Ancient North Eurasians from Siberia

Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) is a genetic component that traveled mainly east into Native Americans, but also west into Europeans. It's represented by pre-historic individuals discovered in Siberia:

Here we sequence the draft genome of an approximately 24,000-year-old individual (MA-1), from Mal'ta in south-central Siberia. [...] Similarly, we find autosomal evidence that MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and genetically closely related to modern-day Native Americans, with no close affinity to east Asians. [...] Sequencing of another south-central Siberian, Afontova Gora-2 dating to approximately 17,000 years ago, revealed similar autosomal genetic signatures as MA-1, suggesting that the region was continuously occupied by humans throughout the Last Glacial Maximum.

Though MA-1 is slightly more Western than Eastern Eurasian genetically, it's actually intermediate and way outside the range of Modern Europeans and Caucasoids:

In the first two principal components, MA-1 is intermediate between modern western Eurasians and Native Americans, but distant from east Asians.

When it's included in an admixture analysis, it comes out as a mix of Western Eurasians and the different Eastern Non-Africans that it shares ancestry with:

The ancient samples appear to be mostly West Eurasian in their ancestry, although the hunter gatherers are also inferred to have greater or lesser extents of an eastern non-African (ENA) component lacking in Stuttgart. [...] We note that the ancestry proportions in ancient samples like MA1 are more likely explained by shared ancestry than admixture. This is more likely to explain the nearly three-way distribution of South Asian, West Eurasian and Native American (plus Northeast Siberian) ancestry proportions in MA1, than three-way admixture of established populations.

Admixture from MA1 (and AG2) is highest in Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG), then Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers (SHG), then Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG):

Application of this methods highlights the impact of Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry related to the ~22,000 BCE Mal'ta 1 and ~15,000 BCE Afontova Gora 2 on populations living in Europe, the Americas, and Eastern Eurasia. Eastern Eurasians can be modelled as arrayed along a cline with different proportions of ANE ancestry, ranging from ~40% ANE in Native Americans matching previous findings, to no less than ~5-10% ANE in diverse East Asian groups including Han Chinese. We also document a cline of ANE ancestry across the east-west extent of Eurasia. Eastern Hunter Gatherers (EHG) derive ~3/4 of their ancestry from the ANE; Scandinavian hunter-gatherers (SHG) are a mix of EHG and WHG; and WHG are a mix of EHG and the Upper Paleolithic Bichon from Switzerland.

After Native Americans, then Siberians, it's Northern and Eastern Europeans that have the highest ANE admixture because they have the most EHG (which came mainly with Bronze Age migrations from the Russian Steppe):

We find that genetic affinity to MA-1 is greatest in two regions: first, the Americas; and second, northeast Europe and northwest Siberia, with north-to-south latitudinal clines in shared drift with MA-1 in both Europe and Asia.

(redder circles = more affinity, bluer = less)

Here's the genetic cline formed by Modern Europeans stretching from Caucasoid Neolithic Farmers (Stuttgart) towards ANE:

By using BedouinB instead of Stuttgart, we can also plot Stuttgart in the space of these statistics. Europeans uniformly share more drift with MA1 than with Karitiana, and form a cline in this space with slope >1. Karitiana, because of its Ancient North Eurasian ancestry was crucial in detecting the presence of such ancestry in Europeans but can now be replaced in the study of this ancestry by a better proxy for this ancestry (MA1).

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Raghavan et al. "Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans". Nature, 2014.

Lazaridis et al. "Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans". Nature, 2014.

Lazaridis et al. "Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East". Nature, 2016.

Related: Phenotypes of Hunters and Farmers

"Dark" and "Swarthy" Europeans Are Still Light

We've seen how olive skin is misunderstood by people to mean "tan" or "non-white", now let's look at the same thing with words like "dark" and "swarthy" used to describe the complexions of Europeans. People treat them as evidence against "whiteness", but they're really just exaggerations of reality.

Benjamin Franklin applied them to a lot of groups that are far from dark, basically lumping all whites who weren't Anglo-Saxon into a "swarthy" group with non-whites, including some who are probably lighter than English people:

All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

Another well-known example of this kind of exaggeration is English ideas about the so-called "Black Irish". They're really just white people from the British Isles (not just Ireland) who have dark hair and eyes and a Mediterranean appearance — like Colin Farrell, Catherine Zeta Jones, Sean Connery, Mr. Bean, Russell Brand and many others — but old school Nordicists used to claim that part of the Celtic physiognomy was "black-tinted skin":


But even when applied to "darker" Southern Europeans, they're still an exaggeration, like in this passage from White on Arrival about how Italian gangsters were portrayed in the media:

Al Capone was constantly portrayed in books, magazine articles, pulps, and movies as having a "dark" or "swarthy" complexion. When he appeared in court in 1929 in Philadelphia on charges of having concealed a weapon, the Chicago Daily News noticed that his "face, which is rather dark, assumed a dull reddish hue." No one emphasized Italians' dark features more than popular writer and former newsman Walter Burns. In his book, The One-Way Ride, Johnny Torrio was "a slight, dapper, dark young man"; gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi had "dark faces"; the Genna brothers were "swarthy, black haired, black eyed, looked not unlike Arabs, and probably had in their ancestral strain a strong dash of Saracenic [North African] blood".

From these descriptions you'd probably picture really dark Saudi Arabians or maybe even mixed-race Berbers, but here's what those people actually looked like (the rare mugshot of Capone has been skillfully colorized to show his blue eyes):

Al Capone

Genna Brothers

Johnny Torrio

John Scalise and Albert Anselmi

So the lesson is to not take descriptions like that literally or as meaning something "non-white". Europeans (including Southern Europeans) actually have the lightest untanned skin in the world, so even when they're "dark" or "swarthy", they're still lighter than everyone else.

Related: Al Capone: From "Dark" to "Fair"

Who's Really "More European"?

Until a few years ago, people thought that Northern Europeans were descended from indigenous Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and Southern Europeans from more recent Neolithic farmers from the Middle East. Nordic supremacists claimed that this made them "more European" because their ancestors had been in Europe much longer and they had almost no Middle Eastern or other foreign ancestry. This went with their belief that "pure Nordics" were responsible for all European achievement.

Thanks to the ancient DNA revolution, we now know that Neolithic farmers spread much deeper into Europe demographically than was previously thought (back in 1993 by Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues):

Cavalli-Sforza was especially interested in interpreting the genetic clusters among present-day people in terms of population history. He and his colleagues analyzed their blood group data by using a technique that identifies combinations of biological variations that are most efficient at summarizing differences across individuals. Plotting these combinations of blood group types onto a map of West Eurasia, they found that the one summarizing the most variation across individuals reached its extreme value in the Near East, and declined along a southeast-to-northwest gradient into Europe. They interpreted this as a genetic footprint of the migration of farmers into Europe from the Near East, known from archaeology to have occurred after nine thousand years ago. The declining intensity suggested to them that after arriving in Europe, the first farmers mixed with local hunter-gatherers, accumulating more hunter-gatherer ancestry as they expanded, a process they called "demic diffusion." Until recently, many archaeologists viewed the demic diffusion model as an exemplary merging of insights from archaeology and genetics.

The model that Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues proposed to describe the data was intellectually attractive, but it was wrong. Its flaws became apparent beginning in 2008, when John Novembre and colleagues demonstrated that gradients like those observed in Europe can arise without migration. They then showed that a Near Eastern farming expansion into Europe might counter-intuitively cause the mathematical technique that Cavalli-Sforza used to produce a gradient perpendicular to the direction of migration, not parallel to it as had been seen in the real data.

It took the revolution wrought by the ability to extract DNA from ancient bones — the "ancient DNA revolution" — to drive a nail into the coffin of the demic diffusion model. The ancient DNA revolution documented that the first farmers even in the most remote reaches of Europe — Britain, Scandinavia, and Iberia — had very little hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. In fact, they had less hunter-gatherer ancestry than is present in diverse European populations today. The highest proportion of early farmer ancestry in Europe is today not in Southeast Europe, the place where Cavalli-Sforza thought it was most common based on the blood group data, but instead is in the Mediterranean island of Sardinia to the west of Italy.

Compare the early estimates of Anatolian farmer ancestry in Europe to the more accurate estimates of today:


It's still a bit lower in Northern Europe, but that's because it was displaced by a group of pastoralists from the Russian steppe called Yamnaya who arrived even later (less than 5000 years ago during the Bronze Age) and had a lot of another kind of Middle Eastern ancestry (from the Caucasus/Iran) plus a component from way out in Siberia called Ancient North Eurasian that's related to Native American Indians:

The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.

The Tide from the East

[...]

The Yamnaya emerged from previous cultures of the steppe and its periphery and exploited the steppe resources far more effectively than their predecessors. They spread over a vast region, from Hungary in Europe to the foothills of the Altai Mountains in central Asia, and in many places replaced the disparate cultures that had preceded them with a more homogeneous way of life.

[...]

Our analysis of DNA from the Yamnaya — led by Iosif Lazaridis in my laboratory — showed that they harbored a combination of ancestries that did not previously exist in central Europe. The Yamnaya were the missing ingredient, carrying exactly the type of ancestry that needed to be added to early European farmers and hunter-gatherers to produce populations with the mixture of ancestries observed in Europe today. Our ancient DNA data also allowed us to learn how the Yamnaya themselves had formed from earlier populations. From seven thousand until five thousand years ago, we observed a steady influx into the steppe of a population whose ancestors traced their origin to the south — as it bore genetic affinity to ancient and present-day people of Armenia and Iran — eventually crystallizing in the Yamnaya, who were about a one-to-one ratio of ancestry from these two sources.

[...]

...the frequencies of mutations in northern Europeans today tend to be intermediate between those of southern Europeans and Native Americans. He hypothesized that these findings could be explained by the existence of a "ghost population" — the Ancient North Eurasians — who were distributed across northern Eurasia more than fifteen thousand years ago and who contributed both to the population that migrated across the Bering land bridge to people the Americas and to northern Europeans. A year later, Eske Willerslev and colleagues obtained a sample of ancient DNA from Siberia that matched the predicted Ancient North Eurasians—the Mal'ta individual whose skeleton dated to around twenty-four thousand years ago.

How could the finding of an Ancient North Eurasian contribution to present-day northern Europeans be reconciled with the two-way mixture of indigenous European hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers from Anatolia that had been directly demonstrated through ancient DNA studies? The plot became even thicker as we and others obtained additional ancient DNA data from hunter-gatherers and farmers between eight thousand and five thousand years ago and found that they fit the two-way mixture model without any evidence of Ancient North Eurasian ancestry. Something profound must have happened later — a new stream of migrants must have arrived, introducing Ancient North Eurasian ancestry and transforming Europe.

What's most ironic is that it's actually all the later "non-European" Middle Eastern ancestry, including a component called Basal Eurasian, that made Europeans become "more European" (i.e. more Caucasoid, i.e. "whiter") and more homogeneous than they would have been, because the original Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, like Ancient North Eurasians, actually had affinities to East Asians:

Lazaridis was trying to understand a peculiar Four Population Test result showing that East Asians, present-day Europeans, and pre-farming European hunter-gatherers from around eight thousand years ago are not related to one another according to the tree model. Instead, his analysis showed that East Asians today are genetically more closely related on average to the ancestors of ancient European hunter-gatherers than they are to the ancestors of present Europeans. Ancient DNA studies prior to his work had already shown that present-day Europeans derive some of their ancestry from migrations of farmers from the Near East, who I had assumed were derived from the same ancestral population as European hunter-gatherers. Lazaridis now realized that the ancestry of the first European farmers was distinct from European hunter-gatherers in some way. Something more complicated was going on.

[...]

Present-day Europeans and Near Easterners are mixed: they carry within them ancestry from a divergent Eurasian lineage that branched from Mal'ta, European hunter-gatherers, and East Asians before those three lineages separated from one another.

Lazaridis called this lineage "Basal Eurasian" to denote its position as the deepest split in the radiation of lineages contributing to non-Africans. The Basal Eurasians were a new ghost population, one as important as the Ancient North Eurasians, measured by the sheer number of descendant genomes they have left behind. The extent of the deviations of the Four Population Test away from the value of zero that would be expected if the populations were related by a simple tree indicates that this ghost population contributed about a quarter of the ancestry of present-day Europeans and Near Easterners. It also contributed comparable proportions of ancestry to Iranians and Indians.

[...]

After around fourteen thousand years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers spread across Europe with ancestry quite different from that of the people associated with the preceding Magdalenian culture, whom they largely displaced. Individuals living in Europe between thirty-seven thousand and fourteen thousand years ago were all plausibly descended from a common ancestral population that separated earlier from the ancestors of lineages represented in the Near East today. But after around fourteen thousand years ago, western European hunter-gatherers became much more closely related to present-day Near Easterners. This proved that new migration occurred between the Near East and Europe around this time.

[...]

The farmers in present-day Turkey expanded into Europe. [...] They mixed with local populations there and established new economies based on herding that allowed the agricultural revolution to spread into parts of the world inhospitable to domesticated crops. The different food-producing populations also mixed with one another, a process that was accelerated by technological developments in the Bronze Age after around five thousand years ago. This meant that the high genetic substructure that had previously characterized West Eurasia collapsed into the present-day very low level of genetic differentiation by the Bronze Age.

So Northern Europeans actually have a ton of the Middle Eastern ancestry that Nordicists have always looked down on. And while they still have some of their beloved European hunter-gatherer ancestry, it turns out that's Asian-related. Furthermore, large parts of their Middle Eastern and Asian/Amerindian-type ancestries arrived long after Paleolithic and Neolithic times in the Bronze Age.

Of course, the same goes for Southern Europeans, but they generally have more of the older Neolithic farmer ancestry and less of the exotic "Asiatic" ancestries. And the originators of European civilization — Minoan and Mycenaean Greeks, as well as Etruscans and Romans — were genetically like modern Southern Europeans, not like modern Northern Europeans as the Nordicists have always claimed.

So in a pissing contest of who's "more European", playing by Nordicists' own rules, Southern Europeans would have to be considered the "winners".

---------------
David Reich. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Related: Phenotypes of Hunters and Farmers

Catherine Zeta Jones Is NOT Greek

The ancestry of British actress Catherine Zeta Jones is Welsh and Irish, but people keep claiming she's part Greek, and it was just repeated in a Jeopardy question. The source is an old CNN interview she did with Larry King which was transcribed online like this:

Zeta is my grandmother's name, who is of north Greek origin. But Zeta is a Greek name. And everyone thinks that I just put Zeta in to spice up Catherine Jones. And that's completely untrue.

But there's a disclaimer at the beginning that says it's a "rush transcript" that "may not be in its final form". If she were saying that her grandmother was Greek, there would be no "But..." after the first sentence. That only makes sense if she's denying having Greek ancestry, which is what she actually said:

Zeta is my grandmother's name, who is of not Greek origin. But Zeta is a Greek name. And everyone thinks that I was, just put Zeta in to spice up Catherine Jones. And that's completely untrue. [...] I've always been called that. And in my school in Wales, Jones is a very, very popular name in Wales. And so there were like three Catherine Joneses in my class, so they always called me Zeta.

It's thought that her last name is "Zeta-Jones", but she added the hyphen later. "Zeta" was originally her middle name and her grandmother's first name, and this is where it actually came from:

"I've been performing since I was 11 years old," said Catherine, named for her maternal grandmother Catherine Fair and her paternal grandmother Zeta Jones (Zeta was the name of a ship that her great-grandfather had sailed on).

Many people have also claimed, with no evidence, that she's Hispanic or even half black because they believe Nordicist stereotypes and can't accept the fact that some Northern Europeans are naturally darker and more "exotic" looking. A sane commenter responds:

Whenever a N.European has darker hair, eyes or complexion, somebody (predictably) uses a stereotype of another ethnic group to suggest they're an "outsider" to their own heritage. Despite popular stereotypes, differences in appearance are normal within any one group due to expected genetic variation within families and their older tribal histories. This is the norm--and not the exception. Anyone proud of their heritage won't like racists taking that from them.

Catherine Zeta Jones is just a dark Brit. That's all.

Genetic Continuity in Greece

Greek women through the ages: Minoan, Cycladic, Mycenaean, Classical, Modern  (SOURCE)

A recent study suggested based on modern samples that Greeks hadn't changed much since ancient times. Now that's been proven with ancient DNA from Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean Greeks. Their ancestry is mostly Anatolian Neolithic farmer with some Caucasus/Iran and less Russian/Siberian admixture (the last two related to the spread of Indo-European languages), they had dark hair and dark eyes, and there was no difference between the elites and common people. They're genetically closest to modern Southeastern Europeans, and not to Northern Europeans or Africans as different people have claimed.

The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus and Iran. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe or Armenia. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.

[...]

The elite Mycenaean individual from the ‘royal’ tomb at Peristeria in the western Peloponnese did not differ genetically from the other three Mycenaean individuals buried in common graves.

[...]

Other proposed migrations, such as settlement by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists, are not discernible in our data, as there is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Mycenaeans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilizations of these regions.

[...]

Phenotype prediction from genetic data has enabled the reconstruction of the appearance of ancient Europeans who left no visual record of their pigmentation. By contrast, the appearance of the Bronze Age people of the Aegean has been preserved in colourful frescos and pottery, depicting people with mostly dark hair and eyes. We used the HIrisPlex tool (Supplementary Information section 4) to infer that the appearance of our ancient samples matched the visual representations (Extended Data Table 2), suggesting that art of this period reproduced phenotypes naturalistically.

We estimated the fixation index, F_ST, of Bronze Age populations with present-day West Eurasians, finding that Mycenaeans were least differentiated from populations from Greece, Cyprus, Albania, and Italy (Fig. 2), part of a general pattern in which Bronze Age populations broadly resembled present-day inhabitants from the same region (Extended Data Fig. 7).

The modern Greek samples used in the study for comparison are not the best. Thessaloniki is in the north of the country, the Coriell database doesn't provide specific origins, and there are only two Cretans. I believe that if Mycenaeans were compared to their descendants in the Peloponnese, continuity would be nearly perfect instead of just very strong.


Lazaridis et al. "Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans". Nature, 2017.

Related: Ancient Roman DNA, Ancient-to-Modern Genetic Distances

Genetics of Peloponnesean Greeks

This new study refutes Nordicist and Afrocentrist claims of population replacement in Ancient Greece, showing that modern Peloponnesean Greeks are most closely related to other Southern Europeans, and far from both Slavic and non-European groups. They're also distinct from Greek-speaking populations in Asia Minor, only partly overlapping with those on the Aegean coast nearest to Greece.

Peloponnese has been one of the cradles of the Classical European civilization and an important contributor to the ancient European history. It has also been the subject of a controversy about the ancestry of its population. In a theory hotly debated by scholars for over 170 years, the German historian Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer proposed that the medieval Peloponneseans were totally extinguished by Slavic and Avar invaders and replaced by Slavic settlers during the 6th century CE. Here we use 2.5 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms to investigate the genetic structure of Peloponnesean populations in a sample of 241 individuals originating from all districts of the peninsula and to examine predictions of the theory of replacement of the medieval Peloponneseans by Slavs. We find considerable heterogeneity of Peloponnesean populations exemplified by genetically distinct subpopulations and by gene flow gradients within Peloponnese. By principal component analysis (PCA) and ADMIXTURE analysis the Peloponneseans are clearly distinguishable from the populations of the Slavic homeland and are very similar to Sicilians and Italians. Using a novel method of quantitative analysis of ADMIXTURE output we find that the Slavic ancestry of Peloponnesean subpopulations ranges from 0.2 to 14.4%. Subpopulations considered by Fallmerayer to be Slavic tribes or to have Near Eastern origin, have no significant ancestry of either. This study rejects the theory of extinction of medieval Peloponneseans and illustrates how genetics can clarify important aspects of the history of a human population.

Figure 2: Genetic similarity of Peloponneseans, Sicilians and Italians. PCA analysis of several European populations. (a) Notice the north to south distribution of the populations and that the Peloponneseans are placed to the far right of the graph and overlap with the Sicilians. (b) PCA analysis of Southern European populations illustrating the close relationship between Peloponneseans, Sicilians and Italians (TSI is an Italian population). (c) Network analysis illustrating the high connectivity between the Peloponnesean populations as well as between the Peloponneseans, the Sicilians and the Italians. Notice the distance between Peloponneseans and the Slavic, and Near Eastern populations. Peloponneseans are connected with the Near Eastern populations through Crete and Dodecanese.

Figure 3: Testing the theory of replacement of medieval Peloponneseans by Slavs and Asia Minor settlers. (a) PCA analysis shows the broad separation of Peloponneseans from four populations of the Slavic homeland (Ukrainians, Polish, Russians and Belarusians). (b) PCA comparisons of the Peloponneseans with three Greek-speaking Asia Minor populations shows only partial overlap with the population of the Asia Minor Aegean coast.

Supplementary Figure 2: Comparisons of Peloponneseans with non-European populations. PCA analysis of Peloponneseans and A. Near East. B. Caucasus. C. North Africa. D. East Africa. E. Arabia. F. West Siberia populations.

Stamatoyannopoulos et al. "Genetics of the peloponnesean populations and the theory of extinction of the medieval peloponnesean Greeks". Eur J Hum Genet, 2017.

Related: Genetic Continuity in Greece

Scythians Had East Asian Ancestry

Nordicists have often claimed that Iron Age Scythians were blonde, blue-eyed "Aryans" most similar to modern Northern Europeans, but ancient DNA analysis shows they were a mix of Yamnaya people from the Russian Steppe (who were mostly brunet) and East Asian Mongoloids.

During the 1st millennium before the Common Era (BCE), nomadic tribes associated with the Iron Age Scythian culture spread over the Eurasian Steppe, covering a territory of more than 3,500 km in breadth. To understand the demographic processes behind the spread of the Scythian culture, we analysed genomic data from eight individuals and a mitochondrial dataset of 96 individuals originating in eastern and western parts of the Eurasian Steppe. Genomic inference reveals that Scythians in the east and the west of the steppe zone can best be described as a mixture of Yamnaya-related ancestry and an East Asian component. Demographic modelling suggests independent origins for eastern and western groups with ongoing gene-flow between them, plausibly explaining the striking uniformity of their material culture. We also find evidence that significant gene-flow from east to west Eurasia must have occurred early during the Iron Age.

[...]

Since the PCA of west Eurasia in Fig. 4 does not allow one to examine the ancient samples in relation to contemporary East Asian populations, we also carried out PCA of all 2,345 modern individuals in the Human Origins dataset, onto which we also projected the ancient individuals (Fig. 5). It is evident from this PCA that ancestry of the Iron Age samples falls on a continuum between present-day west Eurasians and eastern non-Africans, which is in concordance with the mitochondrial haplogroup analyses. The eastern Scythians display nearly equal proportions of mtDNA lineages common in east and west Eurasia, whereas in the western Scythian groups, the frequency of lineages now common in east Eurasia is generally lower, even reaching zero in four samples of the initial Scythian phase of the eight to sixth century BCE (group #1 in Fig. 2), and reaches 18–26% during later periods (sixth to second century BCE; #2 and #3) (Supplementary Table 7).

The Scythian samples are in black:

Figure 5 | Principal component analysis. PCA of ancient individuals (according colours see legend) projected on modern individuals of the Human Origins dataset (grey). Iron Age Scythians are shown in black; CHG, Caucasus hunter-gatherer; LNBA, late Neolithic/Bronze Age; MN, middle Neolithic; EHG, eastern European hunter-gatherer; LBK_EN, early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik; HG, hunter-gatherer; EBA, early Bronze Age; IA, Iron Age; LBA, late Bronze Age; WHG, western hunter-gatherer.

Unterlander et al. "Ancestry and demography and descendants of Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian Steppe". Nature Communications, 2017.

Calling Out JayMan

JayMan is an HBd blogger obsessed with IQ, heredity and achievement, and probably Richard Lynn's #1 fan. He claims to be Jamaican, which makes him either the most insanely self-hating black person on earth, or a white Nordicist pretending to be black so he can get away with insulting blacks and everyone else who isn't Northwestern European. Either way, he's an idiot.

Recently he "called me out" on his blog re: my stance on environmental factors in global IQ disparities. I had debated him there about a year and a half ago and easily won, and I guess he's been traumatized by it ever since. He links to that post in his new one, and I wondered why he would want to remind people of his defeat, but when I checked it again I noticed that he'd deleted my final reply to try and make himself look like the winner (you can read the unedited discussion here; the deleted comment is "Mar 27 2012 9:57 AM"). Then when I attempted to reply to his latest "challenge" the other day, he refused to approve that comment too. Just thought you'd want to know what a pathetic, dishonest, chickenshit loser he is...if you couldn't already tell.

Anyway, my response to his nonsense was this study showing that poverty leads to a significant drop in IQ points, and this new one which concludes similarly that the wealth of nations determines "national IQs" (not the other way around).

Most British Blondes Are Fake

Why we're all dyeing to be blonde; SHOCK AS 80 PER CENT OF WOMEN WITH GOLDEN HAIR ADMIT THEY FAKE IT.

By Jill Foster and Jane Simon
The Mirror
May 19, 2004

IT'S a debate which has raged since the dawn of hair-dye — who has more fun, blondes or brunettes?

It would seem that, for British women at least, the answer is to reach for the bleach.

Four out of 10 women in the UK are blonde but more than 80 per cent are faking it, according to a survey published yesterday.

And there are regional differences, too.

Manchester has the highest proportion of blondes, real or fake, with 45 per cent of women in the northern city golden haired.

Bournemouth has the highest proportion of bottle blondes — only eight per cent of blondies in the southern seaside town are natural.

[...]

BRITAIN'S FAIR CITIES

CITY - % OF BLONDES (% NATURAL)

Manchester - 45 (24)
Bournemouth - 43 (8)
Birmingham - 43 (21)
Newcastle - 40 (23)
London - 39 (19)
Brighton - 38 (25)
Cardiff - 36 (1)

Link

Men's Hair and Eye Color Preferences

The British men surveyed here had a preference for women with brown/black hair (61.7%) and blue/green eyes (57.7%). The remaining 38.3% preferred blond/red hair, and 42.3% preferred brown/hazel eyes. Men in France, Spain, Italy, the U.S. and Brazil were also surveyed, and black was the most popular hair color in all of those countries, while brown and green eyes were preferred.

Badoo, the world's largest Social Network for meeting new people, has polled 2,000 UK males to find the features they find most attractive in the opposite sex. The results have been surprising, with blondes being beaten by brunettes.

In fact a third (33.1%) of all those polled said they find brown hair more attractive than blonde (29.5%), black (28.6%) and red (8.8%), contradicting the adage that gentlemen prefer blondes.

A further surprise the study uncovered is that 38.8% of guys looked for a dress size of 12-14 in their perfect woman, with only 10% looking for a size 6-8. This proves that whilst magazines fill their pages with skinny models, UK males actually prefer a more average build. Only 4.2% preferred size 18+ whilst a curvy size 14-18 was the second most popular with 25.5% of the vote.

Blue eyes still rule the roost in the UK however, with a massive 40.2% of guys preferring blue eyes over brown (29.2%), green (17.5%) and hazel (13.1%).

When all of the pieces of the puzzle are compiled, it's TOWIE's Lauren Goodger who has all of the attributes that men in the UK find most attractive. Her brown hair, blue eyes and average build give her the perfect combination for being the girl next door and the type of girl that UK males find most attractive.

Badoo also ran the study in France, Spain, Italy, US and Brazil and came back with surprising results. In fact only the French said they preferred their women skinny with all others saying they prefer average to curvy women. In all of the countries surveyed, black was the most popular hair colour (except the UK). The UK was also the only country that opted for blue eyes, with brown and green topping the table around the world.

Lloyd Price, from Badoo, said, "I was amazed that blonde hair and size 8 did not top the list. Magazines are full of skinny blonde models, so it is nice to see that in reality guys prefer the girl next door look. Lauren Goodger's boyfriend Mark Wright is clearly a lucky man in the eyes on the nation."

Badoo. "Sorry Marilyn, Gentleman Don't Prefer Blondes Reveals New Study By Badoo.com" [Press Release]. Badoo.com, 22.08.2011.

United States' North-South Achievement Gap

As in Modern Europe, achievement in the USA since its founding has been concentrated in just a few places, which has created a North-South gap that correlates with economic and educational disparities observed today. Nordicists are quick to jump on this sort of thing elsewhere but ignore it in their own backyard, or try to blame it on minorities, like the South's large black population. But Charles Murray, in his book Human Accomplishment, doesn't fail to note the gap, and the fact that it exists within the white population:

The geographic distribution of significant figures from the United States reflects the rapidly changing settlement of the country. The East Coast dominates, inevitably, because hardly anyone lived anywhere else for much of the nation's history. If I could show you a map of America's significant figures in the last half century, it presumably would look much different from the first half of 20C, just because the population shifted so radically westward throughout 20C. With that in mind, the figure below is offered as a summary of the story from the founding to 1950.

The states that are colored represent the origins of 90 percent of the American significant figures. The small dark blue slice running in an arc from Portland, Maine, to the southern tip of New Jersey encompasses the origins of about 50 percent of them. The light blue wedge encompasses another 25 percent, and the gray fills out the remaining 15 percent. Even after factoring in the history of American expansion, the primary concentration along the northeastern coast of the United States and the secondary concentration in the belt stretching to the Mississippi is striking.

An even more striking aspect of the map is the white space covering the American South. Although more lightly populated than the North, the American South had a substantial population throughout American history. In 1850, for example, the white population in the South was 5.6 million, compared to 8.5 million in the Northeast. In 1900, the comparison was 12.1 million to 20.6 million. By 1950, the gap had almost closed — 36.9 million compared to 37.4 million. While it is understandable that the South did not have as many significant figures as the North, the magnitude of the difference goes far beyond population. The northeastern states of New England plus New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey had produced 184 significant figures by 1950, while the states that made up the Confederacy during the Civil War had produced 24, a ratio of more than 7:1.

The scatter plots on the following page show the way in which the American significant figures break down over the three half centuries from 1800-1950.

Brown-eyed Men Appear More Dominant

Eye color predicts but does not directly influence perceived dominance in men

Karel Kleisner et al. (2010)
Personality and Individual Differences

[...]

4. Discussion

In this study we found no effect of eye color on perceived dominance in women. On the contrary, we found a statistically significant association between the eye color and perceived dominance in men: brown-eyed men were perceived as more dominant. Furthermore, we show that iris color does not represent the trait that significantly influences perception of dominance in males. Hence, there must be some other facial characteristics responsible for the higher perceived dominance in brown-eyed males. It is evident, however, that the features standing for higher perceived dominance in males are correlated with presence of brown eyes; or alternatively, the features connected with higher perceived submissiveness in males with the blue eyes.

The question arises: why are brown-eyed males rated as more dominant than blue-eyed? Some facial features such as square jaws, thick eyebrows and broad cheekbones are linked with higher perceived dominance; facial submissiveness, on the other hand, is characterized by a round face with large eyes, smallish nose, and high eyebrows (Berry, 1990; Berry & Mcarthur, 1986; Cunningham, Barbee, & Pike, 1990; Mazur, Halpern, & Udry, 1994; Mueller & Mazur, 1997; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1994). The morphological differences between blue-eyed and brown-eyed males were visualized by deformation of thin-plate splines (Fig. 3). In contrast with blue-eyed males, brown-eyed males have statistically broader and rather massive chins, broader (laterally prolonged) mouths, larger noses, and eyes that are closer together with larger eyebrows. In contrast, blue-eyed males show smaller and sharper chins, mouths that are laterally narrower, noses smaller, and a greater span between the eyes. Especially the broader massive chin, bigger nose, and larger eyebrows of brown-eyed males may explain their higher perceived dominance.


Fig. 3. (a and b): Visualizations of shape regression on eye color in males by thin-plate spline deformation grids illustrating differences in facial shape between blue-eyed (a) and brown-eyed (b) males; the links connecting the landmarks are drawn for better imaging of differences in the shape of face. (c and d): Composite images of 20 photographs of each group unwarped to fixed landmark configuration predicted by shape regression of blue-eyed (c) and brown-eyed (d) male faces. The predictions are magnified three times for better readability. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
However, it is not easy to explain how iris color, which is determined mostly by one or a few genes, can correlate with physiognomic dominance/submissiveness, which is determined by a combination of several independent morphological traits. Theoretically, the allele for brown eyes should "move" from "submissive physiognomy genotype" to "dominant physiognomy genotype" and back again from generation to generation due to genetic recombination and segregation.

In principle, there are three possible explanations for the higher perceived dominance of brown-eyed males, the pleiotropy hypothesis, genetic linkage hypothesis and social feedback hypothesis. The pleiotropy hypothesis presumes that the genes for iris color (such as HERC2 or OCA2) also influence other morphological traits associated with perceived dominance due to its pleiotropy effect. One can speculate, for instance, that the gene influences the production or metabolism of common precursors of adrenaline and melanin, e.g. DOPA or tyrosine.

The genetic linkage hypothesis presumes that the genes influencing iris color are in genetic linkage with genes influencing morphological traits associated with perceived dominance, for example the gene influencing the production of testosterone. If this is so, strong linkage disequilibrium between these loci should exist in the current Czech population. Repeating this study in other populations with polymorphism in eye color can test this hypothesis.

The social feedback hypothesis is based on the presumption that blue and brown-eyed subjects are treated differently within their social surroundings, e.g. by their parents and peers. Young children usually have blue eyes, while definitive iris color develops during the first years of life (Bito, Matheny, Cruickshanks, Nondahl, & Carino, 1997). It is possible that subjects with blue eyes are treated as a small child for a longer period than brown-eyed children. Such early social experience may have been literally "inscribed" into their faces, preserved until adulthood, and finally bring on the perception of higher submissiveness. Rosenberg and Kagan (1987, 1989) investigated the association between eye color and behavioral inhibition, revealing that children with blue eyes are more inhibited. Coplan et al. (1998) found a significant interaction between eye color and social wariness within preschoolers. Blue-eyed males were rated as more socially wary, i.e. being more temperamentally inhibited, displaying more reticent behavior and having more internalizing problems, than males with brown eyes, though there were no differences between blue- and brown-eyed females (Coplan et al., 1998). To test the third hypothesis, it would be necessary to perform a longitudinal study on preschool children to search whether the differences in perceived dominance (and social wariness) develops only after the transformation of iris color from blue to brown.

Link (PDF)

Underperformance of Poor White British Boys

The GCSEs are national achievement exams in the U.K. that are similar to the international PISA tests Richard Lynn uses to "calculate" IQ and advance his theories about racial, ethnic and sex differences in intelligence. They're even referenced in one of his sources, but I wonder if he's aware of how badly poor white boys do on them, even compared to nonwhite students from similar disadvantaged, working-class backgrounds.

Here's a chart showing rates of underperformance on GCSE exams by ethnic group and economic status (free school meal eligibility), followed by excerpts from several related articles run by BBC News over the past few years:

Poor white boys struggle in GCSEs

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Poor, white, teenage boys in England have slipped further behind other youngsters in their GCSE exams, reveals a breakdown of this year's results.

The official figures show that fewer than one in five who qualified for free meals achieved the benchmark of five good GCSEs including English and maths.

Twice as many white boys from better-off homes, not eligible for free meals, achieved this level of results.

[...]

Girls are still outperforming boys in achieving the GCSE benchmark — 54.5% to 47.3% — but the gap has narrowed this year by 0.9 of a percentage point.

Black pupils have also improved their GCSE results at a rate that is faster than average — rising to 41.5%.

There has also been a narrowing of the difference between poorer pupils and those who are better off — as defined by eligibility for free school meals.

But this still remains a substantial divide — with 54.4% of pupils not eligible reaching the level of five good GCSEs including maths and English, while only 26.9% of free school meal pupils achieved this.

The results show the intersection of different factors — gender, race, English as a second language and poverty.

But the group of white boys who qualify for free meals is unusual for falling further behind.

The gap between these pupils and their classmates who do not receive free meals has widened from 29.8% to 31.6%.

These results echo findings last month from an analysis of primary school results which found that poor white boys had fallen below almost every other category of pupil.

Link

Poor white boys do worst in tests

Thursday, 19 November 2009

White boys from poorer homes now do worse in primary school tests in England than any other main group, latest figures show.

Only 48% of white British boys eligible for free school meals achieved the expected level in English and maths.

The average for all pupils was 71.8% — and that gap, 23.8 percentage points, was up from 23.1 points last year.

Attainment varied between ethnic groups with Chinese, Irish, Indian and mixed white and Asian children doing best.

[...]

Last year 52.5% of white British boys and girls together had the worst performance, though the girls' attainment was 55.4%.

This year, as a group, white British pupils again did worst.

Again it was the boys' performance that was weaker than the girls'. While 55% of girls achieved the expected level they were outperformed by the next nearest group — Pakistani girls (57.4%).

[...]

There are almost 200,000 white British boys, of whom 31,237 (16%) were from homes poor enough to qualify them for free school meals.

In the past, poor black boys have tended to have the weakest performance.

But this year 51.6% of black boys on free meals made the grade and the gap in their attainment compared with the national average, 20.2, was down from 21.8 in 2008.

Attainment was 49.7% among the weakest group of black boys, those from Caribbean backgrounds.

This left the white British boys on free school meals at the bottom. Even worse for the government is the fact that the attainment gap widened.

This has been a persistent problem for ministers.

Research shows that even children from affluent families who started out in the bottom ability group as toddlers overtake those from the poorest backgrounds who started out in the top ability group, by the time they are six or seven.

LEVEL 4 ENGLISH AND MATHS, FREE SCHOOL MEALS

• All pupils: 53.3%
• White British boys: 48%
• Black Caribbean boys: 49.7%
• Asian boys: 58.7%
• White British girls: 55%
• Pakistani girls: 57.4%

Link

Poor white boys still lag behind

Thursday, 11 December 2008

Five out of six poor white boys in England did not meet the government's target of at least five good GCSEs including English and maths this year.

This compares to 25% of black boys and 32% of Asian boys of similar backgrounds, the new figures show.

Only one group performed worse — Gypsy/Romany pupils on free school meals.

Schools minister Jim Knight said the groups where children were doing well often shared a belief in the "value of family and education".

[...]

Liberal Democrat children's spokesman David Laws said: "Over half of poor Chinese boys achieve the five A*-C standard.

"Urgent questions must be asked about why white boys from similarly deprived backgrounds are falling behind."

Link

White working class boys failing

Thursday, 31 January 2008

Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs including maths and English last year.

Among white boys from more affluent homes — 45% achieved that level of qualification.

Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better — with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.

[...]

"To have 85% of white boys from poor families failing to achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths is truly shocking."

Link

Low attainers 'poor white boys'

Friday, 22 June 2007

Most of the persistent low achievers in England's schools are poor and white, and far more are boys than girls, a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study says.

Chinese and Indian pupils are most successful. Afro-Caribbean pupils do no worse than white British from similar economic backgrounds, results suggest.

[...]

The authors, Robert Cassen and Geeta Kingdon, analysed official data, focusing on four measures of low achievement:

• no passes at all in GCSE/GNVQ exams
• no result better than grade D
• no pass in either English or maths GCSE
• not getting five GCSEs including English and maths at any grade

Prof Cassen also visited schools and colleges and interviewed educationists and council officials.

The chief characteristic of low achievers is that they come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

They are more likely to qualify for free school meals, live in areas of high unemployment, and have single parents who themselves have poor qualifications.

Link

White boys 'trailing at school'

Wednesday, 15 November 2006

Boys from white working-class backgrounds are doing worse at school than black teenagers, according to a Conservative Party report.

The document from the party's social justice policy group says only 17% of white male students gained five or more A*-C grade GCSEs.

That compares with 19% for boys of Caribbean origin, Tories suggest.

[...]

It compared the exam performance of boys in receipt of free school meals from different ethnic backgrounds.

It suggests that social issues, such as a lack of parental support, peer pressure and family breakdown are contributing to white working-class teenagers' poor exam results.

But the report adds that black teenage boys are affected by similar factors, yet are performing marginally better at school.

[...]

"The fact that poor children from Chinese and Indian backgrounds, where family structures are strong and learning is highly valued, outscore so dramatically children from homes where these values are often missing, suggests that culture not ethnicity or cash is the key to educational achievement."

Link

Richard Lynn on Italian "IQ"

Controversial psychologist Richard Lynn, who looks at IQ and its correlates, has published a study claiming to show regional (North-South) differences in intelligence within Italy, which he attempts to correlate with achievement and attribute to admixture. The guy's been called just about every name in the book, and he can now add Padanian Nordicist to that list.

Intelligence

Generally speaking, Lynn is not to be trusted. He's been caught numerous times falsifying and manipulating data to fit his conclusions (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here), and it looks like he's up to his old tricks again.

This time around, he's not even using actual IQ data, but the proxy of scores on reading, math and science tests administered to 15-year-olds (PISA 2006). So he's attempting to quantify innate general intelligence by looking at the academic performance of school kids, a measure that to a large extent involves learned knowledge and other factors. Indeed, while some researchers report a strong correlation between general intelligence and educational attainment, one of Lynn's own sources, Deary et al. (2007), addressing two of his other sources, suggests that caution should be exercised when attempting to equate the two:

There are various possible causes of the cognitive ability-educational achievement association. Bartels et al. (2002b) found a strong genetic correlation between cognitive ability (measured at 5, 7, 10, and 12 years) and educational achievement at age 12. In an overview, Petrill and Wilkerson (2000) concluded that genetics and shared and non-shared environmental factors all influence intelligence and education, with genetics being important in the correlation between them, and non-shared environment being important in discrepancies between intelligence and educational attainments.

Whereas the correlations indicate that around 50% to 60% of the variance in GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] examination points score can be statistically explained by the prior g [general intelligence] factor, by the same token a large proportion of the variance is not accounted for by g. Some of the remaining variance in GCSE scores will be measurement error, but some will be systematic. Thus, non-g factors have a substantial impact on educational attainment. These may include: school attendance and engagement; pupils' personality traits, motivation and effort; the extent of parental support; and the provision of appropriate learning experiences, teaching quality, school ethos, and structure among other possible factors (Petrides, Chamorro-Premuzic, Frederickson, & Furnham, 2005; Strand, 2003).

But Lynn already knows the pitfalls of his approach. Finland had the highest score in Europe on the 2006 PISA tests, and using his method leads to a calculated IQ of 107, yet he reports Finns' IQ as being just 97. Romanians' PISA score is near the very bottom of Europe, leading to an estimate of 85, though their measured IQ is in fact 94 according to Lynn, just three points lower than that of Finns. With discrepancies like that, there's absolutely no reason to trust his calculated IQs of around 100 and 90 for Northern and Southern Italians. Clearly, PISA scores are not a good substitute for IQ.

Then, to try to prove that disparities in intelligence are long-standing, and therefore genetically based, he uses literacy as another (questionable) proxy for IQ. But whereas for other correlates like stature and infant mortality he includes data from the past and present to show that the North-South gap has remained fairly stable, for literacy he only includes data from 1880, when it was extremely large (55% vs. 20%, on average). Obviously, he wants to hide the fact that the gap has been closing steadily since then, and by the 21st century, literacy among Italians under the age of sixty-five was 99.7% in the North and 99% in the South (Istat 2001).

Achievement

Lynn goes on to attempt to correlate his fake IQs with achievement. The primary measure he uses is per capita income, which is double in the North what it is in the South. His source is the Italian Statistical Office, but he should be aware that figures for the South's economic performance are greatly underestimated because the official statistics fail to take into account a large underground economy there, according to Burnett and Vaccara (1999):

But the third factor, somewhat alleviating the second, is the existence of a far vaster private sector than ever shows up in the economic statistics. The size of the lavoro nero sector and the black market in the South clearly exceeds that of any other EU region.... In Calabria, with its dire employment figures, 84 percent of the families own their own home. What such anomalies must mean is that real income in Calabria is far higher than what is "on the books." Many among the vast numbers of officially unemployed are, in fact, partly or fully employed. They are earning no social benefits, but they are earning the daily lire that keep their families afloat. [...] A very large part of the South's hidden labor is made up of entrepreneurs, sometimes also employing black labor, and existing themselves outside official recognition, taxation, protection, control, or counting. A recent analysis concludes that "there exists in several zones of the Mezzogiorno [Southern Italy] a whole fabric of small and very small businesses that escape every census, but that work and make profits, share among themselves a serious level of production, export to other regions [of Italy] and abroad." [...] This massive sector skews all the statistics. It means that the GDP for the Italian South (and for Italy as a whole) is far from accurate. And the unemployment figures do not reflect reality.

Then, with the same goal of establishing a pattern that extends far back in time, he also looks at historical achievement, citing Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. But here again he plays fast and loose with the data. He adds up Murray's "significant figures" for Italy from 1400-1950 and divides them into "North", "Center" and "South" based on their origins. Almost all of them (187 out of 236) come from the "North". However, he explains that he uses the 42nd and 41st lines of latitude as borders, which are, respectively, just north of Rome and just north of Naples. So more than half of the country is put into the "North" category, while the "Center" gets flattened down and pushed into the territory of the "South" (click here to see what that looks like). This is a shameless and transparent ploy by Lynn to hugely inflate the number of significant figures from the "North" and reduce the number elsewhere in the country.

But perhaps even worse, he ignores the main finding of Murray's book, which is that achievement has been concentrated in just a few places, and Southern Italy is but one of many "low-achievement" areas throughout Europe, along with some of the northernmost regions in Italy:


As you can see — and as Murray points out in his book — the highest ranking region is Tuscany, which would normally be considered part of Central Italy. Ironically, Lynn doesn't even have PISA/IQ data for Tuscany, though its 1880 literacy rate isn't particularly high. So he's basically attributing the unique genius of that region to the brainpower of regions that have not produced the same level of genius.

Admixture

Finally, Lynn offers his "explanation" for the disparities in fake IQ, which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be admixture from the Middle East and North Africa, where (according to him) IQs are in the range of 80-84. As you might expect from someone with an agenda and little knowledge of genetics, he references a lot of old studies that use single or small numbers of loci and don't directly address the question of admixture. One of them has "Neolithic demic diffusion in Europe" in its title, yet he stupidly follows the citation with references to historical groups like Phoenicians and Arabs.

Recent genome-wide studies have been able to detect and quantify admixture like never before. Li et al. (2008), using more than 600,000 autosomal SNPs, identify seven global population clusters, including European, Middle Eastern and Central/South Asian. Contrary to Lynn's claims, it's actually the overachieving Tuscans who have a small amount of non-European admixture and not the underachieving Sardinians:


López Herráez et al. (2009) typed the same samples at close to 1 million SNPs and analyzed them in a Western Eurasian context, identifying a number of subclusters. This time, all of the European samples show some minor admixture. Among the Italians, Tuscany still has the most, and Sardinia has a bit too, but so does Lombardy (Bergamo), which is even farther north:

Conclusion

The bottom line is, we don't know the average IQs for different regions in Italy, which is why Richard Lynn had to resort to making them up. And while Southern Italians are likely to be a few points lower than Northern Italians — as the Irish and Scottish are a few points lower than the English — there's absolutely no reason to believe that North and South would be separated at their extremes by almost a full standard deviation. Lynn certainly hasn't proven anything of the kind with this ridiculous study, nor has he provided any valid explanations for such a disparity.

Updates

Since I wrote this article, a number of studies have been published that refute Lynn and confirm what I've said:

• Cornoldi et al. (2010) and Beraldo (2010)
• Felice and Giugliano (2011)
• Daniele and Malanima (2011)
• Robinson et al. (2011)
• D'Amico et al. (2012)
• Templer (2012)
• Cornoldi et al. (2013)

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Richard Lynn. "In Italy, north-south differences in IQ predict differences in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy". Intelligence, 2010.

Survey: Brunettes Trump Blondes ... Again

Every once in a while, there's a survey on men's hair color preferences in women, and the results are always the same. In this new one from the U.K., brunettes are found to be preferred over blondes in every aspect of a relationship, except "fun" in the bedroom.

So blondes really do have more fun: Men claim brunettes make the best wives, but fair haired women are better in bed

The Daily Mail
13th February 2010

Blondes may have more fun — but it comes at a price. Men don't trust them.

A study found that while fair-haired women are considered to be the most adventurous in bed, brunettes are seen as more reliable in a relationship ... and more sexy.

In a poll of 1,500 men, more than 60 per cent thought dark-haired girls were the most trustworthy and loyal, compared with just 14 per cent of blondes.

The result is men feel brunettes make the best wives.

Some 61 per cent said they would prefer to marry a brunette over women with any other hair colour.

Brunettes were also the most popular choice to have a deep and meaningful conversation with (63 per cent).

While 34 per cent of men like the blonde-haired glamour model look, 42 per cent said they actually found brunettes sexier.

More than half (51 per cent) also think women with dark hair are better kissers, while 47 per cent think they are the most sensual.

Nevertheless, blondes take the prize in the bedroom stakes — 36 per cent of men considered those with light hair to be the most wild, while just 31 per cent think of brunettes in the same way.

Commenting on the study for Philips Sensual Massagers, spokesman Karen Moore said:

"Blondes have always had a reputation for being fun, carefree and adventurous and it seems that can also be applied to relationships, as men think they have the best skills when it comes to the bedroom.

"But brunettes seem to have every other aspect of a relationship sewn up, right down to the kissing.

"However, it's interesting that despite thinking blondes are better in bed, men actually see brunettes as being the more passionate.

"This research stands those with dark hair in good stead for a long-term relationship as they look likely to be the best at keeping their other half entertained and happy as well as managing a home and looking after children."

The study also found men see women with dark hair as more maternal, best at looking after family finances and the best cooks.

Link

Nazi Poster Boy Was Jewish

The secret history of the Nazi mascot

By Nick Bryant
BBC News, Melbourne
Tuesday, 21 August 2007



In newsreels, he was paraded as 'the Reich's youngest Nazi' and he witnessed some unspeakable atrocities.

But his SS masters never discovered the most essential detail about his life: their little Nazi mascot was Jewish.

"They didn't know that I was a Jewish boy who had escaped a Nazi death squad. They thought I was a Russian orphan."

Read the full story

Another photo

Italian Facial Composites

Here's a comparison of young male, female and older male phenotypes from Northern and Southern Italy. For the latter two, where there were a lot of image series to choose from, Sicily was selected to represent the south because it's the southernmost region as well as the most maligned, and Veneto was used for the north because it's a populous region that's much less likely than Lombardy or Piedmont to have recent southern influences. Of course, once that decision was made, all applicable photos were included.

It's well-known by now that the idea of a north-south racial divide in Italy is complete nonsense, but it was still surprising just how similar the composites came out. One might expect at least a difference comparable to that observed between Germans and Swedes or Poles and Ukrainians (see the Caucasoid composites), but that didn't turn out to be the case at all. The similarities are indeed quite striking. Another nail in the coffin of Padanian Nordicism.


Related: More Italian Facial Composites

There's No Arguing with a True Believer

This insightful passage from a review of Mary Lefkowitz' Not Out of Africa details the futility of trying to debate an Afrocentrist or other true believer. The writer could easily have included Nordicism among the many other "-isms" cited as examples.

It is not an accident that the students of Afrocentrism and catastrophism act more like disciples of a guru than students of a scientific teacher. They are on a mission, not a quest. And, as with many before them with noble goals, they believe the end justifies the means. Hence, it is nearly futile to engage them in debate. Scholars have difficulty debating opponents such as Afrocentrists, catastrophists, creationists or even anti-abortionists, because they expect their opponents to be civil and play by the rules of scholarly evidence. They mistakenly believe they have entered an arena where all sides are in quest of the same truth. What they are actually getting into is a street fight, where the goal is to defeat and humiliate your enemy. Their opponents don't follow traditional standards of evidence in their printed arguments and diatribes, so why expect them to be any different in a public debate? If you challenge their accuracy, they will question your integrity. If you ask for evidence, they will insult you. If you challenge their sources, you will be asked to prove the absolute certainty of your sources. You think the arena is an intellectual one where the combatants use wit and intelligence to score points, but while you are looking above your opponent's shoulders, he will kick you in the groin. You may have the evidence and the arguments on your side but your opponent doesn't care about the evidence and is not interested in your arguments. He already knows the truth.

Link

"Best of Sicily" Fraud

On the surface, Best of Sicily (BoS) looks like a harmless travel and tourism site. But dig a little deeper and you'll find references to Sicily as "African" and Sicilians as "descended from Arabs". Move on to the site's History section and the editors' multi-cultural and multi-racial agenda becomes overtly clear. They've turned Sicily into a diverse island whose inhabitants are an even mix of all of its different settlers and conquerors over the centuries, ignoring cultural factors that may have acted as barriers to intermarriage with certain groups, and projecting their own modern obsession with "cultural harmony" onto ancient and medieval populations.

Upon being confronted with contemporary scientific data on Sicilian Origins that shatters their unsupported fantasies, the site's editors, instead of welcoming the new information, responded with a long-winded exercise in denial called Genetics & Anthropology in Sicily. Not surprisingly, it applies all of the old tricks Nordicists and Afrocentrists use to prove what isn't true, like referencing outdated material on sickle cell and other blood groups (they call a 1978 study "the best kind of research currently available"), giving precedence to speculations based on historical records, and rationalizing it all with vague half-truths and tirades against people with dissenting opinions. Whatever it takes to avoid the facts I've collected, of which they've been well aware for some time now.

You see, they have found my site useful for some things, like obtaining photos of Sicilian models to pretty up their Genetics page. But they don't dare divulge the source, and they absolutely will not post any of the relevant genetic data—though they're quick to dismiss it indirectly, going so far as to warn their readers against "[t]he existence of other, seemingly conflicting, studies, seeking to identify other gene markers possibly irrelevant to migration history, or incompletely documented, or cited out of context". Can you smell the desperation?

The reason they do all this is obvious: They know the available evidence categorically disproves their propaganda, and they can't risk their visitors being exposed to the truth, or even to any interpretation that threatens to undo the elaborate myth they've created. To put it plainly, they're liars and cowards, no different from the Neo-Nazi and Black Power revisionists targeted by my website (who, incidentally, often quote from BoS to further their agendas). But they get away with it by wrapping their politics in a deceptively neutral package. The average visitor to the site inevitably falls for it, but there's no reason you should.

So if you happen to come across a website that endorses BoS, I would urge you to send the webmaster a link to this blog entry, with a carbon copy to the BoS editors. Or you could just e-mail the link directly to the editors with an expression of disapproval (but don't expect a reply). Also, if you see their site referenced in a forum as support for some outrageous claim, you might want to direct the offender(s) to this page as well. The BoS crew has done such a thorough job of maintaining its deception that this is the only way to get the truth out.

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Here are some keywords to make sure that when this blog item gets indexed, it'll appear with Best of Sicily in search results: Palermo, Catania, Messina, Siracusa, Agrigento, Cefalù, Monreale, Taormina film festival, Mount Etna, cities, towns, culture, society, trip, vacation, car rentals, hotels, restaurants, cuisine, food, wine, arts, books, heritage, genealogy, ethnology, Saracens, Moors, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Normans, online magazine, Italy, Italians.