Anthropological Myths that never die...

[Gospodine]

No matter how many times these theories get dispelled, or are shown to be seriously lacking in evidence, people still keep bringing them up as the greatest ideas since sliced bread and we end up flogging a dead horse for 30 pages, when probably in the last 3 months alone they have been debunked at least several times.

My favourites:

• The ethnic groups of the Balkans have recent, Turkish/Anatolian genetic input from the Ottoman Empire.
  
  
• Portuguese/Spaniards/Sicilians/Maltese have recent Sub-Saharan African admixture (usually quoted as being anywhere from a few percent to 15%) from the Moors/Islamic Caliphate/Saracens.
  
  
• Surnames are a reliable indicator of ancestral origin. So if someone's last name means "Gypsy" in a certain language; there's no way they're not a gypsy.
  
  
• Atypical-looking individuals from a particular country MUST HAVE foreign ancestry from a few generations ago. Rather than being the products of a combination of recessive genes, genetic drift, lifestyle/environmental/nutritional factors and numerous other perfectly plausible explanations.
  
  
• Serbs, Croats and Bulgarians descend in part or whole from various Iranian-speaking tribes that originally dwelled either near the Black Sea, in the Caucasus or in Central Asia.
  
  
• Hungarians are the descendants of various Eurasian steppe nomads like the Huns, Scythians, Cumans, Pechenegs, Avars, etc and have a higher than normal East Asian genetic influence compared to European averages.
  
  
• Turks have a significant amount of Central Asian/East Asian admixture (i.e. more than 15%) that either equals or surpasses their Caucasus-Anatolian admixture.
  
  
• If the native language of a particular ethnic group is from an entirely different family compared to most neighbouring languages; the said ethnic group must have descent from elsewhere (i.e. the original urheimat of the language family) and be genetically distant to their neighbours.
  
  
• Southern Europeans always have less Upper Paleolithic genetic lineages than Northern Europeans.
  
  
• There exists an unreduced, widespread, easily identifiable "Slavic" and "Germanic" look common to Eastern European and North-Western Europe respectively.
  
  
• Language replacement/Cultural Assimilation must equal gene replacement. When one culture supersedes another they marginalize all pre-existing genetic lineages and replace them with more recent Neolithic or Bronze Age ones. (Because civilizations in the BC era could easily move millions of people around effortlessly and commit ruthlessly efficient Holocausts that eradicated every trace of a previous civilization.)
  
  
• The earliest Europeans (Cro-Magnons) were Nordic-looking "Aryans". (Highly unlikely since the mutation for lighter-pigmented skin only arose as early as 10,000 years ago or as late as 6,000 years ago)

List yours...

[Sikeliot]

1) That Portuguese, Spanish, and French people are of "Ancient Roman" descent.. meaning the people in those countries today all came from Italy at one point.

2) Sicilians are equal parts Norman, Greek, Roman, Moorish, etc. They're actually in reality not a hodge-podge of genes and "a little bit of everything" unlike what you hear but rather didn't mix much with invaders after the Greeks.

but perhaps my biggest anthropological pet peeve:

3) I'll use my own ethnicity as an example.. the idea that a blonde, blue eyed individual will cluster in Northern Europe and not next to the rest of the people of their group, or that a very swarthy, MENA looking person will cluster with non-Europeans. Chances are the two individuals will cluster side by side, despite their appearances.. a light Southern European is not going to cluster in Northern Europe and a dark MENA looking one will not cluster in the Middle East!

[Rastko]

Slovenians are Germanic and don't overlap with other South Slavs.

Dark pigmented Serb is actually Gypsy/Vlach/Turk/Bulgarian.

[Sikeliot]

Here are more:

- Balkan Slavs are Slavic invaders to the Balkans, but Greeks and Albanians are of pure, untouched bloodlines that have not changed a bit in the past three thousand years.

- Non-European genetic input in Europe is due to invaders who should not be counted as part of the gene pool (Moors in Spain and Sicily, any Turkish influence in the Balkans) but European invasions (i.e. Slavs into the Balkans, Visigoths into Spain, Normans into the UK) are considered completely acceptable and someone with higher than average of these is still fully whatever their ethnicity is and not seen as lesser.

[Virtuous]

No matter how many times these theories get dispelled, or are shown to be seriously lacking in evidence, people still keep bringing them up as the greatest ideas since sliced bread and we end up flogging a dead horse for 30 pages, when probably in the last 3 months alone they have been debunked at least several times.

My favourites:

[LIST][*]The ethnic groups of the Balkans have recent, Turkish/Anatolian genetic input from the Ottoman Empire.

[*]Portuguese/Spaniards/Sicilians have recent Sub-Saharan African admixture (usually quoted as being anywhere from a few percent to 15%) from the Moors/Islamic Caliphate/Saracens.


List yours...

add Malta.

[Virtuous]

Actually add nothing, unfortunately for the last decade I have seen a significant increase in Illegal spawn .

[Sikeliot]

OH ALSO

- Ethiopians and Eritreans do not get their Arabian looking features from Southwest Asia, but rather due to evolution of these traits independently in Sub-Saharan Africa.. thus, someone like this:




is 100% Sub-Saharan African and has no Southwest Asian ancestry, and Ethiopians are the purest and oldest group of black people in existence.

[Archduke]

Dark pigmented Serb is actually Gypsy/Vlach/Turk/Bulgarian.

And "Shiptar"

- Romanians are the darkest people in Europe.

- There is no difference between Russians and Ukrainians.

[pinguino]

Myth: Mestizo people are inferior
Myth: Whites in Latin America are fully European
Myth: People in Latin America follow a perfect racial pyramid, with the whitest at the top and the darkest at the bottom.

[Sikeliot]

Oh and back to the Ethiopian thing, people on these sites who think that the pictures of starving people from Ethiopia's most southern and isolated provinces, populated by minority tribes more related to south Sudanese, are what Ethiopians actually look like.