This is an interesting story:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/02/wroman02.xml
The little Chinese girl with blonde hair is adorable. She’s picture #7 in the link on the page.
Read more at the link above.
Dang it. Can’t get the pics link in the article to work. It’s either this stupid dialup or a Javascriptamabob glitch.
Cool article, though. Uighurs, too, show traits that we think of as Caucasian, but I seem to recall that it’s been that way with them for as long as history records.
My paternal grandfather showed traces of Tatar features, not unusual among some Slavs. Those traits didn’t pass on to his offspring, though. Oh, wait: edit that. One of my aunts shows those traits. Nobody else does, though.
Interesting. The Historians say that Byzantium wouldn’t have survived as a city without silk from the East, because the climate scarcely suited any other material for dress.
And there’s the mysterious Celtic Tribe whose remains were found in Manchuria.
And the Greek invaders of India who influenced the Indian sculpture and were in turn influenced by Indian philosophy.
The only wonder is why it hasn’t happened the other way, too, with far-eastern physiognomy appearing in western Europe.
I vaguely remember seeing a show on the history of mummification, and how it was first probably learned about by early peoples due to the effect of quick drying of corpses near desert locations. The show gave examples in various parts of the world, and one of them was on the western edge of the Gobi. What was remarkable about these naturally created mummies was that they were all tall, and there was a small bit of evidence that they had blond hair. The thought was that they were Vikings, not Romans. Neat stuff, eh?
djm
There was a documentary on PBS a while back called [u]Secrets of the Dead[/u] about women warriors who intermarried with the Sauromatians. In that documentary, I remember a focus on this blonde child found in China whose DNA was tied to the Amazons.
- From the 2nd century B.C. to the 2nd to 3rd century A.D., the Sarmatians migrate to the west and north of the Black Sea, and eventually invade Dacia (now Romania). In the 3rd century A.D. the Sarmatians are invaded by the Goths, and in 370 A.D. they are overtaken by Huns and either killed or assimilated. Jeannine Davis-Kimball believes that remnants of the integrated Sarmatian population can still be found in the descendants of that conquering horde of Mongols. The Mongols relocated from southern Russia to western China and western Mongolia 150 to 200 years ago, where they reside today.
Amazing what raping and pillaging results in. Well, at least the former.
When I lived in Hyderabad, India, there were formerly nomadic Banjara people who the govt. had settled into what was basically a housing project. The people would go into town to pursue various occupations, including begging and such. One of the most intriguing women I ever saw was a young lady with the most golden skin and hair, with blue eyes, and to top it off, her baby was similarly colored. Got a picture somewhere buried in the slide archive. No telling where her features traced to, though her tribe used to go from India up to one of the central republics (at the time Soviet) annually. I stared at her for a bit too long and was quickly surrounded by locals, who were watching the tourist watch the local.
Whenever I read a story like this, I am reminded how beautiful and how truly different people really are. I mean physically, the skins and bones and smiles and hair. If I were an artist I think I would paint nothing but people.