Quote:
Originally Posted by
Teacher 
Actually, no. The greatest concentration of blond peoples is in Norway, Sweden, and the Baltic countries. In some (not all) places there, up to 80 percent of a given population is blond. The gene for light pigmentation is thought to have first appeared somewhere in the Baltic region during the last ice age (though the recent finding of a Neanderthal gene in the caucasian genome may push that back) and spread most quickly through modern-day Scandinavia. It spread east and south through emigration and conquest.
That would be southern Germans. Indeed, most German immigrants were from southern Germany due to the severe weather conditions that were wreaking havoc on the crops there. The same is true of the Germans who migrated to Russia: they were all Swabians. Northern and, to a large degree, central Germans have a much higher instance of blond hair (as do the Dutch, Frisians, and Danes).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
FLMountainMan Damn, Teacher, living up to your handle in this thread.
Indeed Teacher, I humbly defer to you for the rest of this thread... I thought my nerdom was unmatched in this field, but you've clearly done your reading
That's interesting what you say about Ben Franklin's observation of
southern Germans... I went there once and I indeed remember seeing a lot of olive-skinned darker people around, they looked very 'european' to me, and I suppose in the US they interbred with pastier British folk and it's become rarer. So I'm still not clear where blonde hair came from- is it exclusively and Indo-European or Teutonic thing or perhaps a pre-Indo-European or Slavic trait that became part of Norse Europe during the first millenium?
