tests d’ADN ont longtemps prouves que ramses etait bel et bien noir avec des cheveux noirs. "

Translation: " It is a falsification that was conveyed by French pseudo-egyptologists with the help of l'oreal.

The mummy of Ramses II was irradiated in 1977 to prevent mushroom decomposition. It is

that comes the color brown or red, and the clever little French falsifiers wanted to take advantage of that for

to whiten it but it is known now, Ramses II was indeed Black.

DNA tests have long proved that ramses were indeed black with black hair. "

I didn't really found any study that shows the Blackness of Ramses II but an egyptian study from 2000's that says egyptians and not Ramses II particularly were blacks.

Also they study few times ago that shows that ancient egyptians of the new kingdom might have been more middle-eastern than african related...

Cannot have any conclusions right now.
 
My brother was in Egypt and he told me that there were some Nubian soldiers in Lake Nasser with very dark skin and blue eyes, but I did not worry in the least, I do not intend to die hugging an old boulder. I have seen in a documentary that that mummy had her hair dyed but still and so her hair was red in origin. On the other hand I trust L'Oreal to get the dark brown, because what sells like dark brown is black, are there people with dark brown hair in France or beyond? It is not the same dark brown as black, now I do not need it because my gray hair has been removed naturally, I do not know what has happened but they have disappeared.
 
My brother was in Egypt and he told me that there were some Nubian soldiers in Lake Nasser with very dark skin and blue eyes, but I did not worry in the least, I do not intend to die hugging an old boulder. I have seen in a documentary that that mummy had her hair dyed but still and so her hair was red in origin. On the other hand I trust L'Oreal to get the dark brown, because what sells like dark brown is black, are there people with dark brown hair in France or beyond? It is not the same dark brown as black, now I do not need it because my gray hair has been removed naturally, I do not know what has happened but they have disappeared.

I'm not sure about your point, but i'm Swiss with Dark Brown Hair.
 
fynny posts sometimes!
@ToBeOrNotToBe:
I never deny the possibility of red hairs for Ramses II and I attached some "authorized" opinions, except genetic analysis -
@Halfalp:
the opinion of these gies about "black" Egyptians doesn't weight too much: so much complexes of inferiority!
Indeed, I doubt frankly Ramses II would have been 'black' in the sense of SAA: his bony features (skull and face at least) don't evocate any typical 'negroid' type: rather some 'mediterranean' subtype; you can lookat nasal profile, lack of strong prog=nathy, jaw form - his skin colour?: I ignore it todate! If we can find these features in SAA pops it would be among some groups of Eastern Africans (Nubie, Soudan, Ethiopia), among whom they come from the Near-Eastern/Arabic inputs IMO - NO Egyptians have not been a monoblock pop allover Egypt and allover its history: according to times and places, the rulers have been of different human stocks, from pure 'caucasoids' to 'negroids', spite no typical fully 'negroid' types have been found among them, for I know. The most of them were 'caucasoid' concerning the hair form, or in a between state for others, not too far from what we can find among North Africans of current times in some regions.
Ramses II was found with dyed hairs, which true colour was white, but blond, black and red can become white, so, where is the point of this Wiki "protester" here???
I'm a bit tired by all these blond blue eyed lost tribes of Asia, and these 'nordic' inventors and rulers-civilisators of the world and these 'black' Greeks, Celts, Germans of Diallo and Cy, and so on...
My decision is taken: I'll pour a small taste of whisky in a big glass to swallow the bitterness of life!
 
"of these GUYS", sorry
 
Levant became Semitic after the Iron Age everywhere in the Near East / Middle East became Semitic after the Iron Age.

That's utter nonsense. Some of the first attested languages in the entire world, from the early to the late Bronze Age, and which were spoken in the Middle East, WERE SEMITIC, including Akkadian, Eblaite, Ugaritic and Old Canaanite.
 
This bullshit that ancient peoples of the Middle East and Egypt could not possibly have had blue eyes needs to end:

https://www.livescience.com/63396-ancient-israel-immigration-turkey-iran.html

Everyone knows that Middle Eastern ancient DNA samples yielded probable results of blue-eye gene variants, but that's it. Not even in modern Scandinavia there is any entirely blue-eyed society, and certainly it's nothing but wishful thinking to think that "ancient peoples of the Middle East and Egypt had blue eyes". Even the very surprising Chalcolithic Israel population had 49% of blue-eyed samples. In other words, slightly more than half of them did not have blue eyes. That CA Israel population was heavily Anatolia_Neolithic and very unlike the BA Levantines, though it apparently contributed significantly to at least the Northern (Sidon) Levant population, but not to the Southern Levant population, a fact that, according to the authors of that study themselves, may also suggest that not all Chalcolithic Levantine communities was like that of the CA Israeli site, and there was strong genetic structure in that region.

A blue-eyed majority is even less likely in a place like Egypt, which going by the LBA and IA samples that have already been analyzed, were mostly Levant_Neolithic, Iranian_Neolithic and probably also a fair bit of indigenous North African (IMHO easily mistaken for Levant_Neolithic until we have more ancient DNA samples from Mesolithic and Neolithic North Africa) as well as a non-negligible amount of Subsaharan African ancestry - with much less ANF ancestry (which I think was associated with the spread of blue eyes - it certainly did not come with Indo-Europans, it predates their expansion). Actually some of the carefully cherry-picked Egyptian statues you've posted do not even look like they had blue-pained eyes, but maybe you see things differently from my own eyes.

To sum it up: did blue-eyed people exist in the CA and BA Middle East and North Africa? Definitely, they do exist even now. Were they a majority in most places? Almost certainly not.
 
halfalp I'm not sure about your point, but i'm Swiss with Dark Brown Hair.

I see it dark brown but for example in the toilets of a mall I'm light brown almost blond, have any explanation? I also had two kinds of hair, one thicker and one thinner, now at the age I'm running with the finest hair, I'm a Fox Terrier? Something similar happens? I had gray hair and they have disappeared alone.
 
I see it dark brown but for example in the toilets of a mall I'm light brown almost blond, have any explanation? I also had two kinds of hair, one thicker and one thinner, now at the age I'm running with the finest hair, I'm a Fox Terrier? Something similar happens? I had gray hair and they have disappeared alone.
In the sun my Hairs also are becoming goldish like Chestnut. It's maybe the genes or maybe it's the shampoo.
 
the feeling of hair colour is linked to luminosity: the more light the more "light" hairs;
some rather blackish haired person under cloudy weather reveal brownish or reddish hues under sunshines, according to heredity, but the difference in luminosity products more effects on fair hairs than on dark hairs where the differences are not so striking (it's gradual, proportioned to lightness of hairs); when head hair is sticked by water BI, light doesn't go through hairs so easily and even very light hairs can seem only brown more or less light : the opposite effect.
Everybody knows that the same persone at the same time seems lighter or darker haired according to changes in light exposure.
One of the ways to devine if 'blond' hair is artificial or not is to compare persons with apparently the same hue under sunlight and in a poorly lightened environment. The dyed hairs will appear very lighter in dark environment; It seems to me this is based on more reflectance for dyed hairs and more transparency in the case of natural fair hairs.
But the same headhair bundle under the same light can change, due to glints depending on hairs curves and on hair form (cylindric, or oval section of hairs) when the head moves.
Here under, a more reliable and detailed source than me, but uneasy to read:
www.graphics.stanford.edu/papers/hair/hair-sg03final.pdf
 
@Johen:
to date, I know NO pop with majority of red hairs, the maxi's being in NW Ireland, W Scotland and Udmurt - (surely because among red haired people, a lot have some other problems concerning health and this colour as a whole has not been favoured too much during history, spite the story about Ramses II and his "clan").
I doubt WSHG would have been light pigmented for hair and eyes at a high % -
The light pigmentation is present, not at an exclusive level, among the West Uralic and IE pops : as the features seemingly 'eastasian' increase in the pops of Urals and Siberia, the light pigmentation of eyes/hair decreases. So maybe the partly 'eastasian' or maybe undifferentiated north-eurasian (ANElike) pop knew a mutation concerning hairs, but it doesn't seem this mutation gained much ground in it. I repeat more than a mutation causes red hairs as well as blond hairs and beside this, Udmurt have more 'caucasoid' input than 'eastasian'.

I think some afanasievo and okunevo people had brown hair with brown eye and blue eye also. Right?

2017_Hollard_Tableau14.jpg


The derived allele of the KITLG SNP rs12821256 that is associated with – and likely causal for – blond hair in Europeans [4,5] is present in one hunter-gatherer from each of Samara, Motala and Ukraine (I0124, I0014 and I1763), as well as several later individuals with Steppe ancestry. Since the allele is found in populations with EHG but not WHG ancestry, it suggests that its origin is in the Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) population. Consistent with this, we observe that earliest known individual with the derived allele is the [Siberian] ANE individual Afontova Gora 3 which is directly dated to 16130-15749 cal BCE (14710±60 BP, MAMS-27186: a previously unpublished date that we newly report here).

So, we can think that so many people had lived with blonde hairs in the huge areas from lake baikal to East Europe at that time. And blue eyes was kept from afanasievo to okunevo, which means, I think, that the other local people also had the blue eye genes at the Altai. As WHG blue eyes were wiped out by farmers, blue eyes could not be produced in Europe at that time. In other words, just small slaves or andronovo people with recessive light gene could not make locals in siberia, mongolia, and south central asian people to have light eyes and light hairs, I think.
 
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I think some afanasievo and okunevo people had brown hair with brown eye and blue eye also. Right?

2017_Hollard_Tableau14.jpg




So, we can think that so many people had lived with blonde hairs in the huge areas from lake baikal to East Europe at that time. And blue eyes was kept from afanasievo to okunevo, which means, I think, that the other local people also had the blue eye genes at the Altai. As WHG blue eyes were wiped out by farmers, blue eyes could not be produced in Europe at that time. In other words, just small slaves or andronovo people with recessive light gene could not make locals in siberia, mongolia, and south central asian people to have light eyes and light hairs, I think.

WHG and blue eyes were not wiped out by the Anatolian farmers. Blue eyes actually seem to have picked up by many EEF (which, remember, was a mixture of EEF + WHG in most regions) in Neolithic Europe. GAC was overwhelmingly EEF in ancestry, and it had not just high frequency of blonde hair, but also blue eyes. Pockets of mostly WHG survived during the Early and Mid Neolithic and in the Late Neolithic there was famously a resurgence of WHG in most of Europe. The ~20-30% of WHG ancestry in some EEF areas of Europe was more than enough for the "blue eye" mutation to spread to the European farmers of Anatolian descent, and in fact blue eyes were apparently found even in 1 sample from Neolithic Anatolia itself.

As for Okunevo and Afanasevo, didn't Okunevo derive a minor part of its ancestry from the former Afanasevo (some Okunevo sample even had the same R1b clade prevalent in former Afanasevo)? I find it likely, and I remember reading something like that in the papers I've read about the Okunevo DNA findings. Afanasevo and other later Western Steppe cultural expansions could easily have lent the genes for blue eyes to peoples like Okunevo, especially since some mutations, once acquired, tend to go on with their own inner expansion as they are selected positively and/or favored by some group, without any need for a big and additional genetic input from foreigners.
 
I think some afanasievo and okunevo people had brown hair with brown eye and blue eye also. Right?

2017_Hollard_Tableau14.jpg




So, we can think that so many people had lived with blonde hairs in the huge areas from lake baikal to East Europe at that time. And blue eyes was kept from afanasievo to okunevo, which means, I think, that the other local people also had the blue eye genes at the Altai. As WHG blue eyes were wiped out by farmers, blue eyes could not be produced in Europe at that time. In other words, just small slaves or andronovo people with recessive light gene could not make locals in siberia, mongolia, and south central asian people to have light eyes and light hairs, I think.

Okunevo people had clear mixing with the local Yamnaya-Afanasievo looking at their mtdna.
 
WHG and blue eyes were not wiped out by the Anatolian farmers. Blue eyes actually seem to have picked up by many EEF (which, remember, was a mixture of EEF + WHG in most regions) in Neolithic Europe. GAC was overwhelmingly EEF in ancestry, and it had not just high frequency of blonde hair, but also blue eyes. Pockets of mostly WHG survived during the Early and Mid Neolithic and in the Late Neolithic there was famously a resurgence of WHG in most of Europe. The ~20-30% of WHG ancestry in some EEF areas of Europe was more than enough for the "blue eye" mutation to spread to the European farmers of Anatolian descent, and in fact blue eyes were apparently found even in 1 sample from Neolithic Anatolia itself.

As for Okunevo and Afanasevo, didn't Okunevo derive a minor part of its ancestry from the former Afanasevo (some Okunevo sample even had the same R1b clade prevalent in former Afanasevo)? I find it likely, and I remember reading something like that in the papers I've read about the Okunevo DNA findings. Afanasevo and other later Western Steppe cultural expansions could easily have lent the genes for blue eyes to peoples like Okunevo, especially since some mutations, once acquired, tend to go on with their own inner expansion as they are selected positively and/or favored by some group, without any need for a big and additional genetic input from foreigners.

I'm still not sure about that. I looked at Genetiker pigmentation calls ( i know, i know ). And surprisingly Blonde haired people with Blue eyes linked with early EEF / Barcin seems to be overwhelmingly of mtdna N1a1, wich is clearly Anatolian or broadly Middle-Eastern. Blonde hairs might be older, and had different founder effects, in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Balkans ( Danubian Plain ) / Anatolia.
 

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