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From: <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Welsh Dark Looks (was: Confused on ancienthaplogroups/haplotypes)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:32:59 -0400
---- Dora Smith <> wrote:
> Since 80% of the population of Britain has the genetic markers of people who lvied in Spain after teh ice age, they should all be small and dark, and not only in Wales, though probably Wales got less Germanic immigration.
>
> The most likely reason why a ruler had flaming red hair was that the Celtic aristocratic had Indo-European blood, followed by teh possibility that the royal family had intermarried with royalty in nearby areas.
>
> Yours,
> Dora Smith
________________________________________________________
Excuse me? Once again you are confusing your own hazy impressions of modern Spaniards with what people may or may not have looked like in the dim, prehistoric past.
You think modern Spaniards tend to be short and dark, so you conclude that anyone at anytime who lived in the Iberian Peninsula or came from the Iberian Peninsula must have been short and dark, too.
Silly.
Modern Iberians are a mix of a number of disparate genetic elements, some of which originated in North Africa and the Middle East and could easily account for the swarthy elements in the Spanish and Portuguese genomes. And not all Iberians are short and dark.
There is no real evidence the ancestors of most of today's British came to Britain from the Iberian Peninsula. There is speculation that they may have, but that is all. An element of that speculation is that those prehistoric Iberians were Cro-Magnons. If that is correct, then they were actually taller on average than most modern humans and more robust, not shorter. We do not how fair or swarthy they were. (Personally I don't buy the Cro-Magnon Paleolithic Continuity thing myself.)
The bulk of the later Germanic invaders of Britain would have belonged to the same y-haplogroup (R1b) as most of those already living there.
There was no need for any imaginary "Indo-European aristocracy" to introduce fair skin and light eyes into Britain. Those are recessive traits. If they had not been possessed by the majority of the people at some point, they would not feature as prominently in Britain as they do today.
My own belief is that some of the Celts entered Britain from the European mainland sometime during the late Neolithic Period or early Bronze Age and that most of them were R1b. Others of them moved into what is now France and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain.
Although the archaeological evidence is sparse, it is true that fortifications began to appear during this time. Many earlier sites were abandoned and some of them burned. Burial rites changed, new types of physical remains appeared, and new kinds of pottery and other artifacts.
It seems likely to me that the primary East-West divide in the Indo-European languages, that between satem and centum languages, mirrors the basic East-West split in y-haplogroup R between R1a and R1b.
It is interesting that the Uyghurs of northwestern China claim descent from the Indo-European Tocharians. The Tocharians, an exception in Central Asia, spoke a Western Indo-European centum language with certain Celtic affinities (although not itself Celtic). The Uyghurs have a fairly high proportion of R1b.
More "Spanish" immigrants?
Rich
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