Doesn’t Catherine Zeta-Jones look really young on this InStyle cover???
Click here for the full sized picture. Anyway, I note that the Lancelot in the new King Arthur flick is played by a Welsman, who has the swarthy look that might indicate someone of Sarmartian origin (they were an Iranian speaking group that roamed the Hungarian plains, and one of their tribes, the Alans, gave rise to the modern Ossettian people of the Caucasus). I recall Zeta-Jones mentioning that the Latino hands on the set of The Mask of Zorro would speak to her in Spanish. I used to call Lori of Real World 10 the “poor woman’s Catherine Zeta-Jones,” but that was good enough for her to win a Playboy poll as the “best looking Real World female cast member” (I thought the blonde chick from Arkansas from Real World 9 was the best looking). The relevant point is that Lori is half-Filipino. The “dark Welsh” stereotype goes back to the Romans, who conjectured a relationship between the tribes of the Cumbrian highlands and the peoples of Iberia on phenotype alone. Why don’t Englishmen say that “the Wogs start at Offa’s Dyke?”
So, after all the talk of how blonde hair and fair skin was selected for either sexually or environmentally (or more likely both) in northerneastern Europe, why does such a swarthy population reside along the western fringe of the continent where environmental conditions were rather stringement during the last Ice Age? Genetically the highland Welsh have commonalities with the Basque down the Y lineage, so they are certainly an ancient population subject to the selective pressures of cloudly northwest Europe for tens of thousands of years. Perhaps admixture can explain some of this, though according to geneticist Steve Jones in Y: The Descent of Men, the antiquity of the highland Welsh lineages in their region are clear, as is the stereotype of their swarthiness (his own family is from that region).
I guess I’ll have to track down a copy of Coon to get more data to confirm some of the above suppositions.
And yes, all that verbiage was partly to justify putting that picture up there. Photoshop can do wonders with some prime-grade raw material….
Posted by razib at 05:25 PM