Complexion of the roman emperors

[helinleger]

A very recent Nature paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v52...14507.html

suggests that an Early Bronze Age culture from the Pontic Steppe the Yamnaya Culture may have been the ancestral Indo-Europeans. Interestingly the latest ancient DNA work seems to suggest that ancestral Europeans, especially in the Mesolithic, were dark-skinned with light eyes, the Yamnaya people in contrast, the above paper suggests, were light-skinned but dark-eyed. The later Europeans being the result of admixture, light skin becoming rapidly fixed in the population, but eye colour remaining more mixed (with a N-S cline) to the present day. The Yamnaya may also have been the originators of the European lactose-digestion persistence mutation, an obvious advantage to a pastoral cattle-herding people.

All in all a bit of a kick in the balls for the blond-blue-eyed-pale-skinned Aryan myth beloved of Hitler et alia., if, as the DNA evidence suggests, pale eyes and pale skin had entirely different origins, in different populations.

Well, he likely wouldn’t have passed airport profiling very well. The Mediterranean saw a lot of mixing before Septimius Severus was born and it saw a lot of mixing after that, too. As far as we can tell, he would have been dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a very deep tan. Sub-Saharan African? No. African? Yes. Ditto Augustine. There are a lot of different kinds of Africans and there were two thousand years ago, as well.