Steve Sailer has just posted Michael Woodley of Menie’s lecture (hosted on Edward Dutton’s YouTube) on the cognitive archeogenetics of ancient and modern Greeks at this year’s Psychology Conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UES_tpDxz9A
Explaining the cultural/intellectual decline of Classical Greece is one of the major puzzles of history. One HBD-realistic approach is to approach it from the point of view of historical IQ, which is what Woodley et al. do in this paper.
They acquired polygenic scores for general cognitive ability (POLYCOG) for a sample of 29 Greek genomes spanning the Neolithic, Minoan, Mycenaean, and modern periods. You can see the resultant graph at 25:07. The general trend is an increase in POLYCOG from 8,000 years ago to some 3,000 years ago, followed by a prepitious collapse through to the modern day.
This initial research suggests that genotypic Greek IQ was substantially higher during the flowing of Greek civilization during the Classical era, and would seem to lend credence to Francis Galton’s suggestion that the Athenians had an IQ of perhaps 120 relative to a Victorian British mean of 100. For the record, this is a thesis that I have myself expressed some skepticism towards, arguing that Classical Greece’s unprecedented levels of literacy – around 10% of the population (“craftsman literacy”), up from the maximum 1-2% (“priestly literacy”) that had been observed in previous civilizations – was by itself sufficient to explain Greek dominance in world intellectual output from 500BC to the era of Christ. These literacy rates were enabled by Greece’s early adoption of the alphabet, and Greek intellectual potential was further turbocharged by its IQ advantage over the civilization in Mesopotamia and Sumer that exists, and can be observed, to this day (e.g. Celts and Germans may have been brighter even then, but they weren’t going to do anything interesting as small illiterate forest tribes). Basically, Classical Greece was the first civilization to obtain an unprecedented number of literate, relatively (not absolutely) high IQ, and non-conformist people. This allowed them to wrack up a vast number of intellectual accomplishments in record time.
Does my explanation then fall by the wayside? Was Greek success – and consequent decline – the result of an anomalously high IQ 2,500 years ago, and subsequent dysgenic decline?
Possibly. But it’s worth noting that this study is hardly the last word on the matter.
- n=25 for a period spanning the first 7,000 years is very low. The n=4 (!) for the modern era, I daresay, is almost useless. This needs to be repeated with much larger samples.
-
What were the causal mechanisms?
One explanation that Woodley favors is the theory of population replacement, in which higher IQ groups conquered lower IQ ones. AFAIK this is generally not supported by the archaeological record, at least so far as the transition from Classical Greece to the Byzantine Empire is concerned. Sure, there was some Slavic introgression, especially in Thrace and Greek Macedonia, but it’s unclear how that would have caused IQ decline.
Another explanation is that the Greeks and Romans experienced dysgenic reproduction patterns, with very low birth rates amongst the elites (e.g. what began happening in the French aristocracy from the 18th century). But why did this happen there – and not in, say, England, which did experience a “farewell to alms” eugenic effect? And would this elite fertility collapse have affected higher IQ successful merchants? It didn’t affect the Christian Copts – strongly overrepresented in commerce – in Islamic Egypt, who actually had higher fertility rates than their Muslim neighbors during most of history.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Unless, you’re a Greek and not a Slav. 🙂
Besides, the Balkan ‘Slavs’ aren’t really Slavs, as we’ve amply learned from reading this blog. Their IQ is lowest of all of the Slavs.
From what I have read, there is little genetic evidence of Slavic introgression according to the genetic data.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5565772/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5565772/bin/nihms888167f9.jpg
Also the ancient Greeks were more similar to ancient Anatolians, but modern Turks are still largely <50% descended from ancient Anatolians and they're not very intelligent either.
BTW, it would be interesting to find out just what proportion of North Russian (starting around Moscow) genetic structure is actually Slavic and what part Finno-Ugric? Anybody know?
I recall a physical anthropology paper which documented a decline in mean cranial volume from classical Greece to late Byzantine Greece. Supposedly this corresponded with a reduction in IQ from 108 to 98.
A reduction of 10 IQ points over ~1500 years is plausible enough, and pegging classical Greek IQ at 108 rather than 120 is also realistic enough.
I do agree with Karlin’s point that a higher IQ than modern Europeans might not be necessary to explain the remarkable efflorescence of classical Greece. After all, consider the accomplishments of Europeans in the past millenium.
As for dysgenic fertility mechanisms, we do know a bit about this from the Roman Empire. Women’s rights and sybaritism depressed elite fertility.
Scipio had four children who survived to adulthood. Marius, who extorted his troops to put up with insufferable Roman women in order to reproduce, had only one. Augustus also only had one.
Rome also pioneered the welfare state with its bread and circuses, which surely increased the fertility of the lower classes.
England did develop dysgenic fertility patterns in the 19th century so there is no mystery to be explained here.
Market-dominant religious minorities like the Copts or pre-emancipation European Jews were generally governed by their religious principles, which presumably prevented women’s rights and hedonism from developing.
I read somewhere (I don’t know about sample sizes) that – contrary to some Nordicist/Alt-Right myths – modern Greeks are genetically remarkably similar to ancient Greeks. Some dysgenic selection for whatever reasons is not impossible, though.
And the only child was a woman, and a slut. That’s the most striking example of elite infertility.
Besides female empowerment, another reason for that was that raising rich kids was horribly expensive: you needed to land them good government jobs etc., and so most patricians were traditionally unable to raise more than maybe three (but rather just two) sons, and eventually daughters became expensive too (maybe because of dowries?). Anyone with more kids had to offer them up for adoption to fellow patricians, so adoption became customary. (Hence the strange adoptive dynasties and “clans.”)
The Roman system was pretty dysgenic.
Though big cities (above all, Rome itself) were population sinks. Neither the Roman patricians nor the plebs have many descendants today, if at all.
There is little evidence of Slavic presence because the locations sampled never experienced Slavic settlement.
Take a good look at Byzantie Empire from 650 to 750 and how Sclavinias dominated Epirus, Aetolia, northwestern Pelopponese, Thesally and Macedonia.
The author is once again an ignorant simpleton, both in historical and statistical knowledge. By the time of Byzantine Empire the Greek speaking population was not really majority descended from Hellenes of Classical Antiquity. Anatolians, Armenians and Assyrians assimilated over the centuries of imperial rule, and it was precisely these regions which constituted the military/manpower base of Byzantines – so once those regions fell to Seljuks, the downfall was inevitable, the damage irrepairable.
The Slavs who by “common knowledge” invaded the Balkans were Slavs. The same way the Boii and Germanics who in that same narrative invaded prior to Slavs were real Celts and Germanics. The catch is they intermarried, no genocide/population replacement took place.
The argument that Celts and Germanics could have been more intelligent than Meds/Hellenes in Classical Antiquity is cancer on the same level as nordicist Greek theories.
Plagues decimated urban population in Greece several times in history – migrations and raids of so many people swept through it (Germanics, Slavs, Bolghars), Arabs and Turks overran everything up to Constantinople, Crusaders thoroughly sacked and looted the capital, Ottoman century-long rule left its mark as well, and finally 1918-1922 and 1944-1948 expulsions and arrivals occured, and in 2019 an ingenious individual asks himself why did average IQ drop in this geopolitical crossroads, war and turmoil strewn area.
However, if I had to single out something, it would be Alexander’s conquests and Hellenistic expansion to East that displaced many ambitious, successful and high class Hellenes across Asia and Egypt; followed by Roman conquest thoroughly savaging many Greek poleis and their populations, often through direct destruction and enslavement, and often through economic weakening and loss of importance.
That is interesting. Would you happen to recall that paper’s title or authors?
Women’s rights were significantly more advanced amongst Romans than amongst the Greeks. From City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt:
https://i.imgur.com/Cr6eq5x.jpg
And yet it was Greek IQ that (may) have declined much more sharply than Roman IQ.
(Though the fact that it is the areas of modern Italy that used to belong to Magna Graecia are also the most backwards suggests that the difference was long-standing).
Bottling up such a large percentage of its population in Rome can’t have been good for Roman eugenics. Ergo for Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire.
Greeks in the Pelopponese, on Aegean Sea islands, yes.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-have-near-mythical-origins-ancient-dna-reveals
https://www.haaretz.com/amp/archaeology/mainland-island-greeks-genetically-diverged-in-middle-ages-1.5489323
They could, but it’s unlikely. There was strong eugenic fertility in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, so it’s pretty likely that early medieval IQs were lower. While in the former Roman Empire the collapse of the empire was likely dysgenic (to an extent, at least), in Germany or Northern Europe that’s unlikely to have been the case, so IQs there were probably lower in antiquity than later by the Modern period.
Part of the answer that you’re seeking may very well be found right here at UNZ review in the very excellent article by John Harrison Sims:
https://www.unz.com/article/what-race-were-the-greeks-and-romans/
He concludes with a modern day warning to the denizens of the Western world.
Unfortunately I don’t, and a cursory search didn’t turn up anything. Perhaps you can try e-mailing Dienekes about the subject.
Roman law and custom would’ve extended to Greece, though at what date I don’t know. And there could have been other negative selective pressures on Greeks–I brought up Roman dysgenics since that’s something I knew about.
Perhaps Alexander and the Diadochi drained Greece of a large fraction of its best men for instance. There could also have been ongoing emigration of literate Greeks to Italy prior to the Crisis of the Third Century. Greek tutors were popular among Roman elites.
Just spitballing ideas here.
Presumably this would’ve been a problem for classical Greece as well. It was very highly urbanized by pre-modern standards.
The study I linked says nothing about restricting the modern sample to the Aegean or Peloponese, in fact it specifically says that data from modern Thessaly and Central Greece was used.
Magyars dominated Hungary, to the extent of imparting their language, yet have left very little genetic trace in modern Hungarians.
Magyar and Bolghars are not a good match – Germanic settlement during migration period would be better.
Modern Greece is a difficult subject because they killed and expelled all “Turks” – islamised Greeks, and later on, vast majority of Slavs (1944-1948). Furthermore, very large numbers of Greeks arrived as refugees to Greece from Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Bulgaria whenever they went to war, which makes tracking local, mainland genetics a nightmare – Asia Minor Greeks settled in Macedonia, Thessaloniki and Thessaly for example.
What and where is Classical Greece?
Peloponnesia and Athens are South on the West of the Aegean. Peloponnesian wars go bad and they are bankrupted. Part of the reason for the endless wars was the smartest man in the world, Alcibiades managed to convince all sides to keep them going. BTW, I know what you are thinking and Alcibiades never shared a lunch table with future neocons at the City University of NY.
Various other places were on the East of the Aegean, now Turkey. They come under Persian domination and are crushed by Alexander.
Macedonia was North and Byzantium was right in the middle. Like Athens, they overextend and can’t consolidate.
Epirus, kind of Albania, tried to invade Italy and get into the big game, but only successful at getting into the dictionary, Pyrrhic victory.
Unlike Rome, the Greeks never are able to create a stable multigenerational government. Byzantium sort of inherits Roman government habits. I personally think Greece just had boom-bust population growth that sometimes manifested themselves as high civilization and other times as destructive wars.
But the problem with all this Greek talk, is why not talk about Persia, Parthia, Carthage, Egypt, the various Judaic kingdoms, ect? The Greeks make it into the quarterfinals and then fade, winning the Mediterranian super bowl is tough, and only one can do it.
Why not?
So something that also left (outside of England) only a minor genetic effect?
Perhaps but that doesn’t affect the comparison between actual modern Greeks and ancient Greeks
Excluding the Jews, they contributed almost nothing to the world intellectually. In fact, we now know that the Greeks were far too generous in attributing those inventions they did to the Egyptians.
I suppose the peoples of the ancient Fertile Crescent did come up with some technologies that spread to the Greeks, but very little in terms of intellectual content.
Yes, that minor impact is actually important to track historical population and migrations.
In Serb case, the Nevgen and Serb DNA project tracked Saxon (miners) as well as migration period Germanic admixtures in modern Serbs, as well as East Slavic and Celtic ones.
Didn’t the people of the fertile crescent invent the written word?
Alphabetic writing comes from the Phoenicians, even if the Greeks added vowels, that’s still a major sign of transfer from Near Eastern cultures. And without such an efficient writing system, the intellectual flourishing of ancient Greece would hardly have been possible.
The afrocentric nonsense in Bernal’s Black Athena is of course not to be taken seriously, but I don’t think it can be denied that the Greeks were in close contact with Asia minor and the Levant at least.
That is interesting [decline in skull size]. Would you happen to recall that paper’s title or authors?
I don’t have access to the full text here, but I believe Thorfinnson is referring to this paper:
Angel, J.L. (1950). Population size and microevolution in Greece. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol 15: 343-351 doi:10.1101/SQB.1950.015.01.031
In my opinion, the main factor was very low fertility in the upper and middle classes. This was widespread not only during the Roman period but also during later periods, including the time of the Ottoman Empire. The upper classes, both Muslim and Christian, tended to congregate in towns and cities, where infant mortality rates were high. Lead poisoning from cooking vessels, abortion, and very hot baths may have also promoted infertility in upper-class households. Above-replacement fertility seems to have been the norm only in the countryside, particularly among the peasantry.
A secondary factor was population replacement, and Angel does discuss that factor. Beginning in Late Antiquity, there was a growing population of foreign slaves, the most noticeable component being from sub-Saharan Africa. Angel reports that 5% of all skeletons from Corinth in Late Antiquity were sub-Saharan African.
That article is Nordicist nonsense, only slightly less dumb than the “ancient Egyptians were black” theories.
Actually, his pronouncements as to the origins of the Greeks is more nuanced than what you seem to suggest. He opens up a whole bunch of possibilities and certainly puts together a picture of the Greek nation being comprised of many different sub-ethnicities, mostly (but not exclusively) of Mediterranean and ‘Northern’ stock. At the very least, he points out that the question has never been conclusively settled and is open to further inquiry and speculation:
There were no Northern Europeans in Greece.
Period.
When it’s written that Achaeans, Dorians and Ionians came from the North, it doesn’t mean Germania or Scandinavia.
Epirus, Macedonia, Lower Danube are all (far) north to Minoan and Mycenean cultures.
Sims presents plenty of space to the detractors of this theory of ‘Nordic’ settlement in his article and seems to fairly present their point of view, however, points out:
It seems to be pretty uncontroversial that Indo-European invaders entered Greece at some point in the 2nd millenium BC, with their language eventually becoming dominant and replacing the previous non-Indo-European language.
However, what is now known about genetics seems to indicate that the genetic ancestry of ancient Greeks still derived mostly from the pre-Indo-European population (the farmers of Near Eastern origin who once dominated much of Europe).
There’s also a pretty substantial amount of non-Indo-European loan words in ancient Greek, and I’ve also read claims that many cultural institutions of ancient Greece might come from the original population.
In any case, classical Greece wasn’t populated by Scandinavians, which is the impression Sims seeks to give imo.
The Mycenaeans themselves had around 10% ‘northern’ ancestry that came from much further North
Which haplogroup would that be?
In other words, what we call “Indo-European” in this context – the invasion brought those genes in the area and replaced previous Balkan culture, evidenced by archeology.
Illyrians and Thracians are a result of Indo-European arrival in the Balkans, and obviously the Indo-Europeans reached Lower Danube, Thrace and Balkans before Greece.
No one is arguing against Indo-Europeans, but against Germanic/Nordic arrival to Greece.
Could very well be. I don’t know a great deal about the topic but am interested in it and am open minded enough to seriously consider your ideas here. The question seems to center on how much the Indo-European settlers penetrated into the early Greek population and how much remained of the ‘autochtonous’ “Greeks”?
“all populations from Archangelsk province are included in the vast “northern” cluster, along with Vologda Russians, Baltic speakers (Latvians and Lithuanians), Finnic speakers (Komi, Finns, Estonians, pooled group of Karels, Vepsa and Izhors) and Germanic speaking Swedes. Note, that North Russians are more genetically similar to geographically distant Baltic populations rather than to Finnic speakers: the similarity with Baltic populations was revealed for each North Russian population, while degree of similarity with Finnic speakers and set of similar Finnic populations do vary. The genetic similarity among linguistically heterogeneous but geographically united (from Baltic to Pechora) populations might indicate the Paleo-European gene pool persisting in this area, which preceded the split of the Balto-Slavic and Finnic linguistic branches. The mitochondrial DNA data (reflecting the maternal lineages) demonstrates the similarity of the Russian North to the widest set of populations from northern half of Europe. Norwegians and Germans appear to be the most genetically similar to the Russian North.”
THE NORTHERN RUSSIAN GENE POOL:
SLAVS? FINNS? PALEO0EUROPEANS?
E.V. Balanovska1 , D.V. Pezhemsky2 , A.G. Romanov1
, E.E. Baranova3 , M.V. Romashkina3,4, A.T. Agdzhoyan5
, A.G. Balagansky1 , I.V. Evseeva1,6, R. Villems7
, O.P. Balanovsky
Look at this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23310.epdf?author_access_token=E4JxhmOKVE0Zk7xCXmpm99RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OwLzzqUmCLV4d2G6bjGa7kiPBb7TTVpAsutKGfIQRMrq8WVAMpP-SfGerriklOb5-JK4PQu2o4hKeBf7fel4E9
The biggest mean cranial volume among all the peoples of the Earth ( absolutely and relatively) have the Mongols and Kazakhs
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/macroevolution/18663086/33404/33404_1000.png
On this count IQ on the mean cranial volume – a absurd idea
The fact that rankings of cranial size do not perfectly match IQ ranking between races does not mean that they don’t correlate well within races.
Also I think that Eskimo actually have the biggest heads.
in the case of Greece, there is a double mystery. The brilliant Cretan-Mycenaean civilization collapsed, and Greece fell into complete darkness. Then came the brilliant flourishing of classical Greece, which was replaced (about the second century BC) by a rapid decline. It is highly unlikely (or rather almost impossible) that these civilizational zigzags could have been caused by a change in the Greek gene pool.
I very doubt literate Celtics and Germanics would have higher IQ h ancient Greeks and Romans. In fact, the fall of IQ during the late Roman Empire can be explained by the barbarization of Greek and Roman citizens. Another drop of Greek IQ can be also explained by the influx of Turkic blood during the years of Ottoman yoke.
Renaissance happened in Italian cities and not in German ones, so a sizable IQ advantage of Italics over Celtics and Germanics was still detectable in the XV century.
The Slavs invaded the Byzantine Empire was the “real Slavs”. Modern Balkan Slavic formed later as a result of the slavonization of the local population.
Survivorship fallacy.
Greek civilization is the only one that more or less survived to tell their tales in an uninterrupted transmission of intelligent discourse.
The rest were reconstructed by academics from mere scraps in the late 19th century.
There’s a difference between reading Euclid in his own words and piecing together shards of clay tablets about cattle accounting.
Not necessarily. Southern Europe (including Italy) was long more urbanized than Northern Europe (including Germany), urbanization was closely tied to literacy, and that counted for at least as much as raw IQ. It is also worth stressing that the Renaissance was a Northern Italian thing. Southern Italy by that time was very backward, more similar to Poland than to any German region. Today, of course, North Italians are about as intelligent as Southern Germans (the most intelligent Germans), while South Italians are much duller than any Germans.
So, as we know from reading this blog and perhaps elsewhere, the Great Russians sit at the top of the Slavic IQ heap (hard for the offspring of ‘Little Russians’ to admit) 🙁 I wonder if there’s a dichotomy in the IQ levels of the NorthWest Russians and the SouthEast ones (that includes more pure Slavic genetic structure)?
What Slavs then do you have in mind?
What’s your impression from reading dialogues of Plato?
In these texts – although this could be more a literary technique, than an accurate recording of Athenian conversation -, most of the interlocutors are perhaps quite stupid (or at least, simple) even by modern standards.
On the other hand, famous sophists usually seem at least the standard deviation above average. And Socrates is usually a lot more intelligent than the other philosophers – e.g. in Protagoras.
However, Socrates is viewed as a subversive magician for being intelligent, and it’s clear in the text that his intelligence is very far from a normal Athenian citizen, and only sophists and philosophers can resist his strange arguments.
When Socrates and other philosophers and sophists begin arguing, it is described like superheros fighting each other with magical powers.
Belorussians are probably similar to Great Russians. (Assuming you’re just talking about East Slavs).
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/map-russia-iq-2017.png
There is indeed a north-south IQ gradient in Russia, with the northern areas around 100 and the southernmost and some Siberian ones around 95 (relative to Greenwich mean of 100).
melanf has claimed it is a function of urbanization differences. I am almost certain it can’t explain all or even most of the difference, but I am going to statistically test that soon.
By the Renaissance age levels of urbanization in Germany and Italy were quite similar. Remember the Hanseatic League of commercial cities and so on. South Italy was already more rural than most underdeveloped places of the Holy Empire.
Agreed. Divergence between North Italy and South Italy started much earlier and was quite visible by this age.
So, the more Romanized parts of Germans land produced the more intelligent Germans, and then you agree with me in that Roman civilization is a likely factor for increasing IQ. Therefore, ancient Germans and Celts, even if literate, hardly would have IQ similar to true Romans (i.e. Republic age and Early Empire age). Late empire Romans were quite barbarized and therefore, degraded.
With respect to the Greeks, a partial Turkification would explain the fall of IQ, even considering that Minor Asia Ottoman-Turks would have quite diluted Turanian blood.
Agreed.
Wishful thinking and hand waving. One can look persuasive with few data points and curve fitting. How valid is it? For example I have just graphed Ron Unz’s summary of Jewish IQ test scores. Seeing what Woodley did to polygenic scores (which everybody knows do not predict IQ test scores well) I decided to be just as brave as Woodley and formulate a hypothesis that Jews are getting stupider by fitting similar curve as Woodley did. Unlike him I am working with real IQ test scores and not some overhyped polygenic score that can’t predict IQ test score within a population. And I have more points.
http://oi67.tinypic.com/kcj91l.jpg
As we can see from the fitted curve something was happening in the US between 1920 and 1960 that was making Jews smarter and smarter and then something else happened later that began to make Jews more stupid. Jewish IQ peaked in around 1980. One could make a presentation elaborating this idea that would be a staring point to countless speculations by readers that would mostly reflect their own prejudices and attitudes w/o paying much attention to validity of what has been done with data. Anyway there is no much science in it just like there is no much science in Woodley’s presentation.
Well according to this blog, the main Slavic genetical cluster (Slovaks-Рoles-Belarusians-southern Russians) has an IQ of approximately 98-101. If Carlin is right in his assumptions about the low IQ of Ukrainians, they are the only exception.
The Northern regions of Russia have a slightly higher IQ than the southern regions, but this division is (most likely) not related to genetic factors.
I’m sorry but what is the so called decline of Greece? Greece only really ‘declined’ in so far as it was eclipsed by northernwestern Europe in the 16th century and onwards, but the Byzantine Empire was a shining beacon of civilization during the dark ages, and was a shining beacon of civilization during antiquity. Western Europe was far more primitive both in the dark ages and antiquity.
There’s a reason St. Paul wrote letters to Corinth, Galatia, and Rome, and mostly went around Asia Minor and Greece. Not to any parts of the western Empire, which for the most part had NOTHING to compare to the great cities of the eastern Empire (except Rome, of course). The germanic tribes ruled by Rome were still barbarians, and didn’t have much ‘civilization’ or ‘ scientific achievement’ to speak of. After the fall of the Western Empire it was a similar story, nothing really changed. The overwhelming majority of civilizational achievement was in the east.
Regarding brain size, our brains have gotten like 10% smaller since our hunter gatherer days…
As far as I know the original native speakers of the Slavic language were tribes genetically appropriate poles-Slovaks-southern Russian. The invasion of these tribes in the Balkans led to the emergence of the South Slavs (genetically different from the “primary” e Slavs). Mixing with the Germans led to the emergence of the Czechs. The spread of Slavic language among unknown non-slavic Northern tribes led to the emergence of the Northern Russian
‘Ukrainians’ (original names Khazars, Kipchaks, Cumans etc.) are the descendants of Turkic and Mongolic tribes that inhabited the Russian steppes. They adopted the Slavic language and Orthodox religion under the influence of the Moscow principality.
They are Slavs in name, but not genetics – which explains their dark complexions and relatively low IQs.
That’s just wrong. Byzantium was hopelessly inferior to the previous ancient civilization. Compare:
https://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/d/2/146/209/146209120_3A88E97EFEBC4A01A4A85548E579D43E.jpg
http://cp14.nevsepic.com.ua/217/21647/thumbs/1389997792-dsc05094.jpg
Italian cities surpassed Byzantium in terms of culture at least in the 11th century
One big advantage the Greeks had, which tends to be somewhat overlooked in this day and age, is slavery. When you can give almost total leisure to an entire class of people, namely your smartest class of people, of course they’ll come up with a lot interesting stuff. They’d be bored to death otherwise.
If our modern middle class didn’t have to earn a living, their creativity would be off the charts. 8 hours of BS work a day to put bread on the table makes a normal person too tired and frustrated to write novels or do great paintings or think up great philosophical ideas. We tend to forget that smart, creative people are NOT always people with extra energy. You can be the most creative, brainiest person on earth, but if your energy levels are not outstanding, your 8-hour a day BS job will wipe you out. You won’t create. What you need is leisure.
Most people are not gifted with extra amounts of energy, and if you spend most of your life producing A, you won’t end up producing much of B in your free time. It just doesn’t work that way. You allocated your overall time incorrectly.
Great societies are founded on the labor of someone else. The Victorian middle class, people tend to forget, all had servants, and the breadwinning men often did not work lengthy hours. That was normal for middle-class people back then. It was only the poor in the factories who labored 10 day hours. A lot of middle-class men back then went to work late and knocked off early.
You are trolling, but there is almost no Turkic or Mongol descent among Ukrainians (just as there is almost no Asian descent among Russians). However, Ukrainians have some Balkan descent, which might account for their moderately lower average IQs than those of northern Russians, Poles and Belarussians (it doesn’t look like Ukrainians differ from southern Russians). It might also account for why they are darker than their Polish, Belarusian and Russian neighbors.
Here is one of the two common Balkan haplogroups. Not that Galicia is skipped somewhat:
https://i.redd.it/h9q8il9ui4501.png
Here is the Slavic marker in Europe:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Distribution_Haplogroup_R1a_Y-DNA.svg
Very common in Ukraine, but not very common in the Balkans.
Reflection of the Soviet educational tradition? Did it value Classical Greece but hate Orthodox Byzantium?
“No one is arguing against Indo-Europeans, but against Germanic/Nordic arrival to Greece.”
No sane person, possessing even rudimentary knowledge in Bronze Age Med history, would place “Nordics” in the late Bronze Age Aegean basin (during the hypothesized, but still controversial “Dorian Invasion”).
However, we’re dealing with the “HBD”/”White Nationalist” crowd here and, to them, this seems like a completely legitimate assumption.. or even a fact.
Which, of course, is just a mirror image of their BLM/Antifa/SJW opposites who are thoroughly convinced that ancient Egypt was the real-life model of Wakanda.
Sad.
The last time the discussion of IQ relative to Ukrainians and other neighboring nationalities took place, we were close to obtaining the results of some sort of national IQ survey (it hadn’t yet been published then). Any updates that you’re aware of?
You know, given the “racial superiority/inferiority” context of this thread, your post might be interpreted as a good application of sarcasm: Most people here would pass on the Egyptian Roman beauty and would go straight for the “Northern-European” Virgin Mary 🙂
You’re confusing geography with race. The fact that the Achaeans, Dorians and Ionians did not come from Northern Europe proper does not mean that they or significant elements of them were not racially Nordic. The Nordic race and type were much more widely distributed than today, not just into the Greek peninsula and islands, but also north Africa, Arabia, and into eastern Asia:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160409080239/http://marchofthetitans.com/earlson/nordicegypt.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20160409080510/http://marchofthetitans.com/earlson/nordicarabs.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20160409080506/http://marchofthetitans.com/earlson/genghis.htm
“Ukrainians have some Balkan descent, which might account for their moderately lower average IQs than those of northern Russians, Poles and Belarussians”
I think I found the exact Balkanoid culprits who shamelessly diluted the Ukies’ IQ:
It’s the 200K Bulgarians living in the Ukraine. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarians_in_Ukraine)
If I were in your shoes, I’d cleanse (you know what I mean) those guys ASAP before they do even greater damage!
https://theapricity.com/earlson/history/hellas.htm
PISA 2018 is going to be released in December 2020.
Forgot to mention that their super-low IQ would also explain their pro-Russian sentiment. Involuntary enlistment in the Great Ukrainian Army was a step in the right direction but it’s simply not enough! We’re talking 200K here!
Ancient Greece was a slave society, like the American South. We could compare contemporary black American DNA from the South with antebellum slave DNA from the South and note the continuity and similarity, but that wouldn’t indicate that the antebellum American South was led and dominated by blacks.
Thanks! But why the long wait – couldn’t our overachieving, high IQ statisticians put it all together a little bit sooner? 🙂
I said “sane person” – not “the chair of racial theory at Jena”. I don’t know if you are aware that physical anthropology has evolved a lot since the 1920s-1940s Germany. Also, I’d suggest you check the bibliography listed on the page you cited. “Nazi racialist thought” does not sound very scientific to me. Yes, talking ’bout Günther, H. F. K. However, you are free to fantasize whatever you like. Such as that the Hellas were pure Germans (in 1200 BC, no less!) who got thoroughly raped by Africans! Enjoy! 🙂
not if there are two layers to IQ
1) simple brain size – a relatively small effect as people moved north and the slightly bigger brained survived better
2) complex societies – a much larger effect caused by competition for the best roles in a more complex society.
if correct the first effect would only be applicable to the IQ of different groups of hunter gatherers and predict eskimos as the smartest HGs (if not supersmart compared to people from more complex societies).
it does seem a mystery but some possibilities (maybe)
1) changes to marriage culture -> more inbreeding (or outbreeding)
2) clever -> military success -> slaves -> dumber
3) eggs in one basket?
– smartest move to main cities
– main cities constantly getting massacred / plagued / volcanoed.
iodine might explain the first part – eastern Europe lacks it – and you’d expect the effect to plateau eventually once people got a sufficient amount.
another thought
if
– smartest moved to main cities
and
– main cities were population sink due to disease
then
what might happen in centuries after major sanitation projects?
It was easy to bait you. Put some random points. Draw a curve and all kind of pseudo-wannabe-scientists coming form a closet offering their two cents interpretations. I wrote:
But don’t worry, you are in a right place. Karlin is your man.
Ignoring the facetious nature of your post – in western and central Ukraine (the core ethnic territory) higher IQ is associated with more nationalism (and thus, anti-Russian sentiment). This is not the case in the other parts of Ukraine. Rural Kherson is more nationalistic than urban well-educated Kharkiv.
https://youtu.be/acOZT240bTA?t=821
Brain size reduction over the last 5000 years is nothing new and I think Wrangham makes a good case.
https://i1.wp.com/www.northstarnewstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/vanna-howell-davis2-1-e1459300012637.jpg?w=491
Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, with his wife and First Lady Varina Howell.
Population replacement and dysgenically low reproductive success within the Greek upper classes may have been related to the slave system. I think it was in the case of the Southern aristocracy that once dominated the US. You cannot fail to be impressed by Robert E. Lee’s eminent forebears. Antebellum Southern plantation aristocracy dominated the whole of the country by their IQ, but they also had access to female slaves. At the arraignment of Robert E Lee for treason it was charged that slavery led to “The subjection of women of one complexion to fury of unbridled licentiousness and as a consequence, denying the women of our own complexion the holy rites of marriage …” Lee’s daughters and Wade Hampton’s sisters never married.
The cultural ideal of the upper classes in Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries BC devalued work and praised leisure. Not dissimilar to the “haughty” and ” improvident” Southern plantation owner class that lived for gambling, dueling and whoring. The Romans were quite certain that irresponsible leisured elites had brought down the preceding civilisations.
US began iodizing salt in the 1920s
Also, a large number of Christian Turks were sent to Greece.
This is not true, the decrease in the volume of the brain occurred much earlier
“The brains of upper Paleolithic people and Neanderthals were on average much larger than the brains of modern people. The average brain of men of late Neanderthals by the lowest estimate had a volume of 1460 cm3, more often the figures are more than 1500 cm3 (a possible difference is due to inaccuracies in determining the volume of the brain in fragmentary findings ). In the upper Paleolithic (for cromagnons ) volume are about the same, about 1500 cm3, maybe even more than the Neanderthals. For modern men of all races the average the size of the equals roughly 1425 cm3, together with women – 1350 cm3
Reduction of the brain began about 25 thousand years ago and about 10 thousand years ago continued quite significantly. This fact, different researchers tend to explain in different ways. Some, especially proud of their own intelligence, tend to talk vaguely about the importance of the number and quality of interneuronal connections, about the non-principle of the absolute mass of the brain, the lack of correlation between this mass and the level of intelligence, the differences in brain mass and volume of the brain cavity of the skull, the subtleties of techniques, the ratio of neurons and neuroglia. However, the neurons of the Neanderthals and CRO-magnon we know nothing, and about the size of the brain – know. There is a second explanation: the upper Paleolithic people were smarter than us.”
anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky (he is a specialist in this field)
If the second explanation is correct, these guys had the best hereditary intelligence in the history of the earth.
https://a-a-ah-ru.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/items/57416/76957/large_546c42751c0f1271285480.jpg
There is no evidence Greek IQ went down it is only speculation, but even if it did, it would be simply because current Greeks are not descendants of the ancient Greeks. This is documented history. Wars with Romans & later cholera wiped out Greek cities. Thus original Greeks are an extinct population. The current population is only their cultural descendants, not genetic.
Yes and no. The Soviet education system hated all sorts of history wholesale. The vision of ‘Classical Greece’ peddled by the Soviets was a dumb caricature as well.
That said, modern Western butchering of history is no better.
It is typical for Russian culture at least since the 18th century, for example, such views had Pushkin (who value Classical Greece but despised Byzantium). In the earlier period, the Russians did not know about ancient Greece, but still despised Byzantium
But I gave an example – only the blind will not see the incredible interfiority of Byzantine icons in comparison with ancient painting. And such situation in all fields (sculture, architecture, mathematics, astronomy…)
Any ‘intellectual content’ they created was destroyed by dozens and dozens of genocidal conquerors through the millennia.
For example: the Sumerians seem to have invented the metric system 4000 years before the French. Their cubit was very close to 50cm and is related to the standard weight and time unit via measuring the length of a standard swinging pendulum. We still use the Sumerian second for measuring time today, with minor variations.
The Phoenicians invented writing. (BTW, the Hebrews, Canaanites and Phoenicians were the same people culturally and, probably, ethnically. It makes no sense to separate them.)
But these are scraps, most of what they did is lost in time due to wars and population replacement.
If Xerxes had won, there’d be no Greek ‘intellectual content’ today. The Greeks are massively lucky that they had Alexander the Great.
Complete nonsense, since the conquerors adopted the culture of the conquered; for instance, Sumerian was kept in use for hundreds of years after they were conquered and the Gilgamesh legend is known in both Sumerian and Akkadian, they had the same pantheon etc.
It’s nonsense. Soviet illustrations for a book for schoolchildren about Alexander the great
https://itexts.net/files/online_html/201940/i_008.jpg
https://itexts.net/files/online_html/201940/i_009.jpg
https://itexts.net/files/online_html/201940/i_010.jpg
As we can see from the fitted curve something was happening in the US between 1920 and 1960 that was making Jews smarter and smarter and then something else happened later that began to make Jews more stupid. Jewish IQ peaked in around 1980.
That is consistent with what we see in many Western populations. In Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, reaction time began to increase circa 1980. In Scandinavia, mean IQ peaked in the late 1990s and has since declined. There is evidence that the Flynn effect is similarly reversing in the United Kingdom. This is discussed on “The Flynn effect” Wiki page.
The decline in Jewish American IQ is also consistent with a phenomenon that Ron Unz calls “the strange collapse of Jewish achievement”:
On the Putnam Exam (a mathematics competition for American college students) over 40% of the winners were Jewish before 1950. Between that year and the 1990s, the percentage was 22-31%. Since 2000, it has been under 10%, without a single likely Jewish name between 2005 and 2012.
Of the national finalists for the Science Talent Search, 22-23% were Jewish from the 1950s to the 1980s. The percentage was 17% in the 1990s, 15% in the 2000s, and 7% from 2010 to 2012. Of the thirty top students over the last period, only one seems to have been Jewish.
Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997. During the 2000s the percentage was 5%.
From 2000 to 2012, only 8% of the top students in the Biology Olympiad were Jewish, with none from 2010 to 2012.
Between 1992 and 2012, only 11% of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had Jewish names, as did 8% of the Siemens AP Award winners.
From 2010 to 2012, none of the Chemistry Olympiad winners had a probable Jewish name.
A similar decline seems to be under way in Israel. Rindermann (2018, p. 148) cites student assessment studies that indicate a decrease in that country’s IQ from 101 in the 1960s to 95 today.
References
Frost, P. (2014). What happened in the 1980s to reaction time? Evo and Proud, May 3
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-happened-in-1980s-to-reaction-time.html
Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.
Unz, R. (2012). The myth of American meritocracy. The American Conservative, November 28
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
A very Marxian sentiment (fishing, working in the factory, writing books), but I don’t think the middle classes are that creative. Once the household appliances had been built, rather than creating fantastic art, the house wife stormed the company bureaucracies in order to shuffle papers. The non-working lower and upper classes mostly idle as well.
Seriously, are you even literate? Did you read my post? Go back and try again, maybe sounding out the words this time?
Problem is those pictures are fantasy and have no relation to actual history.
The Soviets quite liked their fantasy image of fantasy ancient Greeks.
The Soviets seriously hated history, though.
There were dozens of conquerors of Sumeria over the millennia. Akkad was a good deal, the others not so much.
So much so that the original Sumerian language and ethnicity is completely gone today. As in, we don’t even know what race they were or where their language came from. Completely wiped from the Earth. (Though they certainly weren’t Semites or Indo-European, we know that much.)
Which of the conquerors are you thinking of? Akkadian peoples (like the Assyrians and the Babylonians) were in control of the fertile crescent until the Persians and variants of their language remained the administrative and literary language until then.
The Sumerian language is no longer extant, sure, but we know what it was. There are no longer people calling themselves Sumerians, but the people living in the same place today are probably largely their descendants. The continuous culture was broken if anything by the Arab conquests.
‘Etruscans’ no longer exist but it doesn’t negate the huge contributions they made to Roman civilisation and culture.
There are those restored statues from ancient Greece, they tend to have people with blue eyes and blond hair. So unless the ancient Greeks were worshipping foreign looking people, how does this fact reconcile with the theory that the modern Greeks are the same race as the ancients?
Dowries make having daughters expensive. Hence limiting the daughters that are born in Roman society.
Female infanticide was quite a problem.Whilst the bride price. Where man pays the father of daughters money like a reverse dowry incentivized preservation of their lives.
Urbanized and unhygienic. Disease killed off the majority of the cities denizens and the population has to constantly be refreshed by new people migrating from the countryside.
Michael Hart.
.
those pictures – This is the standard for Europe/America perception of antiquity. If this perception is wrong – it is a common mistake of Europeans, there is nothing specifically “Soviet”in this error. But I’m interested – what is wrong in your opinion in these illustrations?
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/uchitelj/16634194/1108801/1108801_original.jpg
https://cdn.syg.ma/attachments/de697175d7d2ef57c0a2e7138ed6eb7efe0ae0e2/store/df85a5fbe1773b8e98cbe7fb23321e75554f328067233a2d8fe4ab6359f2/file.jpeg
etc.
Note that the Greeks were able to portray blondes on vases
https://glasspaperweight.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/all-empires-fall.jpg
blonde girl is a slave probably of non-Greek origin ( Nordic Scandinavian with a cool IQ/s)
Herculaneum-Pompeii
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6c/b1/18/6cb1189e195562e4c971190e29676aa8.jpg
https://peripluscd.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/the-music-lesson-early-first-century-ad-from-herculaneum.jpg?w=1165&h=780
The usual story – anime, bollywood, etc.
https://www.wallpaperup.com/uploads/wallpapers/2015/09/13/801731/b1716fbd60db0935cf5e3e3829b5717a-1000.jpg
Try to imagine how the people of the future will reconstruct the appearance of the Indians by this picture
Blondism and blue eyes exist in modern Greece as well. The 2012 caretaker Prime Minister Panagiotis Pikrammenos has blue eyes.
It’s possible that same ancient Greeks prized blondism and blue eyes for their beauty just as many modern people do which was reflected in their art. We do know that some upper class Roman women wore blonde wigs which were sourced from Rhenish girls.
Is there any actual evidence that ancient Europeans were more intelligent than ancient Middle Easterners? In addition to Hart, Karlin asserted this.
The fact that modern Europeans are more intelligent than modern Middle Easterns doesn’t prove that was the case in antiquity. Patterns of cousin marriage have not been identical for the past 4,000 years after all, and medieval Islam apparently had widespread upper class abortion.
Comparative skull volume analysis might be useful.
Intelligence shifts with time and this due not only to environmental maximization (Flynn effect) but may also be due to genetics – Ashknazi developed higher intelligence over about 1,000 years is a flash of time. It looks as if it is declining everywhere in the West currently (IIRC some genes associated with intelligence are becoming more scarce). It isn’t like the evolution of wings. Biologically, it may be affected by small differences that can shift relatively rapidly.
I suspect that ancient barbarian northern Europeans, prior to widespread urbanization, were genetically less intelligent than Greeks or Romans, and that it took a few centuries of selection for them to catch up. That is, even with the help of a Flynn effect their average would be lower than that of modern northern Europeans and lower than that of their Greek or Roman contemporaries. Maybe if someone traveled in time an adopted a typical Germanic baby from the first century AD and raised it in the modern world, the child’s IQ would turn out to be 85.
Similarly, after a few centuries or urbanization, Africans may catch up genetically to Europeans.* This may involve the promotion of different genes than among Europeans, just as how different genes account for fair skin in Europeans vs. Asians.
*Although they face dysgenic pressure in that their smartest leave Africa (in contrast mass numbers of smart northern Europeans didn’t move to Byzantium or the Arab world but stayed in Europe).
Good heavens. Read the science.
Despite being one of history’s most important trading people, being in a part of the world which is not isolated and also having been colonised by Muslim Turks for 400 or so years, Greeks have retained remarkable consistency in their genetic composition with only relatively small intrusions of Slavic ancestry primarily in Macedonia and some Levantine intrusions in Cyprus.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-have-near-mythical-origins-ancient-dna-reveals
https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg201718
I’ll add that this kid would probably be more likely to be troublesome in school and be more prone to violence. These traits appear to be adaptive in primitive tribal societies (otherwise they would not be so widespread) but were bred out of Europeans over the centuries of civilization.
Buy his book, if you can, otherwise here is a link.
https://archive.org/stream/Understanding_Human_History_Michael_Hart/Hart%20-%20Understanding%20Human%20History%20-%20Geography%20and%20Differential%20Evolution_djvu.txt
You may be confusing Greece, a place currently on the roster of nation-states, with the Hellenic word which was the Greek-speaking Mediterranian and Black Sea with outposts as far away as today’s Afghanistan.
There may have been an actual act marking the IQ high point, the death of Socrates, which was when Athens decided it would not tolerate ultra smart individuals.
I wonder if the death of Assange will be viewed the same way by future (Chinese?) scholars?
Don’t whine to me. Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (the scholar) himself laments that the population of Greece was wiped out due to the plague and ancient Greek cities were being populated by Macedonian Slavs. That is science, written by a first-hand witness, no one other than the Emperor of Greeks and Romans himself.
DNA studies are overrated and tell little, that is when they are not downright wrong and that is when they are run on living samples with contemporary data.
Besides, what does it have to do with what I said? Anatolia had a large Christian Turkish population, before even Ottomans and Seljuqs, settled in Anatolia by Byzantine Empire. When the population exchange happened, it was based on religion. So hundreds of thousands of Turks who didn’t even know a word of Greek were sent to Greece. It is a historical fact, not estimate or lab result.
What do these pictures depict?
The helmets and panoply are incorrect. Corinthian helmets had fallen out of use by the time of Alexander, the “Persians” (I guess looking at figure 8 shield) or Illyrians wear some cross between Medieval Barbetta, Illyrian and Corinthian helmet, the Macedonian phalanx is hoplite variety, not nearly dense enough, the aspis shields are too small, the sarissa is nowhere to be seen so no phalangites at all depicted.
The Macedonians wear Thracian-type helmets, no Phrygian or Chalcedonian types at all.
The horseman’s helmet would break his neck if he were to fall on his back from horse – Boeotian helmets were worn for that reason.
By now y’all must have realised I’m total fun at parties 🙂
Battle of Chaeronea , the murder of Philip and the campaign against the Thracians.
Well, this book is for students in grades 5-7.
As I understand it is Hypaspists
“How exactly the phalanx was built in the classical era of Macedonian history (the era of Philip and Alexander), we do not know in detail, in particular do not know how long was the sarissa. I guess the first or two first rows of phalanx before and then had a hand spear like the hoplites, and only the back rows had a long spear, however it probably wasn’t so long that it couldn’t be controlled with one hand”
Hans Delbrück “History of Warfare in the Framework of Political History”
Yeah, which is exactly what I said in my original post.
There are authentic Greek pictures of themselves in this thread. Compare the setting, tone and message. Look at the aesthetic choices and accents.
The ancient Greeks were a completely alien culture to us, as different and alien as bushmen.
P.S. Ancient Chinese art, by contrast, is easy to understand and readily applicable to our modern life. I’m not sure what that says about us, but there you go.
Book illustrations of the 20th century differ from the paintings of ancient Greek amphorae. Great revelation
Speak for yourself. The popularity of ancient Greek culture is enormous (in Russia for 300 years, in Europe for at least 500 years)
https://putidorogi-nn.ru/images/stories/evropa/rossiya/fontan_neptun_4.jpg
Cro Magnons were unwhite. Wrangham says domestication leads to smaller a braincase as a side effect of selection against aggression. Wrangham proposes that group lynching of murderers (which he calls pro-active aggression) culled men prone to “reactive aggression”. Over time the tall large skulled barrel chested Cro-magnons become smaller and less aggressive and us. A similar process can be seen with chimps and bonobos. Also wolves and dogs.
I don’t think there’s any hard evidence, but two arguments off the top of my head:
More northern peoples were at the forefront of pushing up the technological frontier whenever they were brought within the orbit of civilization.
The most northerly (and latest peoples to be civilized – for climatic reasons), such as Finns, also have some of the highest IQs.
If you mean skin color, then that color is unknown (sensational articles about the black CRO-magnons just manipulation) however, given the geographic latitude the Paleolithic hunters of Europe were to be relatively light.
If we keep in mind facial features by the end of the upper Paleolithic European CRO-magnons acquire “European” features. The man in the picture – reconstruction of a real hunter from Sungir
https://slavmir.tv/upload/medialibrary/c17/Sungir3.jpg
Ashkenazi Jews went through a bottleneck during that time, and they were also a group in an unusual situation with a high degree of specialization. They also have a lot of weird patterns in terms of rare diseases which suggest something unusual. None of those things apply to northern Europeans.
Also, there are many groups of people, particularly in cold regions, who have never lived in densely populated areas that have IQs higher than 85. Ainu, southern Tungus peoples, Mongols, Sami, and Eskimos are all easy examples of traditional hunter gatherers or pastoralists. All of these groups except Eskimos are over 90 in all estimates I have seen.
What you’re suggesting is implausible.
I also see no reason why urbanization in modern societies should select for high IQ, not in the third world or anywhere else.
Another article on here, explains it. Modern Greeks are Minoans not the Hellenic people whi built what we call ancient Greece. Hellenic people even brought the Greek language. Rome was probably a similar story.
Weird diseases occur due to inbreeding and is not a byproduct of higher intelligence. The population of Northern Europeans is simply too large for that.
Chukchi have a reputation of not being smart but I haven’t seen studies about them. At any rate, very cold regions may select for higher intelligence than would be expected for pastoralists/hunter/gatherers in warmer climates due to the particularly difficult nature of survival in those areas.
Pre-contact or little-c0ntact Europeans no longer exist. Pastoral Turkmen probably have an average IQ in the lowto mid 80s (Turkmenistan itself is estimated to be at 87, but that includes people such as Russians).
Modern urban living requires the type of thinking that is measured on IQ tests. People in such environments maximize their inborn talents (Flynn effect). It seems reasonable to assume that more successful people, who have higher inborn capacity, are more likely to survive longer and therefore to have more children in that environment. So over generations, an urbanized population becomes smarter (btw, this has been observed in real time among raccoons, urban ones have become smarter than rural ones). The same is true for behavior. Behavioral traits that allow one to prosper in the literally cut-throat world of savage tribal societies tends leads to lead to swift justice in urban environments. Over time, people who have the genetic load for such traits tend to leave the gene pool. I suspect that a neighborhood of transplanted 1st century Germanics (or their linguistically assimilated grandchildren) would be as dangerous as Detroit.
Modern Greeks don’t look Slavic, at all. Modern Greeks are certainly Minoans.
No, it is supported by evidence:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin
When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.
But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin.
Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.
Cro-Magnons might have had other genes for light skin. Although SLC45A2 seems to have a large impact on skin color, we still do not understand of the genes involved in skin color variation in Europeans. We also know of populations in for example Ethiopia which have SLC45A2 but are dark skinned.
No it is not supported by the evidence (I specifically learned from specialists, geneticists). Geneticists found that the skin of Paleolithic hunters in Europe was different from the skin of modern Europeans. Also, the skin of the Paleolithic hunters of Europe differed from the skin of the Negroid, Australoid, Mongoloids. This skin was different from the skin of any modern people. What color was this skin – it is impossible to determine the genetic method. Because all (without exception) of modern peoples living in temperate or Arctic climates have light skin, the Paleolithic hunters of Europe also almost certainly have a relatively light skin. Also weighty proof – the ancestors of the American Indians who passed the Bering Strait 14 000 years ago undoubtedly had a relatively bright. Probably about the same skin (as in modern Tlingit or Inuit) had the European Paleolithic hunters.
You provide no evidence but use unnamed authorities.
Fact is that those people lacked genes that we know are associated with white skin. Maybe, maybe they had some unknown gene associated with white skin. But given what we know, odds are that they were dark-skinned.
Native Americans (often called “Redskins”) do not have white skin (though they are lighter than Africans):
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3e/fe/48/3efe4884d1f10abfa52cfef90de05fb7.jpg
Most likely, ancient Europeans were dark like Native Americans.
I’ve noticed that a certain number of Mexicans posses this beautiful hue of reddish skin color, almost copper in appearance. I’m pretty sure these are ones that are less mestizo and more purely Indian. Mexicans and other Central Americans include a wide array of different physical attributes. Perhaps, this is the future look of all North Americans too?
Native Ameicans are a mix of roughly 10% proto-Europeans and 90% proto-Asians. But they left Eurasia before the mutations for white skin and blue eyes appeared.
These are a couple of Navajos:
http://i.imgur.com/GqU2kla.jpg
An Indian activist from South Dakota:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/AP_16258000054459-001-365×500.jpg
They do not have white skin.
one of the interesting things about the Motala samples is as well as having the depigmentation genes modern Europeans have iirc some of them also had the east Asian EDAR gene – which was pretty surprising.
So what? In African Negroids, the accumulation of dominant alleles of melanin-synthesizing enzymes is also a late process, probably even later than the formation of modern “white” skin of Europeans. Here’s your absurd logic: European Paleolithic hunters didn’t have modern-day white skin, so they were black. African Paleolithic hunters did not have the black skin of the modern type, so they were…white.
In reality, skin color is an adaptation to solar radiation. In the tropics Paleolithic hunters had to be black (but had a different black skin than modern Negroids), in the Arctic conditions of glacial Europe, mammoth hunters skin had to be light (but different than skin of modern Europeans). A sensational article “the CRO-magnons were black” is a pseudo-science serving a political purpose (“make Europe the black again”)
Indians have not “white” but light skin. Here the Tlingit
http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/92/96192-050-C8E69490.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uiTUsTpl8wc/maxresdefault.jpg
Even the Indians of the tropics have light skin (because their Paleolithic ancestors came from the Arctic)
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/48/27/3c/48273c00c9eafda7bd184e2b579ed257.jpg
Hunters of Siberia have even lighter skin than tlingit (they are by color really “white” but do not have the genes of modern Europeens skin)
https://cdn.fishki.net/upload/post/201401/28/1240601/d03170bc57eea77a695fe6c0027ca3c0.jpg
http://ysia.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IMG_0812-1.jpg
That is, there is no doubt that the Paleolithic hunters of Siberia (the ancestors of the American Indians and natives of Siberia) had light skin, at least 14 thousand years ago.
I never claimed they were black, I stated they were darker than whites and dark like American Natives.
Read more carefully before making false comments.
Genes for lighter skin appeared among East Asians fairly late also:
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/why-are-northeast-asians-white-skinned/
::::::::::::::
Modern Tlingits (and most modern East Coast natives) are often mixed with whites. Did you choose them on purpose, to get white-looking people?
Navajo:
https://dksphotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/untitled-2083.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a2/b3/95/a2b39587d3e208224b21bcfe203f79eb.jpg
Sioux:
https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/161031_em_siouxeconomics2.jpg
Not black, but dark-skinned.
Hunter-gatherers didn’t need white skin that much, because their diets were balanced and they received plenty of vitamin D from the meats they ate. White skin became a necessity for the agriculturalists, whose diet mostly consisted of grains and very little else.
Oh really? Quote:
All of them (Tlingit found by Google) have light skin. It can’t be explained by mixing with white.
https://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/sites/default/files/imagecache/Header-Image-640×300/images/project-components/community-based_initiatives/dsc10342wide21200.jpg
It’s funny that you posted photos of subtropical Navajo Indians tanned by the sun
Navajos are irrelevant to this debate, they arrived much later.
Quote by me never stated they were black.
My actual words:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/two-millennia-of-dysgenics-in-greece/#comment-3246228
“Fact is that those people lacked genes that we know are associated with white skin. Maybe, maybe they had some unknown gene associated with white skin. But given what we know, odds are that they were dark-skinned.
Native Americans (often called “Redskins”) do not have white skin (though they are lighter than Africans)…Most likely, ancient Europeans were dark like Native Americans.”
Try to be more honest, melanf.
Navajos live in northern Arizona, which is not subtropical. You are digging your hole:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation#Climate
“Much of the Navajo Nation is situated atop the Colorado Plateau.[60] The large variation in altitude (3,080 feet (940 m) to 10,346 feet (3,153 m)) throughout the Navajo Nation is responsible for considerable variations in climate, from an arid, desert climate, comprising 55% of the area, an intermediate steppe region, and the cold, sub-humid climate of the mountainous 8%”
I also posted pictures of dark-skinned Sioux who live in the northern USA which is colder than your St. Petersburg.
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Tlingit have been mixing with Europeans for centuries. That’s why they are lighter-skinned than those form inland.
This is obviously wrong. All hunting tribes living in Arctic latitudes (all without exceptions) have light skin. Even hunter-gatherers tribes living in the subtropics of Australia and South Africa (Bushmen) have much lighter skin than tropical Negroids and australoids.
Here are portraits of pure-blooded aborigines of South Australia and Tasmania
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b1/5d/99/b15d9927e53c18be74c1e59f40d34e41–aboriginal-people-south-wales.jpg
https://www.dkn.tv/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/chan-dung-tho-dan-uc.jpg
The ancestors of the American Indians and the tribes of Siberia had light skin is at least 14 thousand years ago. etc., etc.
Common ancestors of American Indians and Mongoloids undoubtedly had light skin at least 14 thousand years ago. This is obvious because the Indians living in the tropics have relatively light skin (not suitable for radiation in the tropics).
https://japoneco.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Hammocks_and_Ruins_Blog_Riviera_Maya_Mexico_Travel_Discover_Explore_What_to_do_Jungles_Lacandon_20.jpg
If the ancestors of the Indians 14 thousand years ago had black skin – then tropical Indians should also have black skin. But this is not so, that is, the ancestor of the Indians (Paleolithic hunter of Siberia) was light-skinned
This is true for the Cherokee, but not for the Indians of Northern Canada and Alaska (who came into contact with the whites late). In addition there are images
https://mtdata.ru/u2/photoB9EA/20616262493-0/original.jpg
Again, nobody claimed they had black skin. Just dark skin.
Tlingit encountered the Russians in the 1740s. I suspect this Tlingit from Sitka, the former capital of Russian Alaska, has some European ancestry:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Tommy_joseph_tlingit.jpg/160px-Tommy_joseph_tlingit.jpg
And then they were interacting with Americans. “Pure” Indians can be found more inland. They are dark (though not black).
I posted pictures of Navajos from northern Arizona. Their ancestors migrated from the northern US or Canada.
encountered – In the form of mutual killings.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nBWewlMgD3w/maxresdefault.jpg
How this interaction could affect the color of the skin of the Tlingit?
There is a description of the Tlingit which was made in the 19th century Russian missioner Anatoly Kamensky. The skin color of the Indians (according description) was slightly darker than that of the Europeans and quite accurately corresponded to the skin color of the Tlingit Indians in the photo above
“Если бы не цвет кожи, слегка отливающий медью, иногда статного индеанина или индеанку трудно было бы распознать и отличить от европейца“
Yeah, the Indians living in the subtropical latitudes, under the burning sun
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ahsanulhaq_Qurashi/publication/321712870/figure/fig1/AS:569904634253312@1512887261992/Global-distribution-map-of-solar-energy-4.png
They, as expected, darker than the Tlingit, but also relatively light (like all the Indians)
http://papale-papale.it/upload/a659267c9a96ba18/0f09238e7713257d/919222bf8be9b4f9/633046bc54118430_800.jpg
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/EFA6B4/a-navajo-indian-woman-explains-the-female-only-fancy-shawl-dance-wearing-EFA6B4.jpg
You chose to keep digging your hole.
Subtropical latitude ends at 35 degrees. Navajo Nation is north of that.
Latitude of Navajo Nation is the same as northern Tennessee and North Carolina. It is further north than Tokyo. Not subtropical.
Here is a typically dark-skinned Navajo woman in what in your world is subtropics:
https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beautiful-young-woman-snow-winter-260nw-500855131.jpg
Moreover, Navajos moved from Canada (they speak an Athabaskan language) so even that is irrelevant..
I posted pictures of inland Sioux who are in the far North:
https://media.npr.org/assets/news/2010/09/03/braveheart.jpg?s=3
You ignore that. Why?
The pictures of Navajos you posted show dark-skinned people, as dark-skinned as pure gypsies.
I guess in your world Spaniards and Natives also never mixed?
You do realize Tlingits converted to Orthodoxy and also lived peacefully with Russians for decades, before living with Anglos.
https://www.academia.edu/33707976/Strategic_Syncretism_Tlingit_and_Russian_Orthodox_Agency_in_Alaska
Intermarriage with Russians:
https://www.academia.edu/30085225/Tlingit_Slavery_and_Russian_Empire_Indigenous_Peculiar_Institution_as_Resistance_to_Colonialism_1741-1867
Throughout the Russian colonial project, colonists and indigenous women regularly intermarried, creating a large enough population of so-called Creoles to receive their own racial category in the Russian Church Archives. These intermarriages and changing demographics intertwined the Russians and Tlingit so that by the 1840s they were economically interdependent.
Intermarriage is still common for Tlingits:
https://www.everyculture.com/multi/Sr-Z/Tlingit.html
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If you want to see a “pure” Native people, look at those from the inland West who encountered white people much later. It’s telling that you prefer to avoid pure Natives and instead post photos of Tlingits, who have been mixing with Europeans. Sorry, it is intellectual dishonesty. Like when you posted a photo of a 1/4 gypsy woman from Finland to try to prove that Finns could be dark.
Maybe next you will post photos of Volga Tatars to “prove” that Turkic peoples are basically European?
Dude look at the insolation map (above). The northernmost point of the United States (without Alaska) is South of the Crimea or Sochi
Yeah, “far North” to the South of Sochi
Google search “modern Sioux Indians” gives this page
https://b.radikal.ru/b33/1906/07/a749c321692e.jpg
That is again you have chosen the portrait of the Indians tanned in the sun. Even if you neglect the numerous photos of modern Sioux with almost white skin (right on the same page “Modern Sioux”), there are old black and white photos and portraits
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/55/6e/2a/556e2aa218aced213fc9f3e0e9fe00ec–native-american-indians-the-indians.jpg
Just from your link
“Shelehov and his company moved down the coast into Tlingit land later in 1788. This is considered the first interaction between the Russo-American Trade Company and the Tlingit.”
How is baptism part of the Tlingit to Orthodoxy in the 19th century (as well as the existence of a very small number of Russian-Tlingit métisos) could affect the “light copper” skin tone of the Tlingit (from the words of the 19th century missionaries )?
So you don’t know what subtropical means.
Due to the Gulf Stream Europe is warmer than it should be according to its latitude. So?
Chicago in winter is as cold as Kiev, but it is as far south as Rome.
Dark-skinned people. So?
Go for color pictures.
Russian-Tlingit mixing was not rare. From the academic source:
https://www.academia.edu/30085225/Tlingit_Slavery_and_Russian_Empire_Indigenous_Peculiar_Institution_as_Resistance_to_Colonialism_1741-1867
Throughout the Russian colonial project, colonists and indigenous women regularly intermarried, creating a large enough population of so-called Creoles to receive their own racial category in the Russian Church Archives. These intermarriages and changing demographics intertwined the Russians and Tlingit so that by the 1840s they were economically interdependent.
You posted pictures of a particular group of Natives who were heavily mixed with whites to “prove” that they are light-skinned people. This is exactly like when you posted a photo of a 1/4 gypsy woman from Finland to “prove” that Finns can be dark-looking. It is an unfortunate example of intellectual dishonesty.