Were Blue Eyes and Blonde Hair common among Ancient Greek aristocrats?

The Greeks believed that humans were just corrupted descendants of the Gods. Part of their ideology about everything getting worse with time. (Indirectly an attempt to understand entropy.)

Darwin's idea about apes evolving "upward" to humans would have been blasphemy to them.


So they would have observed that the child of a blond haired/blue eyed person and a dark haired/ brown eyed person usually ends up with dark hair and brown eyes. And on that basis would assume the recessive gene was the "pure" one. (If it had been the other way around, with dark/brown being recessive, we would see brown eyed, dark haired gods.)


I don't think it was intended to be sinister, or justify genocide. I think they were just a bunch of philosophers trying to make sense of the world, using very limited information to go on.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
The Greeks believed that humans were just corrupted descendants of the Gods. Part of their ideology about everything getting worse with time. (Indirectly an attempt to understand entropy.)

Darwin's idea about apes evolving "upward" to humans would have been blasphemy to them.

I think ancient Greeks like Anaximander would disagree with the above statement. www.insider.com...

originally posted by: zazzafrazz

originally posted by: TobyFlenderson
a reply to: ancienthistorian

You present quite a bit of evidence for this. To what end?

Yeah, royalty are blonde and blue eyed (well I think we can guess to what end )...

OP, they probably weren't unless they had Slavic or Northern European in them....

Also, a sightly important note to the premise: the gods aren't real, so their imaginary hair colour is irrelevant when discussing Greco-Roman aristocratic genes.

Wow. No need to slam the person. They looked up quite a bit of information. Truly well put together.

Usually, "gods and goddesses" were once flesh and blood human beings. When they die, they become legends and then through a process of ancestor worship, humans turn other humans into deities.

So like Demeter, goddess of agriculture was probably a human being who figured out that you can take wild plants and transplant them, which becomes agriculture. And Demeter as a human being probably travelled by boat island hopping in the Aegean or going to coastal cities teaching the natives agriculture. After death, she became deified into a goddess by ancestor worship.

I find the references great info. BUT saying someone is "fair-haired" doesn't necessarily make them a blonde. They could be a red head. And throughout the Aegean, red heads are associated with the burial practice of excarnation. Red heads practicing excarnation as a burial practice were the first group to colonize Cyprus by boat. And they came from the Aegean.

Also, saying someone has "bright eyes" doesn't necessarily mean "blue eyes." It could be "green eyes" and it could be "hazel eyes." Hazel eyes can be a combination of blue, green or amber eye color. I once tried to trace the origin of hazel eyes and wound up in the Aegean.

I figure that green, blue and hazel eyes might have evolved in the Aegean. Perhaps also red hair and blonde hair. Based on ice age cycles of the Aegean.

Think of human evolution in the Aegean as similar to the Galapagos islands. The animals in the Galapagos islands evolved differently because the islands were once connected to the mainland. Once separated, the animals had a different evolution from their mainland cousins.

During each Ice Age freeze, every 125,000 years, islands in the Aegean are connected to the mainland. The Sporades are connected to Greece during an ice age freeze. Thassos connects to Thessaly, Samothrace connects to Thrace, Lemnos and Lesvos connect to Troy, and the Dodecanese islands all connected to Southwest Turkey all during each ice age freeze.

Humans lived along the coast. Then the Eemian melt occurred and humans living in those regions became trapped on islands. They evolved differently than their mainland cousins due to scarcity of food.

As the humans evolved on Aegean islands, with a different diet, you get blue eyes, green eyes, hazel eyes, red hair, blonde hair, dwarf genes, midget genes all tracing back to Aegean islands.

Then the last glacial maximum happened and all those groups stuck on islands now wander around the Aegean coast, mixing with mainland groups.

Then as the last glacial maximum melted, their coastlines became islands again and some of their early cities sunk.

This time, necessity is the mother of invention. They invented boats to reconnect to their island cousins.

After inventing boats, they began colonizing the coasts and islands of the Mediteranean, the Adriatic, the Tyhrennian, the Atlantic, the North Sea.

Red hair definitely has a boat migration out of the Aegean, into the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic along the coasts.

But so does blonde hair, just different coastal cities for colonies.

Same for blue eyes, green eyes and hazel eyes. And definitely the dwarf gene. The dwarf gene community got integrated into red heads migrating by boats.

So "fair headed" is not always blonde. And "bright eyes" is not always blue. It could mean red hair and green eyes or hazel eyes.

Ancient Greeks had to have looked mostly mediterranean/southern European. It's impossible they didn't because the majority population in ancient Greece—and southern Europe in general—is Anatolian Neolithic Farmer, who arrived in Europe approximately ~9000 years ago. There's also Caucuses Hunter-Gatherer (CHG) which contributes to the mediterranean look, common in Greek islands & southern Italy (think the big-nosed "Arab" look).

"Nordic" traits are generally the result of Ancestral North Eurasian (ANE)/Steppe/Aryan and/or Western European Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) ancestry. There's very little WHG in southern Euros with the general exception of Iberians and north Italians.


Hunter Gatherers = WHG
Early Farmers = Anatolian Neolithic Farmers/"Mediterraneans"
IBD = Ancestral North Eurasian/Aryan/Steppe


Now about ~4000 years ago Aryans invaded and spread the Indo-European languages. When this happened in ancient Greece, it started the Mycenaean era, and they'd have inserted themselves as the upper classes of the ancient Greeks and the Greeks began to speak what we know as "Greek". I theorize that the Minoans were remnant un-assimilated pre-IE Greeks that didn't become assimilated until after their civilization collapsed.



The issue is the Aryans assimilated a lot of CHG people in the steppe before that, and whilst a lot of them would have looked northern, this doesn't mean they all had blonde hair/blue eyes even correcting for the later CHG. It's possible that only a minority of them had that trait and then the Aryans that settled northern Europe selected for those traits over time making them dominant. Regardless, we can infer that the upper classes of Mycenaean-era Greece disproportionately had nordic traits among them compared to the average Greek. (For the record blue eyes also come from WHG).