Well, I can say that I now know a lot more than when I first started reading about population genetics, and the first source of knowledge to me was Maciamo's articles on R1b,R1a, Indo-Europeans, and Yamnaya. He frequently associated red and blonde hair to the IE horse riding conquerors, and still does.
In my naivety I thought that was science, irrefutable facts. And so I believed it, before learning that Maciamo is a mortal and not every word he writes is truth.
I was asking why do they still want them to be blonde after we learned Yamnaya's complexion from the samples collected ? why does it matter so much to them ? Nazis ? or is it because of their insecurity and they want something to be proud of ? why should we care about them or what Davidski believes ?
And even in the case that they were blonde, what does it matter, its a trait like any other, I don't see the problem with that, if a future sample turns out to be blonde will that automatically prove them right ?
****** feed on attention, and the pseudo-science they believe in doesn't deserve any.
Up until very recently all we could do was speculate about the pigmentation of ancient peoples. We now have dna from them to give us at least rough guidance.
As Promenade pointed out, we now know that the WHG had blue eyes, but were darker skinned than the incoming farmers from Anatolia, who almost all had at least one derived de-pigmentation snp (SLC24A5), and a good proportion of whom were derived for SLC45A2 as well. There were even a few who were predicted to have blonde hair. The same is true for some of the Hungarian farmers as is clear from Gamba et al.
See:
Cristina Gamba et al:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6257
The highest percentage of derived depigmentation alleles were found in the SHG, and as I pointed out before the EHG so far seem to have been dark haired, dark eyed, but fairer skinned.
The Yamnaya are a different story. We now have the Mathiesen et al paper as well as the Sandra Wilde paper, which show that they were darker on the whole than modern Europeans, whether or not a few of them might have carried one of the genes responsible for blonde hair.
Sandra Wilde et al:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/4832.full
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/10/016477
Some of our newer members would do well to read the papers on ancient dna rather than relying on folk tales and the rantings of places like Stormfront. It seems reading is too arduous for them, however, or as some of us pointed out in another thread, it wouldn't matter anyway, as anything that contradicts peoples' quasi-religious beliefs is just to be ignored and denied.
Now, as to why all of this matters so much to Nordicists, Nazis, and Neo-Nazis, to explain it in detail would derail this thread even more, and I wouldn't be able to do it justice in the space permitted. Suffice it to say that by the 19th century northern European historians and anthropologists had created a theory that they were a superior race, allowed to have dominion over other inferior races through conquest or domination or colonialism, and the "mark" of their superiority was their relatively lighter pigmentation and certain other traits like skull shape, nose shape etc.
It has never gone away entirely, and is in fact experiencing a type of resurgence.
For these kinds of people, who have idolized the Indo-Europeans and claim total descent from them, to discover that they did not, in fact, fit this standard, and that indeed this "Aryan" race was a mixed group of people with high proportions of Near Eastern ancestry has been a body blow, and so they try to discredit the results of the papers whenever possible, or do a lot of special pleading, or, like a poster above, shift the discussion to the people of Andronovo from a later time period, who were indeed somewhat fairer, and with a somewhat different genetic mix, as if that will somehow change the fact that the people who brought all the elements of the "Indo-European package" together in Yamnaya were not whom they claimed or hoped, either genetically or physically.
Now, if you're asking me to explain the psychology of people attracted in this day and age to this kind of outmoded, a-scientific thinking, all I can offer is amateur psychology: early conditioning and teaching, personal or ethnic feelings of insecurity and inferiority, mental disorders, or some combination thereof. My father and his entire family are fair haired and eyed and I never heard it remarked upon, much less cited as some mark of superiority. This kind of thinking is, in my opinion, insane, but it can't be denied that there are people to whom it matters a great deal.
As to your last statement, I couldn't disagree more. Someone once said that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing. Joseph Goebbels said that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes truth. He should know: he did it and it worked. The Communists did it, the Nazis did it, all authoritarian leaders do it, but it works even in supposedly democratic countries. These people prey on the young and uneducated with this toxic stew of racist ideas. It is very dangerous. Their idiotic and a-scientific pronouncements have to be countered and exposed every single time they dare to utter them.
There are indeed many.
