Eye and hair colour distribution among 1272 Germans + general comment

[Lucas]

They did score as less blond but not dramatically either.
Besides, every state has its variations. Sometimes a certain trait peaks in one part of the country, and another one - in a different part of it.
Obviously blondism among Germans peaks in the north, while rufosity is most common in the south.
In light eyes total the difference between the regions ain't dramatic at all.
People here generally like to exaggerate things. Northern Germans are often portrayed as Swedes, while southerners are depicted as on par with Italians - both stupid and incorrect claims.

I think it is more simple explanation of this phenomenon.

First, every region of Germany received influx of large number of resettled Germans from the East after 1945. Which change some local phenotype stability.

Second, it was much more internal migration in modern times than before (like in every country). Especially now it is Bavaria which is most reach German region and many northerners emigrated there for work. Thus it was blondwashed a little or more.

[aherne]

Personal observations based on German places I've visited:

- Vienna: definitely a fringe region. Many natives there don't look German, while others do! Failed to see any average: people look really diverse there.
- Klagenfurt: most people there look like Germanized SW Slavs. The average is brown haired, brown eyed but light skinned (like in France).
- Cologne: the average is like me. Medium brown hair, light eyes...
- Kassel: same, but with higher percentage of dark eyes.
- Hannover: the average is lighter than me. Light brown hair, light eyes, but many have platinum hair as adults and Scandinavian features... Definitely felt like a southerner there!

[XenophobicPrussian]

I am surprised how light Southern Germans turned out, especially in eye colour (70%!), actually lighter-eyed than people from Central Germany according to your collected data.

He actually has them as very dark(not in total numbers, but in comparison). The 70% light eye colour doesn't mean much when Hungarians also have 65.14% and Bulgarians have 55.44%.

He actually has Hungarians blonder than South Germans(15.25% vs 15.09% for males, no comment). Overall The Blade's results indicate European pigmentation as pretty homogenous and with little difference between ethnic groups(there are older studies that share his total numbers, but not in comparison to other nations, I haven't seen one that has all Europeans this close in number, especially regarding specific ethnic groups, for example an old Bulgarian study that has Bulgarians around what Blade has in light eye colour, has Norwegians as 98% light eyed, and Japanese 9%), as is phenotype(such as Hallstatt, Corded, Keltid Nordids, Tronder, Anglo-Saxon, Brunn, Phalian and Borreby being common in Portugal, again, no comment). I'm guessing Poland will wind up being blonder or as blonde as Germany, but I won't be peer reviewing that as I'm still peer reviewing Blade's Swedish and Estonian samples, which is taking a long time, people can decide whether his other numbers are accurate if they want to or not based on that.

I think you over-exaggerate blondism in your results (not just of Germans). Coon's results of Fehmarn males (where Germans are at their blondest: a few miles off homeland of all Germanics: Scandinavia):

https://www.theapricity.com/snpa/index2.htm



This happens to be something I've also found among my German ancestors: platinum blonde hair up until school age (my father, my grand-father, my great-grandfather), then hair turning darker and darker until it reached very dark brown at age 50. Eye color always blue... But in my extended family there were plenty of Alpines, plenty of people with brown eyes but Faelid features.



This book is a masterpiece! Every observation is confirmed by scientific observation and intuition while people here believe in negro Cheddar man...

Coon literally called Fehmarn Islanders among the darkest non-southern Germans, because of a higher number of paleolithic survivors, and anything Coon says belongs in the garbage can anyway.

The hair is brown as a rule among adults; 54 per cent could be classed as dark brown (Fischer #27, 4-7); the rest are divided between golden and ashen shades of light brown and blond. The hair as a rule darkens steadily throughout life; at the onset of senility, 80 per cent of all non-white hair observed was dark brown, as against 7 per cent at the age of 6 years. By contrast, the eyes are very light; less than 3 per cent have brown or dark-mixed shades (Martin #1-6); 78 per cent have eyes which are pure light or almost entirely so (Martin #13-16). This combination of very light eyes with brown hair is typical of Palaeolithic survivors in northern Europe, rather than of Nordics.

Did you even read the book?

Also, it's rather amusing you go onto say these numbers are exaggerated and then praise Coon's book, while Coon(and all older anthropologists, some even had Germany as majority blonde) had Germany as a whole double blonde what Blade has(which is wrong, Blade's Germany male number is similar to mine, at around 20%)

@Blade Not sure why you're using the outdated Fst method to show genetic distance. It uses too few SNPs(only 3,500 in this case) versus over 100k for conventional methods. Could've just posted the PCA plot on that Wiki page. For example, South Germans are not genetically closer to Latvians than they are to Poles or Swedes like that fst chart says. It's only showing that because Latvians have some very recent German admixture. Similarly, Fst will show a closer relation between Spaniards and Mexicans, when Mexicans are actually genetically closer to every single other European group than Mexicans. You need something that uses more SNPs.

This PCA is much more accurate:



or something like G25 or K36 is even better(although not from an actual paper like the former):





Also, I know the N sizes will be too low to be relevant, but do you have region specific(like Mecklenburg) results saved?

[The Blade]

He actually has them as very dark(not in total numbers, but in comparison). The 70% light eye colour doesn't mean much when Hungarians also have 65.14% and Bulgarians have 55.44%.

He actually has Hungarians blonder than South Germans(15.25% vs 15.09% for males, no comment). Overall The Blade's results indicate European pigmentation as pretty homogenous and with little difference between ethnic groups(there are older studies that share his total numbers, but not in comparison to other nations, I haven't seen one that has all Europeans this close in number, especially regarding specific ethnic groups, for example an old Bulgarian study that has Bulgarians around what Blade has in light eye colour, has Norwegians as 98% light eyed, and Japanese 9%), as is phenotype(such as Hallstatt, Corded, Keltid Nordids, Tronder, Anglo-Saxon, Brunn, Phalian and Borreby being common in Portugal, again, no comment). I'm guessing Poland will wind up being blonder or as blonde as Germany, but I won't be peer reviewing that as I'm still peer reviewing Blade's Swedish and Estonian samples, which is taking a long time, people can decide whether his other numbers are accurate if they want to or not based on that.

Coon literally called Fehmarn Islanders among the darkest non-southern Germans, because of a higher number of paleolithic survivors, and anything Coon says belongs in the garbage can anyway.



Did you even read the book?

Also, it's rather amusing you go onto say these numbers are exaggerated and then praise Coon's book, while Coon(and all older anthropologists, some even had Germany as majority blonde) had Germany as a whole double blonde what Blade has(which is wrong, Blade's Germany male number is similar to mine, at around 20%)

@Blade Not sure why you're using the outdated Fst method to show genetic distance. It uses too few SNPs(only 3,500 in this case) versus over 100k for conventional methods. Could've just posted the PCA plot on that Wiki page. For example, South Germans are not genetically closer to Latvians than they are to Poles or Swedes like that fst chart says. It's only showing that because Latvians have some very recent German admixture. Similarly, Fst will show a closer relation between Spaniards and Mexicans, when Mexicans are actually genetically closer to every single other European group than Mexicans. You need something that uses more SNPs.

This PCA is much more accurate:



or something like G25 or K36 is even better(although not from an actual paper like the former):





Also, I know the N sizes will be too low to be relevant, but do you have region specific(like Mecklenburg) results saved?

A brief answer to your post point by point:
1) No, I only have collected data north vs. centre vs. south. In order of every single province to have a reasonable result in the range of standard (and not huge) deviation one would need an even greater amount of people. Yeah, I enjoy doing these from time to time but I have a life which is my priority after all (besides, I only have unlimited data access for my own country and even in its case I used 2002 people, not tens of thousands). Nevertheless, my data for each state is based on more people than ToeKneeHwin's, for instance, and covers both sexes.
2) I found the Latvian result a little peculiar, too, but still the majority of genetic results I posted make a lot of sense and the rest can be explained with additional comments like Germans in Latvia, etc.
3) Aherne is actually among the few people finding my blondism values greater than his perception apparently shows. If you look at the posting history of this forum you'll find tons of people who are either stubborn (like our weird Flandrian fella who commented this thread, too), or consider everything lighter than their dark brown hair blond Of course, some like me or Lucas follow the actual meaning of blond hair.
4) I'm pretty sure some people doing similar studies in the past either didn't have unified standards or used a lot of SSA admixed players for countries like Portugal (which would be somewhat ok if it was Brazil but not in Iberian case) or Roma footballers for states like Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and to an extent even Hungary.

[Peter Parker]

I think too many people believe that Northern Germans look like Swedes but I was pretty surprised to see that darker brown shades aren't even that uncommon in the North.

[Oliver109]

Yeah apparently it is to do with past migrations from the south, especially at the time of WW2, it is still surprising though when i researched phenotypes in Schleswig Holstein that they are really no blonder than the eastern English while the Dutch are quite a bit blonder with the Danes being very blonde indeed.

[aherne]

Yeah apparently it is to do with past migrations from the south, especially at the time of WW2, it is still surprising though when i researched phenotypes in Schleswig Holstein that they are really no blonder than the eastern English while the Dutch are quite a bit blonder with the Danes being very blonde indeed.

This was true 100 years ago, too. Coon and previous anthropologists noticed it already... On average, the English are definitely more Germanic than Germans and the reason is very simple: Germanic element that came from Anglo-Saxons got doubled through massive Norse invasions. If latter wouldn't have happened, the English would have been as Germanic as the Tyrolese

[Jana]

This was true 100 years ago, too. Coon and previous anthropologists noticed it already... On average, the English are definitely more Germanic than Germans and the reason is very simple: Germanic element that came from Anglo-Saxons got doubled through massive Norse invasions. If latter wouldn't have happened, the English would have been as Germanic as the Tyrolese

English are less Germanic than Germans on average, but at the same time more northwest Euro on average.

[aherne]

English are less Germanic than Germans on average, but at the same time more northwest Euro on average.

You forgot to provide evidence from those bullshit "oracles" My evidence is that what my eyes see: if you take a random group of English people, they definitely look more Scandinavian than a random group of German people. Historically speaking, my evidence is also sound: all Germanic ancestry in Germans comes from a single migration of settlers from Scandinavia during antiquity then followed by gradual assimilation of Kelts, Venetes (not those from Italy), Slavs and Romans (romanized people) that is still not complete to this day (pockets of Rheto-Romance speakers today, pockets of Oil speakers near Cologne during middle ages, pockets of Sorbs near Poland). In England it came from two migration events:

- migration of Anglo-Saxons
- migration of Norsemen (Danes, Norwegians)

Both involved massive population changes, causing sudden shift of language and culture in areas affected. It is true that invaders were less numerous than locals, but the cumulative effect was very significant...

[Jana]

You forgot to provide evidence from those bullshit "oracles" My evidence is that what my eyes see: if you take a random group of English people, they definitely look more Scandinavian than a random group of German people. Historically speaking, my evidence is also sound: all Germanic ancestry in Germans comes from a single migration of settlers from Scandinavia during antiquity then followed by gradual assimilation of Kelts, Venetes (not those from Italy), Slavs and Romans (romanized people) that is still not complete to this day (pockets of Rheto-Romance speakers today, pockets of Oil speakers near Cologne during middle ages, pockets of Sorbs near Poland). In England it came from two migration events:

- migration of Anglo-Saxons
- migration of Norsemen (Danes, Norwegians)

Both involved massive population changes, causing sudden shift of language and culture in areas affected. It is true that invaders were less numerous than locals, but the cumulative effect was very significant...

Genetics is far more reliable than your fairy tales. Even most Germanic English regions (Yorkshire, East Anglia) are less than 50% Anglo-Saxon on average.
Meanwhile northwest Germans like low Saxons, Frisians or good amount of people from North-Rhine Westphalia are predominately Germanic.

Reason why English look more northwestern than Germans on average is because non-Germanic natives of Britain were very NW Euro like in DNA and very similar to Germanics genetically.
While in Germany pre-Germanic population was genetically further apart from conquering Germanics.

Which is why population like Irish has lower distance to Scandinavians than Germans do on average.