PICTURE OF THE BREED
As a swarthy sort of person who takes a strong sun-tan and who possesses what have been variously described as piercing, deep or, less flatteringly, 'cruel' blue eyes, I was not really surprised to learn that I share these characteristics with at least some of Europe’s 7,000-year old hunter gatherers. See:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/26/swarthy-blue-eyed-caveman-dna-tooth#
All we need now is proof that some of our Neanderthal ancestors also had baby-blues.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/26/swarthy-blue-eyed-caveman-dna-tooth#
All we need now is proof that some of our Neanderthal ancestors also had baby-blues.
It has been a long road for Europeans, especially Northern Europeans, in recognizing that, not only are they nothing special, they are the remnants of a relatively inbred and marginalized group – one nevertheless that has a remarkable story to tell of survival and eventual respectability.
Although WW2 had been partly against notions of racial superiority, the idea that Europeans, and in particular, fair-haired blue-eyed Europeans, were at the top of the intellectual, cultural and organizational heaps was almost universal in the post-War period.
My mother had spent a year in Wiesbaden as a nineteen year old in 1934 on an exchange scheme and she picked up on what was to become an obsession in Germany about racial purity. She was even told that, as the paired girls had walked out in file to go to the park, one of the townsfolk had remarked on the fact that she obviously wasn’t German. She had black hair and bright blue eyes.
But my father seemed to be a very model of an Aryan. Blue-eyed and blond, he would have passed muster for a breeding programme. But like many Northern Germans and Scandinavians, he took a very deep tan. And as died at 33-years old in WW2, we will never know whether or not his hair would have darkened in his late 30s. I went from blondish to black between 25 and 40.
On the other hand, my stepfather had black hair and gentle brown eyes, as well as a very hairy chest and hairy back.
At my secondary school in Cheshire, England in the period 1955 -1962, the blond, blue-eyed bit was subtly at ease with attitudes about the racial pyramid that shared a common heritage with the classification adopted by the Nazis [a majority of whose leaders do not appear to have had a strong claim on these traits]. This was rounded out by an interest in head shape, with our classification as kids into brachycephalic [broad-headed] and dolicocephalic [long-headed] types in one memorable History class.
Everyone wanted to be long-headed to meet the prescriptions of Swedish professor of anatomy Anders Retzius (1796–1860), who first used in physical anthropology to classify ancient human remains found in Europe – and whose theories became closely associated with the development of racial anthropology in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
All this put me in a bind – as the orphan of a blond, blue-eyed father and the stepson of a brown-eyed, hairy and very lovable ‘Uncle’.
And feeling alienated somewhat from the farming community into which I had been grafted, I surmised in my imagination that I was the product of Anglo-Saxon invaders whilst my stepfather’s family harked back to the ‘older’ people of North West England who were kin to the Welsh.
All this sort of drafting-into-one-pen-or-another thinking about individuals is of course is absolute nonsense but it has taken me a good while to realize exactly how much nonsense it is.
If you now asked me for my judgment on the relative male-line DNA of my father and my stepfather, I would go with the view that my father’s paternal family descends more directly from the inhabitants of Yr Hen Ogledd [the Old North that included Northern England and Wales] with some links back to the Neolithic / Palaeolithic, and that my stepfather’s paternal family was likely of Viking origin - with both families sharing a long-distant admixture of Neanderthal [like all the other Eurasians].
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