awed-frog:a-themosthappy:cring-yuse-rname:awed-frog:Digital artist Daniel Voshart recreates the ‘rea
awed-frog:a-themosthappy:cring-yuse-rname:awed-frog:Digital artist Daniel Voshart recreates the ‘real’ faces of Roman emperors thanks to machine learning. You can learn more about the process, discover more emperors or buy a poster here.[Marcus Aurelius][Lucius Verus][Trajan]NO WAY IN HELL WERE THEY THIS WHITE Today we are going to discuss a very serious topic: individuals who think that Italic people were POC. I went down a rabbit hole of DNA studies trying to understand why people on tumblr seem to think the Romans were not white, and here are a few thoughts:in Europe, ‘white’ isn’t a thingin the sense that there are so many shades of white, it doesn’t really mean anythinglike, Spanish white and Swedish white are different things, but we wouldn’t consider either ‘non-white’ or ‘whiter’you can generally tell where someone’s from, but there are people who ‘look out of place’ a bit everywhereeither because recent or century-old migrations, or because of a previous population that lived there and then the borders moved or somethingand: in a nutshell, Italian geography discourages friendshipsthat means that before the Romans came along, people generally kept to themselves, so there’s more genetic diversity the farther back you goat some point in the Neolithic, there were non Indo-European tribes living in Italy, but we don’t know exactly where they came fromthe Indo-European people, on the other hand, probably invaded from the Northexcept for the Etruscans, because as it turns out, Herodotus was right (AGAIN! HAHHAHAHAHAHA SUCK IT HATERS) and they actually came from somewhere in modern Turkeywhich still doesn’t mean they weren’t white, btweven today, there’s plenty of people in the Middle East who look like this:[top to bottom: a Kurdish fighter; Iranian politician Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf; Syrian writer Samar Yazbek]so the notion of ‘race’ as it’s understood in the US doesn’t really work elsewhereif it even works in the US, that isso anyway, from what we know from literary sources, the Romans weren’t incredibly dark(btw people abroad, and especially Americans, tend to have a fixed idea of what Italians look like and act like)(but most of the Italians who emigrated to the US came from four Southern regions - Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicilia - and because Italy basically became a united country, like, 20 years ago, it’s still a very diverse nation)(so what you think of as a ‘typical’ Italian is probably the great-grandnephew of a ‘typical’ resident of one small village in Sicily)and the ‘typical’ Roman you often see in movies, with tanned skin, dark eyes and curly black hair, probably wasn’t a ‘typical’ Roman at allthose traits are way more common in some areas of the South - where about 37% of the population has Greek DNA because ancient coloniesso while blond hair probably wasn’t really common (we can tell because it was greatly admired and sought after, and people generally like what they don’t have), neither were darker skin and black hairin fact, a lot of politicians and other VIPs are described in the texts as having light eyes (light blue, green and gray) and some had blond or red hairothers died their hair blond with pigeon poop, but that’s another storyso the bottom line is - like modern inhabitants of Italy, ancient Romans were white, but in many cases you could probably tell from where their family came from, and some were ‘whiter’ than others depending on their ancestrythat said, the European past was a lot more diverse than our instinctive perception of itthere was a lot of trade going on, slaves from conquered lands, wealthy and poor people roaming about, and units of foreign-born Roman soldiers in unlikely places, so that’s something to keep in mind.As a bonus for reading this far, here is a smiling wolf.(Also please stop saying those guys are chads, daddys and DILFs. Most of them were dangerous sociopaths who’d feed you to their pet eels if they could.)I saw this post earlier on my dash and I said “give it a few hours and someone on Tumblr will say ‘why do they look so white??’” Also, if those people were a bit more tan they would still be White because “tan” is not a race. Most of tan people and people with dark eyes and hair are considered White in south Europe.Edit: Maybe the colors of their hair and eyes don’t represent the majority of Italians but that is something for Italians to discuss. But on terms of skin color, if you think a few tones darker will make Italians feel “represented” as opposed to this light skin, you are kidding yourself. Surely sometimes a tan skin might not be seen as pretty but Italians with a few tones darker beige skin than this one were never oppressed. Most importantly, those people don’t seek validation from a random post on Tumblr. -- source link
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