
See also R1b—Gene Of Modern Civilization (And Red Hair)
There seems to be a negative relationship between our growing knowledge of human genetics, and the extent to which we are allowed to publicly say that genetic differences between ethnic groups exist and matter. This became crystal clear recently when Bret Stephens’s New York Times piece on Jewish intelligence was censored (post-publication!) to memory-hole a reference to a once-widely-praised study [PDF] in a leading scientific journal that had demonstrated that Jews were on average smarter than other races for genetic reasons. This widely-replicated finding was declared to be “racist”—as, supposedly, was Henry Harpending, one of the authors of the study Stephens referenced. (This is continuing to make waves: Siva Vaidhyanathan [Email him] an Indian “media studies” professor at Virginia Tech, was quoted in Politico as calling for the NYT to uphold “high standards”—i.e more firmly suppressing what he calls “ridiculous, eugenicist garbage“.)
So there seems no better time to explore afresh the genetics of the people who, overwhelmingly, built the United States: Europeans.
The males, being still overwhelmingly Western European and in particular British, are characterized by the Y Chromosome Haplotype R1b. Between 60% and 100% of Irish, Welsh and Southern English men carry this haplotype. It first appeared roughly 12,000 years ago and spread westwards from West Asia, where it originated. Carried by no less than 30% of European males, it is the marker of being “Indo-European”—the war-like culture which spread into Europe and which is genetically most influential in Europe’s North West.
But what about European ladies? What are maternal-line origins of Emily Dickinson, Amelia Earheart and Ann Coulter? Where did the European Eve come from?
The answer is that she came from the same place as the Indo-Europeans—only much, much earlier.
The Haplogroup carried by approximately 40% of all European females, Haplogroup H (mtDNA) first appeared in West Asia 25,000 years ago, well before the last Ice Age [The Molecular Dissection of mtDNA Haplogroup H Confirms That the Franco-Cantabrian Glacial Refuge Was a Major Source for the European Gene Pool, By Alessandro Achilli et al., American Journal of Human Genetics, 2004].
As Kevin MacDonald points out in his very useful 2019 book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, Europe experienced three waves of settlement.
- The first settlers were “Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers,” who appeared in Europe approximately 10,000 years ago.
- Next came the “Neolithic Farmers,” from Anatolia, who arrived in the Continent about 8,000 years ago.
- Finally, there came the “Indo-Europeans,” who started-out in Western Asia but very much established themselves as a relatively developed culture—evidence of which can be found in the “beakers” and “axes” – in Eastern Europe. These of course were the bearers of the R1b haplotype.
MacDonald reports sound archaeological evidence that the highly advanced Indo-Europeans substantially wiped-out their competitors all over Europe, and especially in the Northwest of Europe. And, of course, it would have been the Neolithic and Hunter-Gatherer males whom they would have killed and displaced—taking Neolithic and Hunter-Gatherer females as the spoils of war.
In Britain, notes MacDonald, the Neolithic Farmers were replaced by Indo-Europeans to the tune of 90%, with them hanging on only in isolated parts of the island.
MacDonald also demonstrates that, thousands of years earlier, the Neolithic Farmers themselves outcompeted, and perhaps successfully battled with, male Stone Age Hunter Gatherers, displacing them and also taking their females as their own. However, these Hunter Gatherers were liquidated to a much greater extent, hanging on only in very isolated areas, as they could so easily be out-competed by farmers with their larger numbers and superior technology.
But the Neolithic Farmers didn’t make it as far north as Scandinavia, meaning that remnant Hunter Gatherers there would have survived to be later wiped out by Indo-Europeans (whose own womenfolk would have been picked up on their journey north).
The result: Approximately 40% of European females carry Haplogroup H, with the highest frequency, of almost 60%, found among Welsh women and a frequency of 44% among English, Scottish, and Irish women [Distribution of European mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups by region in percentage, April 2018, Eupedia]. This is the Haplogroup which arrived in Europe with Neolithic Farmers [Neolithic mitochondrial haplogroup H genomes and the genetic origins of Europeans, By Paul Brotherton et al., Nature Communications, 2013].
Haplogroup H is completely absent on the Y (female) Chromosome in Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Britain. It is most prominent, on the Y Chromosome, in southern India, where it originated, before making its way to southern Turkey [The Genetic Formation of South and Central Asia, By V.M. Narasimhan et al., bioRxiv]. It is found, to a lesser extent, in southern Europe, among between 2% and 10% of populations.
According to MacDonald, Indo-European ancestry is 55% in Norway, as the Neolithic Farmers never even made it that far north. This percentage decreases continuously as you move south and east of Norway.
Hunter-Gatherer ancestry is highest in relatively isolated areas such as the Baltic States and Finland, where it is around 40%. In Finland, only 36% of females carry the H Haplotype, while 20.7% of them carry U5, which betokens Hunter-Gatherer ancestry [Distribution of European mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups by region in percentage, April 2018, Eupedia]. This originated no less than 45,000 years ago, [A revised timescale for human evolution based on ancient mitochondrial genomes, By Q. Fu et al., Current Biology, 2013].
Hunter-Gatherer ancestry is zero in Spain and Italy. It is in such countries such that Neolithic Farmer ancestry is the highest. Around 90% of Sardinian ancestry, male and female, is Neolithic Farmer, the other 10% being Indo-European. See the Eupedia map of Haplogroup H distribution below, in which the darkest blue spot is tiny Sardinia.
So, it follows that the European male is an Indo-European warrior, very possibly with ginger hair and associated pale skin and blue eyes, as this is associated with R1b. By contrast, the European female is a dusky Sardinian maiden with olive skin, brown eyes and dark hair.
Pictured below, Bond girl (Casino Royale, 2006) Caterina Murino, born in Cagliari.
It feels odd to write this. But the closest thing to the Northern European ancestral male is a Norwegian—whereas the closest thing to a Northern European ancestral female is a Sardinian.
Lance Welton [email him] is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.
Good to know we hail from unknownpurposeaxepersons raping Ötzi.
I feel better already 😛
(though this somewhat contradicts the conventional wisdom of female DNA being more mobile)
– Pais Basque is no surprise, but Macedonia? Tiens 😀
– 25kaBP is not “well before” the last ice age, but “definitely waning”.
10ka (“Egesen”) only marks the “last stand”, so to say; the last interglacial was 127ka ago.
Thanks for the link (though I had to go direct) !
“Haplogroup H is completely absent on the Y (female) Chromosome in Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Britain. It is most prominent, on the Y Chromosome, in southern India, where it originated, before making its way to southern Turkey [The Genetic Formation of South and Central Asia, By V.M. Narasimhan et al., bioRxiv]. It is found, to a lesser extent, in southern Europe, among between 2% and 10% of populations.”
I decided not to follow or comment this highly questionable site, but this text from you exceeds all ignorance so I have to comment. The female chromosome is X, but H is an mt-DNA haplotype, obtained from mithocondral DNA. The Y-chromosome does have a haplotype H, which you find in India, but the European DNA mt-DNA haplotype H is indeed a mithocondral haplotype. mt-DNA H is not at all absent from Scandinavia, Germany and so on, it is the most common mt-DNA haplotype in Europe. I make no more comments, this site is totally absurd. Would it not be for comments from Iris, I would not read this site, say, ever.
The earliest blonde hair allele (c. 18,000 BP) was found in the region “near to where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together”. A funny looking swarthy skinned but somewhat blue eyed and blond haired bunch of hunter gatherers in were in Sweden before both the really dark Neolithic farmers and swart Indo-European invaders.
The derived variant of SLC24A5 that Europeans have ALL got now is the main reason they all have white skin. The ancestral SLC24A5 was once extremely common in Europe. Ancestral SLC24A5 is the main reason sub Saharan Africans have dark brown skin, so European were once quite a bit darker. Ancestral SLC24A5 disappeared from Europe about 5000 years ago. which is very close to when the Indo European / Bell Beaker people arrived. The only reasonable explanation is that invasion resulted in the death of the darkest: the bearers of ancestral SLC24A5. Razib Khan said (of the dark skin version of SLC24A5):
Pretty obvious that natural selection did not wait until 5000 years ago to start working, but even if it did it would not have eliminated virtually 100% of ancestral SLC24A5.
It was something like sexual selection of women, which required high mortality of men necessary for reproductive fitness ( care and provisioning or wife and child) . In the Ice Age the men were in short supply because they froze on long hunting trips . In the Bronze Age they were killed by Bell Beaker invaders’ copper halberds like this one found in County Mayo :-

My feeling is thje Indo European conquest resulted in the mixed populations and of the conquered and Yamnaya in which all the North European eye, skin and hair phenotype genes were present, but white skin genes were still rare. Then in Corded or Bell Beaker society the women were under strong selection for sexual attractiveness and eliciting care and provisioning (as we now know the Yamnaya were savage toward even their own women). In the patriarchal and hierarchical society from the Bronze ago on the women who were chosen as legitimate wife of a high status man (guaranteeing superior resources for reproductive success) tended to be the lightest. As with many baby animals, light coloration inhibits aggression and elicits care
and this was an ongoing process.
It is now, but the original Indo European invaders of Europe were very swarthy indeed by todays standards. Caterina Murino would have been freakishly pale among Neolithic farmers when the Yamnaya showed up . What happened was the light genes, especially the light skin tone ones that were originally vanishingly rare completely took over. Other genes that were selected in women would be the ones that appealed to men. Hence, being pretty would have been even rarer back then than it is now. As for the men they would be rough customers and look it.
I like Kevin MacDonald’s work a lot, but always remember he is an evolutionist. We are in every respect better than what came before.
I was reading along with this article, finding it rather interesting, till I came to this:
“Haplogroup H is completely absent on the Y (female) Chromosome in Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Britain. It is most prominent, on the Y Chromosome, in southern India…”
No, idiot. There is no “Y (female) Chromosome ” in Scandinavia nor India. In-fact, there is no “Y (female) Chromosome” anywhere!
Do you know why that is? Let me tell you, friend. It is because the Y chromosome is the MALE sex chromosome! I’ll explain some biology to you:
Men are XY, women are XX.
Now, there is this part of the cell called the mitochondria. What the mitochondria does is generate energy and performs respiration. The interesting thing about these mitochondria is that they have DNA that is distinct from the nuclear DNA; that DNA we get from our parents in chop-chop fashion that controls things like hair color, height, allergies, whether we grow to be humans or fig-trees, et cetera. No, mitochondrial DNA doesn’t deal with any of those things and we only inherit it from or mothers.
So, here you have it. I hope you can educate yourself before publishing articles on subjects you seem to not truly understand. Your misunderstanding of a very basic aspect of biology has given me doubt of the accuracy and work put into all of the previous articles I’d read up till now on this web-site.
And on a final note, I kept having the impression I was being told the history of Celtic Europe. As the Celts are a fairly useless lot, and I myself am of a Germanic descent, it seemed rather trivial.
Presumably the Indo-European invaders also brought their women along with them.
That woman pictured looks more like a Lebanese or Syrian . Olive skin ,Black hair and dark brown eyes.
yamnaya wasnt swarty was more or less like today hungarians and the first genes of blonde hair came from the ancestors of yamnaya the same that motala hunter gatherer had afontova gora 3 .
and its old news yamnaya wasnt the one spreading to europe but a more western version of the steppe people (a pure corded ware )they have found pure steppe ancestry with the same r1a halogroup in what is now poland s and yes is blonde like 40% of mixed corded ware samples later on.
Red hair does not have a single “origin”. It occurs in formerly isolated populations everywhere from Armenia to Afghanistan to even Mongolia.
they have found r1b and r1a (european variety in corded ware) discarding completely yamnaya as the steppe group that spread to europe ,probably the group that spread to europe(proto corded ware) was living north west russia bordering the baltics.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-battle-axe-people-came-from-steppe.html
and its logical it didnt make any sense the more steppe ancestry europeans have the more blonde they are ,the correlation is absolute
of course every place aryans planted their seed ,the only ancestral population described with redhair were scythians and tocharians that lived in western china among their mummies 60% were redhaired .
tocharians living in xinjiang 2000bc
tocharian monk
tocharian monk look very similar to the roman emperor nero
Above is a reconstruction of a Bell Beaker girl dubbed Ava found in the far north of Scotland with a rather large skull. Ava who was 100% Bell Beaker, died 4,350 years ago, in Northern Scotland during the so called Copper Age, the early wave of Indo European settlement.
The geneticists say the Yamnaya were dark by todays standards, they were not blond when they left their homeland by got progressively blonder less dark. The front of an advancing wave of expansion is where genetic adaptation would be expected to be most rapid.
No mere mixture with invaders in any proportion can explain how the ancestral allele of SLC24A5 that was common across so much of Europe suddenly began disappearing 5,000 years ago . There was selection. The other white skin allele (on SLC45A2) swept up from low levels 5000 years ago. Pretty conclusive. The gene for red hair has a big effect in whitening skin. Women with that gene would be at an advantage in the aftermath of the Bell Beaker conquest. There are places in Ireland where living people with large heads are found, ditto Scotland. The Yamnaya/ Bell Beakers conquest led to intense selection for lighter skin. Hence the selection of the red hair gene was greatest in places like Ireland and Scotland where almost all the Neolithic farmer men were killed off.
SLC45A2 did not come from outside Europe,, but it suddenly started being massively selected for about 5000 years ago.
-desactualized information yamnaya werent the one that came to europe like have i posted earlier the ones with highest steppe ancestry (what you call yamnaya ) udmurts are the ones with highest proportion of redhair even when they are heavily mixed with mongoloids
-pure beal beakers in hungary were redheads
-evidently not eveyone was blonde /redhaired but the phenotipe spread from the steppe
-all those genes were already in eastern hunter fatherers( proto aryans )
and it doent matter genetically and phenotipically all indo europeans group that spread around the world were genetically like today europeans
andronovo the tribe that founded india are genetically and phenotipically identical to north euros
the founders of iran the same genetically and phenotipically identical to north europeans
tocharians that lived in western china 4000 years ago the same 60% of were redhead
and scythians a branch of andronovo the same were described by all the sources as blonde and red haired cluster with north euros while eastern scythians are much more mixed
the same with the greeks literature and myths describe then as fair haired and the same with roman emperors
lets make it simple
proto aryans(proto corded ware ) that lived in what is now ukraine /baltic frontier moved to poland mixing with neholitic farmers and from there aryans (basically today europeans) would end up spreading all over the world: steppe ,china,india,iran,anatolia….
aryans in their pure form only mixed with neholitic europan farmers
as a jew you will find this interesting too
the ethnogenesis of jews is very related to indoeuropeans ,hittites mitani and kassites that ruled the middle east in the late bronze age .
they have found r1b ( pie subclade)samples with yamnaya ancestry all over israel consecuence of hittite and mitanni expansionism and the reason why around 1700bc masive number of jews and other semitic people asented in egypt .
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2019/04/r1b-m269-in-bronze-age-levant.html
100 years later another wave of confederation of tribes leaded by indo european (hyksos) would end up conquering egypt ,tutankhamon pharaoh who was redhead by the way was r1b (the same subclade as the hittites that spread to levant) so the entire linage of pharaoh of new dinasty were at least partially indoeuropeans genetically .
https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-britain-tutankhamun-dna-idAFTRE7704OR20110801
is with the collapse of the bronze age and the mycenians (another pie tribe)asenting in the levant around 1200 bc that advanced pottery ,writing,iron metalurgy ….appear in the levant, lol is not strange that king david hinself founder of israel was retrated as redhead in the bible or some of the foundational myth like the leviathan (snake dragon) is literally a PIE myth .
ancient jews are fusion of proto iranian hittite and mycenian expansionist culture and their own semitic traits
That is all very interesting about those ancient accounts, but right now if you wanted to go to a country with a lot of red haired people you would not be heading for any of these exotic places, but rather be going to the north and west British Isles: Scotland and Ireland. You would have to argue that red hair has been powerfully selected against in all those places to explain you say it was so common in since as there is not an excess of it there today.
Why is red hair so common in Ireland.? Know that 84 per cent of all Irish men have a R1b Y–chromosome, the highest prevalence of any country in the world. An explanation for the extremely light skin found in Ireland is rather obviously that all the the genes conferring light skin (which inhibits aggression and stimulates bonding as with many infant animals) including the red hair allele, were selected for intensely in Ireland during the early Bronze Age.
1. All the Neolithic farmer males in Ireland were killed by the swart Bell Beaker invaders.
2. The Neolithic farmer women need to elicit care and provisioning so they could bring up children they had with the Bell Beaker invaders.
The gene for red hair lightens the skin very significantly. Think adaptations being selected for. Forget about all this cookbook stuff where each gene gene originated in a certain place so it must have once been extremely common there. Genes become common where they offer a net advantage.
you can go udmurtia in russia where the highest proportion of redhead exist too and coincidentally the highest proportion of steppe ancestry
and the correlation of blonde hair and steppe ancestry is absolute and now we know that it wasnt yamnaya but proto corded ware the ones who spread across europe and the sample analized have blonde hair its case closed
here a much more interesting thing you knew the aryans were inmune to HIV and were the ones who spread those genes all across eurasia ,here dr reich from hardvard university explaining it
If Udmurtia has far more steppe ancestry than Ireland (not having originated from a mainly male invasion) then Udmurtia should have a far higher proportion of redheads than in Ireland. Udmurtia surely does not have red hair in proportion to its steppe ancestry compared to Ireland.
Red hair is not on the Y–chromosome or any sex linked chromosome and so the unusual thing about the Irish is explicable. Although the Irish do not have a great proportion of steppe ancestry compared to Udmurtia, as a result of the Copper Age invasion by R1b males exterminating all the conquered males, the terms of the mating market were favourable to selection for light skin, which means favourable to red hair because the red hair gene greatly lightens skin.
You are arguing that the origin of red hair is roughly where it must be most common today. This is a typical anti adaptationalist argument. You probably think somewhere like Udmurtia or wherever the ‘proto Corded’ ancestry originated went red head for no particular reason, such as ‘drift’, then that redheadedness got diluted. Possible. But how could it pop up again in Ireland and Scotland just as strong? Maybe you believe people from somewhere like Udmurtia had a tunnel that came out on the northwest fringe of the British Isles and redheads got in free.
Sardinia is one of those notorious Blue Zones, with enhanced lifespans. Any connection to this? The only similar one appears to be Okinawa, another isolated, literally insular place, looked down upon by their (nominal) countrymen.
Who looks disturbingly similar to Ed Sheeran. Plus ça change…
Wales has higher proportions of R1b and red hair than Ireland. Red hair is however autosomal and is likely to have present from early on. Red heads tend to have very pale skin. Good for vitamin D production and summer time freckles.
The most common Y DNA haplogroup in Norway is I1, with lesser numbers of R1b and R1a (Indo-European haplogroups) which makes Norway atypical among Europeans. The presence of I1 among a population is a good marker for the Germanic content, with progressively lower percentages as one proceeds south from Scandinavia, which is the presumed origin of the original I1 male ancestor and the Germanic people. It is also a good marker for the “invader” content of the British genome (from the Anglo-Saxon and Norse invaders). The geneticist Bryan Sykes estimates that content to be no more than 20%, concentrated in the East and North and progressively smaller as one heads west and south (e.g., the Celtic people of Wales and Cornwall).
Who give the authority to these antrotards to speak about we sardinians and why do they select pics of random people who don’t look sardinians on average at all?
Wales has less red hair than Ireland and Scotland.
Long Okinawan lifespan has been attributed to near starvation lifestyle which is rapidly being lost to affluence.
You are conflating YDNA and mtDNA here. Y is male not female and the H haplogroup you are talking about in South Europe is the Ydna haplogroup H not the mtDNA one.
Also, the Narasimhan paper suggests that there was substantial East Asian ancestry in Yamnaya and other proto-Indo European groups via the WSHG (Western Siberian Hunter Gatherer) component.
Maybe it just feels long.
The Irish have the invaders bringing two diseases with them, one fast acting the other a wasting disease. If they were cattle herders then smallpox and TB would fit the bill. With no immunity the ‘Europeans’ would be wiped out in short order, the only exceptions being the children fathered by the incomers.
That is sort of like what Dr Simon Rasmussen says about disease devastating northern Neolithic farmer mega settlements and causing them to be abandoned except he suggests the disease outbreaks preceded the Yamnaya (or whatever you want to call them) invasion of Europe because the diseases were there 5700 years ago apparently.
Please don’t anyone imply the white skin genes are something to do with the immune system being resistant to disease and that is why they swept to fixation in Europe 5000 years ago.
Sardinian woman who was not a model
Emanuela Loi (1967-1992)
It depends on whose survey you accept. All three have high levels.
Counterintuitive and even silly as the idea seems of blue eyes, fair skin, and blondness all evolving in separate groups and then somehow ending up in Northern Europe (what a coincidence they look so nice randomly popping up together on the same people), I can’t completely reject the idea of these dark First People Europeans that the scientists keep insisting were around. But wouldn’t the Dark Lady have had striking blue eyes as the scientists insist? I’ve seen some of the Black Madonnas with light eyes; it’s certainly obvious these statues are images of dark, but very European women, with their angular and severe features: long faces, narrow noses, and small, thin-lipped mouths. It would make sense that they were passed down, long before Christianity, from mother to daughter along with the mitochondria.
I wouldn’t imagine that having a population with a higher percentage of red haired individuals would be something to boast about (with the exception of Maureen O’Hara).
.
You are right. It is an unpardonable error to make such a blundering howler that denies the claim it makes. It confused me and I had to check again to confirm the discrepancy. The non-expert reader relies on the author to discuss the findings and relevance to the assertion stated on the title of the article. On the other hand, it is an interesting topic and the observant reader can detect inconsistencies. Anyway, I don’t think it was an intentional “error” to promote the superiority of the Northern Europeans!
But you are wrong on the second limb – about not commenting due to the occasional lack of rigour – although I share your appreciation for Iris’s contributions. Your critical mind may help us to see things otherwise hidden from the less endowed.
Cheers
eastern hunter gatherer ( proto aryans) were already fair skinned and blonde 7000 years ago and more importantly the progenitors of the same genes that produce them today .
blue eyes is a western hunter gahter thing thou
You are still thinking in terms of a pure population that mixed with the Bell Beakers but the Bell Beakers killed almost everyone off. The hair and eye colour of the Bell Beaker victims took over the Bell Beaker people’s appearance. NO population was fully white by today’s standards before the Bell Beakers, and none were redhead . Not even in Scotland which has the most redheads as a proportion of the population (certainly more than Wales) is red hair all that common. A lot of people carry the genes for it though
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20237511
https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/the-secret-behind-ginger-hair-colour-unlocked-by-scottish-scientists/
The genes for red hair have a skin lightening effect even if there is not enough to make your hair red. As with many baby animals, light coloration inhibits aggression and elicits care and provisioning, so it was more and more selected for.’
The Motola grouplet were beheaded, they are a mystery, possibly they were massacred by refugees from Doggerland. In any case they were not ancestral to any people around today. They had the alleles for white skin, but none of them were homogenous for those alles and some had none. They also had the Asian Edar variant. They would be off white on average and funny looking. But they were no relation to the Yamnaya that is for sure.
My daughter insists the correct terminology is strawberry blonde.
Even the Irish DNA project shows more redhead genes in Wales.
https://www.irishpost.com/news/britain-more-redhead-people-than-ireland-12068
Blond hair reaches a peak in Scandinavia. I1 territory. Not Yamanaya.
https://images.app.goo.gl/46gPqvcD46sxJz666
The Welsh have an excess of red hair but do not have as pale a skin as other parts of Britain. Red hair less is certainly common in Wales than Scotland. Read the links (the BBC one and Sunday Post one) please. The Irish do have paler skin than the Welsh.
The long known red hair gene is an MC1R variant. But in addition to being homozygous for the variant of MC1R another eight genetic differences discovered by Scottish scientists in 2018 are now known to be required for red hair. Red haired people have significantly paler skin.
The big white skin gene is SLC24A5, which seems to have come from south Asia. SLC45A2 plays a lesser part in whitening skin and may be native to Europe. These two spread rapidly once the Bell Beakers showed up. The Bell Beakers were swarthy, had large heads, and were extremely patriarchal and violent. In my opinion, their violence and brutal treatment of women is the reason for strong selection of lighter skin rapidly leading to the first truly white people evolving in northern Europe during the Bronze Age.
because scandinavians are the ones with highest steppe ancestry (excluding udmurts that are heavily mixed with asians) halogroups mean very little.
and you are wrong again you are speaking of motala (scandinavian hunter gatherers) not eastern hunter gatherers that were more than half of the ancestry of proto corded ware people( the so called yamnaya) that spread their genes all across europe and whose genes are ancestral to blonde hair and fair skin .
Red hair in Wales is more of a gold colour than in Gaelic countries. My daughter uses the term strawberry blonde. So deciding on the exact shade is not so straight forward. I agree that there are not so many Welsh redheads with the intense colour preferred Hollywood central casting (my own hair was more chestnut brown when young) but total numbers, particularly in rural Wales are high. See a bunch of children in the sunlight (I speak as a former cub leader) and the average looks a (strawberry blond) sort of red.
All the Atlantic “Celts” have pale skin. In Galicia and Port-u-gal as well as in the British isles, out to Iceland. The sea was a superhighway for a long time. The rain blots out the sun for months as I am sure you know.
here is the phenotype of the first corded ware and beal beakers
not only that the two proto corded ware samples( pure aryans) that lived in poland 2800 bc are 100% steppe and blonde .
I have one of the rarest subgroups of h and it says it is particularly common in scandinavia so i agree.
Yamnaya seem to have practiced primogeniture, and in their hierarchical society a Y-chromosome like R1b could easily become dominant over many others given enough time. Yamnaya culture was to put it very mildly, patriarchal, they seem to have practiced sacrifice of women on the death of males. Multiple women for high status males.

Ava the Bell Beaker girl who lived in the early Bronze Age Scotland was by modern Scottish standards very swarthy and had an enormous head. Head size goes with violence according to Professor Wrangham. With extremely callous husbands there would be selection in women for whatever could elicit care and provisioning, I think this resulted in lighter and lighter skin.
An MC1R variant was long thought to be the red hair gene if an individual was homozygous for it. However, another eight genetic differences in addition to the MC1R one are now known to be required for red hair. Red haired people have significantly paler skin. I think it probable that selection for genes producing lighter skin was what brought all these genes together and made individuals with very white skin, while red hair was more or less a side effect.
The genes which when they come together in an individual produce the phenotype of very white skin and flaming red hair were doubtless scattered at low frequency in the Eurasian gene pool, but in my opinion before the early Bronze age (sometimes called the Copper age) no one had the red hair and very pale skin phenotype that is at a relatively high frequency in Scots today.
first yamnaya never expanded to europe their r1b subclade is l-51 all europeans descent from r1b m269 and the only group ancestral to it and r1a (founders of indo iranians )are proto corded ware people.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-battle-axe-people-came-from-steppe.html
like i have already posted there was variance of phenotipes in corded ware and beal beakers ,ava reconstruction is in one extreme but the genes ancestral to fair skin and blonde hair are ancestral from the steppe .
and then we have tocharians mummies , 60% of their population was redhead more than 4000 years ago
Who knew that those Sardine gals were such babes? No wonder the invaders wanted to boff them.
I think white skin blonde/red hair blue/green eyes are artifacts of the spread of humanity, with the less dominant allways being the ones having to move on. So these features represent the furthest spread, though with time their ‘homeland’ would change. Another feature from the same circumstances would be extended childhood, so later puberty and sexual maturity too.
The only black [W.Indian] babies I’ve seen all had blue eyes at birth, every member of my family has been born with blond hair very few carry that into adulthood some even going jet black so it seems to me that lighter skin and it’s associated hair/eye colours are the result of childhood features being carried into adulthood, maybe forced a little by inbreeding leading to occasional albinism through the generations.
compare uakari monkeys for instance
I’ve been looking into ‘catastrophism’ since I first heard about uniformitarianism and there’s a good case for lowland western europe having it’s population almost wiped out prior to the yamnaya expansion, and that their homeland in turn was suddenly deep frozen, but that’s a whole other issue.
”Presumably the Indo-European invaders also brought their women along with them.”
Thats not true. The Yamnaya peoples who migrated to Europe in successive waves from 4000-1000 B.C. were overwhelmingly male. A team of geneticists did a study, and determined that the ratio was roughly 10 men for every woman. You can read more here:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/thousands-horsemen-may-have-swept-bronze-age-europe-transforming-local-population
The important thing for a woman was to get a high status male to make her his official wife. A warlord wanting to having sex with a woman is not going to help her when he was an evil bastard from the rape and murder cult that was the Yamnaya. The man had to take care of her and give her children status.
Best looking porn star of all time.
The whitest porn star of all time, half Scottish.

The sexy look was not necessarily going to help a woman get on the Bronze age band wagon. Pale skin is not that sexy. It is there to elicit more long lasting interest. Pale and interesting. Girls who are into a good time often get tanned heavily, because white skin inhibits male aggressive desire.
a puntualization
i doubt that rape like some of you understand it ever happened in india and elsewhere they tried to mantain their status by not interamrring with the locals ,andronovo womans were adored precisely because of their rarity and only when there was no option the low and middle caste indo europeans intermarried with the locals ,the same goes with beal beakers that have a very elitist culture.
and lol to your obsesion of portraying pre indo europeans as nordics when we have living examples of them in sardinia
Those genes were scattered about, but people with white skin as were would be used to it today would have been very very rare everywhere before the Bronze Age. Red heads would have been virtually non-existent. The genes required for a for red hair phenotype are more than have been previously realised. In addition to being homozygous for the variant of MC1R another eight genetic differences–discovered by Scottish scientists in 2011-are now known to be necessary for red hair. These eight alleles must be involved in skin lightening as redheads always have pale skin. I suspect red hair is more or less a side effect of mega-selection for skin lightening.
https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad35a5cf1200c-600wi
Read this please, and the full thing at the link is also massively informative.
Even if all the women got raped, only the ones who gave actually birth to sons bearing, for instance, R1b1a1a2 (at 70% in Scotland) who grew up to father sons themselves would be relevant to the current distribution of that Y chromosome marker, which is at 68% in Spain. Not a lot of red hair in Spain. So the crucial factor was not so much what went into the original mix as what was required to be made an official wife in the highly patriarchal environment on the Yamanay based society.
The origin of red hair lies in a need for lightening skin, and those genes being increasingly concentrated in succeeding generations. In women, white skin was originally an an aid to being taken as an official wife, one whose children (sons especially) would inherit the father’s status. At the original conquest there was a massive surplus of women for the warlords. After that the expansion of the population was from the high status chieftain lines. Razib Khan said of the dark skin version of SLC24A5:
The Bronze Age was not a very good time for a woman to have bronzed skin
The CWC males were mostly R1a with some R1b and I2. The Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers also had alleles for light skin and blond hair, so it had apparent, multiple sources in Europeans. Sexual selection allowed these phenotypes to take the continent in selective sweeps.
Significant East Asian ancestry? The Yamnaya parsed out as an almost even split of Caucasus Hunter Gatherers and Eastern European Hunter Gatherers (derived indirectly from the Ancient North Eurasian Hunter Gatherers). The East – West Eurasian split occurred some 30 – 40-kY BP. The ANEs fed into the Indigenous American genetic line, but very little into other East Eurasian lines.
you are repeating the same bullshit again and again when i have putt you the phenotipes of the first corded ware and beal beakers
not only that you base your correlation in halogroups when what is esential is the admixture , some african tribes have 80% r1b but 0,1 %steppe ancentry
when done right the correlation between steppe admixture with blonde hair is nealy total
there have been tends of interpretations of the nature of the conquest of indo europeans (nearly one every year ) from the pacifist takeover,plagues desolating the neholitic comunities and here we have the last one but confronted with reality none of them stand .
The reality is that they tried everything in their disposal to mantain thenselfs as pure ethnic group everywhere they went and only when there wasnt any indo european female they end up admixed with the locals as the last alternative, they were very councious of their race .
Sardinians are clearly Nordic in origin, given common pics of natives even when not using search terms that would specifically look to return Northwest Europeans with unmixed features (though dusky Sardinians certainly exist as well). Nordic blood doesn’t just arrive and stand above contaminating blood (unmixed). If it is clearly present and unmixed in the indigenous population, it can be safely assumed to be foundational. Later dusky blood doesn’t mean much.
Both Sardinians and Norwegians share a mythological origin in terms of geography, via a mythological geographical confluence in two different sources of myths. The Sardinians are traced purely through myth and the Norwegians are traced via their dominant R1b subclade being also dominant in an adjoining nation that has a strong connection to one of the aforementioned myths. It helps to have a working knowledge of Western Euro Royalty mythological origins. And you have to be detail oriented and complete in studying the myths in question. It takes time. It also helps to have somewhat detailed knowledge of y-DNA distribution to be able to connect cross-border groups to the myth. Do all of that and the connection between Sardinia and Norway (and other nations that this cross-border group inhabits) is clear.
Sardonic humor, which I would argue extends to define their spirits, is still a racial characteristic of this group.
I am commenting on the post which talked about red hair. I don’t see how you can explain the frequency of red hair among the Scots by the proportions of ancestry they have, relative to Estonians’ ancestry and red hair.
I don’t think the red hair phenotype existed anywhere before the Bronze Age. West Hunter Gatherers and EHGs did not have the lightening alleles (SLC24A5, SLC45A2, and OCA2/HERC2) at a frequency that would explain the how the mixing of WHGs and EHG could produce frequency of those alleles in the SHGs. Everything we know suggests the full set of light skin alleles was vanishingly rare everywhere. Even the SHG were not north European white by post Bronze Age standards. The Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers had alleles associated with light skin and hair colours, but they did not have red hair, which is now known to require more genes than previously thought.
I think R1b in Western Europe is a marker for genocide of indigenous men and the indigenous women being competed against one another for the invader’s sexual attention, but also forming pair bonds with them. In Scotland R1b1a1a2 is at 70%, but in Wales 92% bear it. Some people might be puzzled at why there is an excess of red hair among the Welsh even though the Welsh are on average significantly darker haired than the average British person. The culling of indigenous males was more intense in Wales and this created a more intense selection for whiter skin and thus red hair. Cases like red hair in Wales are puzzling if you approach them thinking that a certain ancestral group were all pure this or that and the admixed population is a dilution of an original population.
I don’t think selection for white skin was really sexual selection as commonly understood (women tan to look sexy). Red hair is very strongly connected to white skin, and in my opinion red hair was a side effect of early Bronze Age selection for unprecedentedly light (white) skin. So in the Copper Age it was good for women to have copper colored hair, or rather the white skin that went with it.
Many Sardinian women look like the one below
The Haplogroup carried by approximately 40% of all European females
The result: Approximately 40% of European females carry Haplogroup H, with the highest frequency, of almost 60%, found among Welsh women and a frequency of 44% among English, Scottish, and Irish women
Men have mitochondria/mtDNA as well.
Pure Norman. So what?
When human geneticists say “Sardinian” it is a proxy for “megalithic”, “neolithic farmer (the ones from Anatolia)” or “Ötzi” as the purest unmixed relic dwell in the mountains there.
That weapon … it gives me ideas 😀
It not only looks like Marathi and pre-Qin, it speaks of organized warfare against mounted opposition. AND it is older than the sword – to European cultural anthropologists this point is important, as the first implement without conceivable civilian use (as opposed to axe, spear and bow) has social implications.
You do not happen to have a trace element analysis?
Is that the norm of Sardinian women?
Eh, sorry to break it to ya but the Sardinian lady was probably much uglier. Look up that phenotype and see – nearly extinct today, however
On the other hand, the only areas where the invaders failed to do their thing – Scandinavia and the Balkans. I1 and I2 male haplogroups respectively. Here, the hunter-gatherers and farmers peacefully merged (terrain too hilly for the farmers to take over everything, so they had to cooperate is my guess)
Milk white skin, and she was a redhead.
Ginger. Not that sexy looking due to her naturally pale skin, but as with all redheads the actual sexual response is doubtless exceptional. I have no idea whether Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud actually banged LiLo– the effect of peaches and cream complexion in eliciting American Express Black Cards from the most brutal of alphas makes it quite possible he did not–but if so he got some he doubtless enjoyed the same thing swart males have been delighted by since the dawn of history.
Indo-Europeans did not ‘start out in Western Asia’, as the text states, but actually north of it, in Southern Russia, more or less on the steppes between the Black and Caspian Seas. Their source population is the Yamnaya Culture, themselves a mix of ‘Ancestral North Eurasians’ and yes, ‘Caucasus Hunter Gatherers’, in terms of Principal Component Analysis.
Yes and they were swarthy, as were the Sardinians, so where did the red hair come from?
Neanderthal, probably … though this isn´t settled.
(rufism + extra white skin)
Current distribution clearly says “relic”, but of what?
Blondes originated in Middle Sweden, a single defect mutation on the same chromosome as eye colour but independent. johnm33 #51´s idea it is an infantilism is interesting.
Mr. Welton´s specimen is Mediterranean mélange as you might encounter anywhere between Marrakech and Aleppo. Your #48 example sounds reasonable for “Sardinian”.
Roxelana´s major claim to immortality was ending the Ottoman Empire.
This is not to complain 😛
They were furry as bears. It was discovered last year that eight genes are linked to red hair, so you do not get red hair just by being being homozygous for the redhead variant of MC1R.
Roxelana was picked from a huge harem of the sexiest women in the world and made official wife. She had something that hacked the male brain. Something that can be assumed to have increased exponentially in the Bronze Age at the very same time Europe was invaded by our Yamnaya male line ancestors half of who trace back to handful of Bronze Age warlords.
We know the ancestral dark skin variant of rs1426654 on solute carrier family 24 member 5 disappeared from Europe completely in the Bronze Age. Ava was a Bell Beaker girl found in northern Scotland it was originally assumed she would be light and rufus-ish but when they tested her remains they found she was actually a swarthy girl. Bell Beaker society was very patriarchal–hierarchical and they practiced primogeniture so one oldest son inherited all. He was the one for a woman to marry to get her genes spread. So even once things settled down to monogamy after the conquests there would be a tremendous advantage for any genes that aided in becoming the official wife of a chief,

Ava had an enormous head, like everyone especially Bell Beakers did back them. What Carlton Coon called ‘reduction’ from a large brained ‘Borreby’ type (which there are still traces of in northern Scotland and south west Ireland) was likely the domestication type selection against violence that Richard Wrangham talks about.
llol so are the one spaming the climate change stats too
What a shame what could have been an interesting conversation have end up monopolized by the usual suspects trying to desmitificate europeans .
let that clown talk science have already spoke confirming that europeans are aryans and nordics are the closest to them .
hitler proved right once again.
Hitler was E1b, which is a Semitic/African haplotype.
Wrong. Blond hair peaks in Belarus (it also used to be most common in central Asia — even the Mongols used to be blond ((see the Shiwei people, and even many Mongols in the Lake Khoton region, who carry an excess of haplogroup R1a).
Recently, a blond Scythian mummy was found in Mongolia’s capital.
https://japanesemythology.wordpress.com/notes-ulan-bator-mongolia-mummy-of-scythian-warrior-found/
Err…yeah ok I like her too. (Facepalm)
I went out with a chick who looked like her, only better looking, and she was from Columbia SA. (Wry grin)
Your comment was devastating. Are you referring to all of the writers on Unz, or just this one?
This article has confused what haplogroup is, there are separate haplogroupings for both Y-DNA and mt-DNA, and they are not the same and men carry both (mother and father) and women, only the mtDNA haplogroup. Thus they are an unbroken chain of the male line or female line, respectively, and as studied. None of that has anything to do with the majority of your genetic makeup, which are your autosomal results, generally recombination of your great-grandparents on down to you. So someone can be 99 percent African, but have the surname Callahan and on their father’s side, literally be a descdent of an Irish guy 30 generations ago who passed down his Y-DNA to subsequent sons, one of whom had a child with a black woman, whos son also had child with a black woman, and so on, all the way down.
Also, if anything, the “Warrior” Haplogroup is the Nordic I1, which remains in most of Scandinavia, and is found in other places in Europe where the Vikings went. It is also the Haplogroup of several famous men, from Andrew Jackson, to Swedenborg to Hamilton, to (sadly) Jimmy Carter.
Lastly, just based on American cultural anecdotes, I don’t think anyone views white men with blond hair, or reddish-blond (strawberry blond) with red beards, as being anything less than aggressive, like Conor McGregor. It’s the viking looks (and Scottish) and is not the same as a Chad with blow dried blond hair, nor a freckled ginger.
“The sexy look was not necessarily going to help a woman get on the Bronze age band wagon. Pale skin is not that sexy. It is there to elicit more long lasting interest. Pale and interesting. Girls who are into a good time often get tanned heavily, because white skin inhibits male aggressive desire.”
You must be speaking for yourself because pale skin is considered to be the gold standard in almost every society ancient or modern. The idea that tanned skin is sexy is the creation of modern American marketing of suntan lotion since the 1950’s as was women smoking going back to the 1920’s.
No mere mixture with invaders in any proportion can explain how the ancestral (dark skin) allele of SLC24A5 that was common across so much of Europe suddenly began disappearing 5,000 years ago .
Pale skin is considered to be the gold standard, for marriage. But in the Bronze age we are talking about men who treated their own wives like domestic livestock (suttee) and were doubtless even more brutal to the conquered women hardly any of who would have been able to get the status of official wife. I think R1b in Western Europe is a marker for genocide of indigenous men and the indigenous women being competed against one another to become an official wife whose children could pass on their status. Being kept as a sex slave was not going to spread the woman’s genes for dark skin.
Women back up until before WW1 were aiming for marriage. It was not common or accepted to have a sexual relationship and the woman bore the whole of the stigma of pregnancy, which there was no easy way to avoid. I would point out that smoking is no longer fashionable but the tanned look (including bottled tan) is going strong from strength to strength as sexual promiscuity is increasing (one in eight 17-24 year old women in Britain have had sex with at least ten different partners). https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2332178/Women-Glasgow-buy-fake-tan-UK---including-Essex.html
Lance Welton can’t keep X and Y chromosomes straight. Doesn’t know the difference between a haploid genetic marker and the total genome that determines the phenotype. And assured us that Caucasians couldn’t be infected by SARS-Cov-2. His ignorance of biology is truly amazing.
Lance Welton needs money, so he writes ignorant stuff quickly and illustrates it erroneously. That is the answer to your question.
Not for me. I enjoy the anticipation associated with a fast.
Your best looking porn star is actually quite inferior (in looks) to the Scottish one.