I am referring to pardos claros on the Portuguese translation of Gray & Tocher's standards used by Tamagnini:
The Scottish survey includes very light hazel in medium eyes but this meaning is not made clear by Tamagnini (pardos claros can mean light brown not specifically very light hazel):
https://books.google.com/books?id=jP...lue%20&f=false
Even though the official standards are essentially the same between the two studies aside from changes arising from the translation process, functionally the standards had significant differences.
Despite explicit instructions indicating otherwise the Portuguese observers included light brown as blond hair which is the only way the results for fair hair make sense. ~20% fair hair found for Portuguese schoolchildren overall was slightly lower than the darker end of variation in Scotland and there were Portuguese districts higher that, but any real overlap at all between Scottish and Portuguese populations in fair hair is doubtful. Very light brown hair was included but what is considered near blond in Portugal is likely just regular light brown in Scotland, so the subjective component comes into play. This likely also impacted eye color with even light brown eyes or amber eyes already being considered fairly light in Portugal while clearly dark in Scotland. Since there was some ambiguity in the tables because of the inclusion of pardos claros the observers in Portuguese schools likely often included light brown eyes. Even the light category could be ambiguous because minor flecks of darker pigment might disregarded by some observers. Pure blue is very consistent between the two Tamagnini studies because it is so unmistakable.
Results for Gray & Tocher's Scottish divisions:
I'm comparing functional categories and it is possible light eyes from the first study ended up being largely comparable to medium eyes from the latter study despite intention. Only with scaled observations like in the later Tamagnini study of adults can the categories taken more or less literally. Without a standard scale to make a direct comparison to the cultural differences in perception of pigmentation may have an influence. Northern Europeans tend to have more rigid standards for light features than Southern Europeans due to differences in average pigmentation. It takes extra mental effort to realign perceptions to the descriptions of a table. This factor could account for some unexpected differences between the results Gray & Tocher and Tamagnini despite essentially the same official standards.
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