On the ancestry of modern Normans

[Ikiru]

The opinion that modern Normans largely or significantly descend from the Vikings who settled in Northern Neustria and gave their name to the province they acquired and to its inhabitants is widespread. The fact that at most 3,000 Vikings could peacefully alter beyond measure the gene pool of a province of about 1 million inhabitants seems however quite unlikely. DNA testing on Norman inhabitants of Contentin - the place in Normandy where the Vikings are thought to have settled the most - have given a result of only 11 people bearing the I1 haplogroup out of the 89 individuals tested. (1) This isn't a good sign for Normandy as a whole.

A more efficient method is to assess directly the phenotypes of modern Normans before the recent immigration waves. This can be done by looking at old high school pictures of the 1970's and 1980's, before the recent immigration waves. Small cities should be favored over big cities, because the millions of immigrants from Italy, Spain and Portugal who settled in Northern France in the 1880-1960 era mostly did so in the larger cities.

I've selected three cities according to their geographical position: Coutances (Western Normandy, Cotentin), Lisieux (Central Normandy) and Gisors (Eastern Normandy).
Here are the pictures: (2)

Coutances (Lycée C.F. Lebrun):
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Lisieux (Lycée Marcel Gambier):
Attachment 84679
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Gisors (Lycée Louise Michel):
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I just see Gallo-Romans (of the Northern variety: more Gaulish than Roman), not Vikings. Only in the pictures of Coutances is there a slightly higher proportion of light-haired people.

Now let's compare it with French students from a city on the same latitude as Normandy, but in a region in which no significant Viking or Frankish settlement occurred: take Épernay, small city in the purely Gallo-Roman province of Champagne, Northeastern France.

Épernay (Lycée Godart Roger):
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Striking isn't?

Feel free to post your thoughts and comments.

1. https://thornews.com/2018/01/17/do-t...ing-ancestors/
2. I picked the first pictures with good lightning on the website : https://copainsdavant-faq.linternaut...e-ou-de-groupe
This website hosts free-to-access pre-2000's class pictures of most middle and high schools of France. A wonderful tool for demographic analysis.

[Rouxinol]

Interesting.

There are obvious foreigners even in pictures as old as those from small towns in the 1970s and 1980s (I even spotted a few East Asians).

Yes, I wasn't expecting to see Norsemen, however the frequency of light types seems higher in the pictures from Normandy than in those from Épernay.

[Ikiru]

Yes there are obvious foreigners who stand out from the groups, including Southern European immigrants.
Had I added a few pictures from Scandinavian classes then perhaps the similitude between Lisieux, Gisors and Épernay would have stricken you more.

I think this method applied with a "hair lightness scale" to the whole of France could lead to very interesting results. Firstly it should replace those contradictory maps based on very loose historical knowledge and not on statistics such as these: Attachment 84696
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I've already started a while ago with three cities (% of light-haired people, number of students examined):

Attachment 84695