Kusala wrote: ↑Wed Sep 08, 2021 9:52 pm
The Indo-European expansion to the East is not a 19-th century myth. The Scythian and other Iranic tribes are recorded by the ancient Greeks and Chinese. Are you telling me that Caucasian looking people in places like Iran all the way to Western China is nothing more than a fabrication and that blonde and red head blue eyed individuals never existed in that part of the world?
This little girl and her sister from Iran is a perfect example of ancient Indo-European settlement in Central Asia.
In the Buddha's teachings ancestry is less important than ones lineage in the dhamma. Ones conduct.
We are attached to our identity views and concepts no matter their accuracy if they make us feel good.
So the following will be a good excericise is examining and abandonong idealized and wishful perceptions.
Actually you are unwittingly rehashing some standard false stereotypes there. Same with cherry picking Bollywood actors where there is a strong post colonial prejudice that the upper castes bought into to try to appear 'more European' and select fair skinned actors.
Same when we see the Kalash who look white and would seem a good candidate for the 'blonde Aryan' myth.
This belief seems reasonable at face value because the Indian population varies in light to dark skin whereas Europeans are mainly 'white'. But then we look deeper and there are big twists in the story.
Indeed, a picture can be worth a thousand words...
As DNS mentioned there seems to be a preference in the West to try to turn all religious figures into European blue eyed blondes. It's seems not enough to acknowledge the shared kinship between Indo-Europeans, we need him to be 'white'. This occurs with Jesus and an attempt has been made with the Buddha and even to falsely claim that upper castes were 'white' before being mixed which you are rehashing.
Also the study you posted is more than 20 years old. There have been more recent studies that make things more clear.
First up it is misleading to simply say the upper castes are more 'European'.
Who are white people aka Europeans?
Europeans themselves are actually a mix of 3 different tribes and they have also become much lighter skinned over last few thousand years.
https://www.livescience.com/ancient-che ... -lola.html
This is what a Norwegian, called Western Hunter Gatherer looked like just 5-6000 years ago.
As we will see, it is sanna or our perception which 'colors' our views of this.
"Blue eyes, it suggests, could come from hunter gatherers in Mesolithic Europe (10,000 to 5,000 BC), while other characteristics arrived later with newcomers from the East.....
The Bronze Age (around 3,000–1,000 BC) was a time of major advances... One people that was particularly important in the spread of both early Bronze-Age technologies and genetics were the Yamnaya...
By comparing DNA from various Bronze-Age European cultures to that of both Yamnaya and the Neolithic farmers, researchers found that most had a mixture of the two backgrounds....
And it appears that the Yamnaya also moved east. The Afanasievo culture of the Altai-Sayan region in central Asia seemed to be genetically indistinguishable from the Yamnaya...
The DNA of several hunter gatherers living in Europe long before the Bronze Age was also tested. It showed that they probably had a combination of features quite striking to the modern eye: dark skin with blue eyes.
The blue eyes of these people – and of the many modern Europeans who have them – are thanks to a specific mutation near a gene called OCA2. As none of the Yamnaya samples have this mutation, it seems likely that modern Europeans owe this trait to their ancestry from these European hunter gatherers of the Mesolithic (10,000-5,000 BC).
Two mutations responsible for light skin, however, tell quite a different story. Both seem to have been rare in the Mesolithic, but present in a large majority by the Bronze Age (3,000 years later), both in Europe and the steppe (Yamnaya)...."
https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna ... ance-43078
So in summary its more accurate to say upper castes have more Yamnaya ancestry (thought to be the so called 'Aryans') and so do Europeans. But they mixed in both Europe and India with earlier farmer populations and hunter gatherers.
Also surprisingly the blue eyes come from the dark skinned hunter gathers in Europe, not the 'Aryans' who later came and invaded/migrated to Europe and India, from Central Asia.
So it looks like what happened was Europeans have only been light skinned for about 6 thousand years. They went 'all the way' with the skin lightening since then while in India it was mainly the North that got skin lightened by marriage selection not the South.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/scienc ... 556277.cms
To make matters more interestng and fully end the blonde Aryan myth, recent genetics and culture has linked the very dark skinned Dravidians like Tamils to migrations both to South India and to ancient Europe even before the Aryans came, from the Indus Valley region. So a migration of dark skinned 'caucasians' who lost the color on the European side.
"Ukrainian archaeologist Iurii Mosenkis, according to whom the Dravidian culture of the Indus valley has expanded to Iran (Zagros culture), Mesopotamia (Ubaid culture), Anatolia (Çatal Höyük), the Balkans (Vinča) to Northern Gaul (megaliths of the Vth millennium BC in Barnenez (Brittany) and in the Parisian basin), as well as to Majkop (North Caucasus) to Northern Gaul (Parisian basin) and Southern Gaul (Fontbouisse, Languedoc), French megalithic sites where can be found according to him characteristical elements of Ubaid and Majkop cultures. He also underlines that the cult language of Vinča could be Dravidian, given the Dravidian etymology of several words of the language and the script of Vinča."
https://www.researchgate.net/project/Ou ... Dravidians
Now if we compare to those blonde Kalash that we would love to romanticize, they do not have the genetics of Europeans, those blondes have almost the same genetic profile as other Indian groups including the darkest skinned Tamils of South India! That is the 3 main tribes that form the Indian population.
You can see here 'Steppe' in blue (which is the same as what is called Yamnaya and is speculated to be the 'Aryan' part).
Actually it is skin lightening that is the mystery process that helps us understand all this and the similar appearance of people from India to Europe with variance in coloration.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24244186/
And this picture really demystifies the debate.
Did the Aryans have any with blue eyes and blonde? Unlikely, majority probably had the typical dark hair and eyes is what the studies of the Steppe dna tells us. And either way they were all very dark just a few thousand years earlier, with the original very dark color only preserved in India especially South for speculated sociodemographic factors.
It just goes to show how sanna conditions papanka and then our preferred identity views come in, reinforced by more thought and perception.
All very interesting and still being researched. Expect science to make more revelations in future!