Szombat, a Hungarian Jewish internet page, notes that one of every four Hungarian Jewish girls is blonde. Of course, one of the supressed publications by Austrian Nazi race-scientists shows that the frequency of blue and light eyes among Austrian Jews was higher than among the "Arians". Anyway, how did look the Jews of the Antiquity? In this mosaic of the Bet Alpha synagogue, they seem to have been mostly blond (yellow hair). Not that it is important, but interesting. In Argentina, anyone with red hair or freckles was automatically classified as Jewish.
13 comments:
Hehe, they have "jew-fros".
Nazi ideology didn't make sense even on its own terms. They considered Slavs to be subhumans almost on the same level as Jews, despite the fact that many Poles, Czechs, Russians or Ukrainians are more blond than were many Germans and Austrians. Nazism was invented by non-blond individuals who had a fetish for blonds. Herr Hitler himself was short and dark, as we all know. Ironically, Nazism was never very popular in Scandinavian Germanic countries such as Denmark, which were very "Aryan" according to their race theories.
Europe alone contains more diversity when it comes to hair color than all other continents combined, but we still don't know why. Our understanding of DNA and genetics is now advancing so fast that we may well know a few years from now, though. Europeans also display by far the greatest variety of natural eye colors, from brown – which is nearly universal in most parts of the world – to blue, green, gray or hazel eyes.
Blue eyes are common in many European populations but are nearly nonexistent in most of the world. They can occasionally be found in nearby areas such as northern Syria, among the Berbers of northwestern Africa or in regions that have been exposed to European genetic influences in the past, for example Afghanistan or parts of Central Asia since the Indo-European expansion, Alexander the Great and his men or a few other traders and adventurers.
According to authors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, “blue eyes are caused by a change in a DNA sequence that is embedded in HERC2, the gene next to OCA2. That allele accounts for 75 percent of the variation in eye color in Europe. It’s the third longest haplotype in Europeans and therefore can’t be very old: Analysis of the unshuffled region associated with OCA2 suggests that it originated about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Blue eyes are most common in northern Europe, centered around the Baltic. The simplest assumption is that the allele originated in the center of the region, where its frequency is very high today, so our best guess is that it first occurred in a Lithuanian village about 6,000 years ago.”
“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, says Professor Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen. Moreover, “all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor.” Exactly where this event took place is not yet known, but if it happened between 6000-4000 BC it may have been related to the introduction of agriculture to northern Europe. The mutation affected a gene called OCA2 and literally turned off the ability to produce brown eyes. OCA2 is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to hair, eyes and skin. The mutation in the adjacent gene does not switch off the OCA gene entirely but limits its action. If the OCA2 gene had been completely turned off, those who inherited this mutation would be without melanin in their hair or skin color, that is, albino.
In The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending estimate that by the end of the last Ice Age there may have been 6 million hunter-gatherers world wide. The advent of agriculture vastly increased the amount of food available, as humans didn’t merely have to rely on that available in nature but could grow their own. This allowed those who practiced it to greatly expand their numbers, but it is possible that the nutritional quality of their food initially was worse than before.
Consequently, the health of each individual was not necessarily better in the Neolithic period than it had been in the Paleolithic era. The bodies of those who practiced agriculture had to adapt to a new diet consisting of foods that had either not been eaten before or had previously been of secondary importance. The more permanent settlements associated with agriculture gave rise to new infectious diseases, as a critical mass of humans lived in close contact with each other and with domesticated animals. There is every reason to suspect that the first farmers suffered from a number of health problems related to a low-protein, vitamin-short, high-carbohydrate diet, and some genetic changes may have helped to compensate for this:
“For example, we see changes in genes affecting transport of vitamins into cells. Similarly, vitamin D shortages in the new diet may have driven the evolution of light skin in Europe and northern Asia. Vitamin D is produced by ultraviolet radiation from the sun acting on our skin – an odd, plantlike way of going about things. Less is therefore produced in areas far from the equator, where UV flux is low. Since there is plenty of vitamin D in fresh meat, hunter-gatherers in Europe may not have suffered from vitamin D shortages and thus may have been able to get by with fairly dark skin. In fact, this must have been the case, since several of the major mutations causing light skin color appear to have originated after the birth of agriculture. Vitamin D was not abundant in the new cereal-based diet, and any resulting shortages would have been serious, since they could lead to bone malformations (rickets), decreased resistance to infectious diseases, and even cancer. This may be why natural selection favored mutations causing light skin, which allowed for adequate vitamin D synthesis in regions with little ultraviolet radiation.”
During the past 10,000 years, the human skeleton has become more lightly built. Archaic features such as brow ridges have virtually disappeared in most populations (except Australian aborigines), even though a few Europeans still had them during the Bronze Age. Surprisingly, skull volume has apparently also decreased in most populations, which might correspond to a slightly smaller human brain today than in the Mesolithic. Some of these changes are apparent within the past one thousand years, judging from medieval skeletons.
As Cochran and Harpending point out, the genetic changes underlying light skin in Europe and East Asia are not identical, even though both of these groups faced similar evolutionary pressures. “In most parts of the world, even in temperate regions, everyone has dark eyes and dark hair. To us these facts suggest that there was something fundamentally different in the selective forces affecting skin color in Europe and East Asia. If those forces were different, at least one of them was probably selecting for something other than vitamin D.”
I'm not sure you are aware that in Eastern Europe in winter it is sunny almost never. Even in other cold regions there is more sun. My hunch is that the eye/hair color mutations are all related to loss of skin pigment in order to get more Vitamin D. Redheads are also very fair skinned.
K
K: Yes. As I said, we don't have access to all the genetic data on this just yet, but from what I've seen, blond hair is caused by a younger mutation than red hair. Most likely, when the Lascaux cave paintings were created by the end of the Upper Paleolithic, not a single human being in the world had either blond hair or blue eyes. It is interesting to speculate why some Europeans developed blue eyes whereas people in northeast Asia, who experienced similar evolutionary pressures for light skin (and probably high IQ as well) didn't evolve the same range of hair- and eye colors.
We don't know why red and blond hair came into being, but let us speculate that the mutation for blue eyes happened somewhere in northern Europe after the introduction of agriculture and that it may have been partly linked to diet. Northern Europeans utilized milk and dairy products much more than East Asians did. I may be way off base here, but it's an interesting working hypothesis.
Most likely, the evolution of the range of skin- and hair colors we see in modern Europeans happened in stages after the first influx of dark-skinned peoples from Africa. Merely by living in a cool, northern climate you will evolve lighter skin over time, but perhaps there was a secondary effect, associated with blue eyes, with the introduction of agriculture, since the new diet led to less vitamin D from food.
J,
Do you have a citation for the studies that showed _higher_ rates of light hair and eyes in Jews than in "Aryans"? I recall seeing an article from the old, long out-of-print Jewish Encyclopedia years ago that showed slightly higher rates of blondism among Jewish children but not adults, and I don't recall that being true of eye color.
You must be exaggerating about red hair and Argentina. None of the English, Irish or German-descended Argentinians, or even the Spanish and Italian-descended Argentinians have red hair?
Hitler did not idolize blonds.
Rosenberg & Goering did.
Of course there are many more non Jewish redheads than Jewish. But stereotypes are frequently irrational.
But that Argentinian sterotype probably has an Spanish origin. In 16-17th century Judas Iscariot is described as "bermejo", red-haired.
Javier
Quien sabe.
Wait a minute, what is with the spelling Arian? Is that a mistake, or are you passing along a misspelling?
(Arians are followers of the great North African theologian Arius.)
Correction accepted, Olave. I should have written Aryan. I hope no one made the mistake to think I was writing about a Christian sect.
Fjordman, skin colour represents a compromise between Vitamin D synthesis and folic acid preservation.
Go out in the sun for a while, and if you are white man (which I insightfully suspect is the case), your serum folate will have appreciably declined. On the other hand, your vitamin D will have appreciably increased.
Mothers need both of these vitamins to bear and rear successfully the next generation; so the skin pigment is carefully calibrated by natural selection to enable the optimal balance between these these two essential nutrients.
Anon.
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