I like the combination of brown/black hair and blue eyes in women, and I also like Eastern European women. My Internet searching for photos of such women has been … mostly futile. The brunettes have brown eyes, the redheads have brown eyes, and even the blondes have brown eyes.
I understand that the gene for brown eyes is dominant. I have nothing against brown eyes; I just like the brunette/blue eyes combo.
Can this prevalence of brown eyes in Russian/Ukrainian/other Eastern Europeans be traced back to the Mongol invasions?
Looking at the maps, my first thought is your assumptions is mistaken. There should be more blue-eyed women in Moscow than in say London or Paris. (Or anywhere outside of Germany/Scandinavia).
I would guess that genes for light hair and eyes tend to be associated, so you will find far more combos of blonde/blue eyed, than brunette/blue eyed.
Before trying to explain a pattern, it’s desirable to establish that the pattern actually exists. I think you need much better evidence than a personal Internet search to establish that blue-eyed brunettes are actually underrepresented in Eastern Europe.
At any rate, here’s a map of the distribution of blue eyes in Europe. Given that the Mongol invasions reached areas in Russia with high concentrations of blue eyes today its unlikely they are the main factor governing the distribution of brown eyes in Eastern Europe.
I’m not too educated on genetics, but I do know that eye color/hair color isn’t nearly as strictly a recessive/dominant phenomenon as we once thought. I wonder if there is a partially sex-linked component.
The reason being, now that I think about it, I haven’t noticed too many dark-haired/blue-eyed females either. But plenty of men. In my family, my dad had black hair/blue eyes. My first husband did, too, and so do my two sons (though the baby is blondish now, he was born with black hair and I’m pretty sure it will get dark again–that’s how it worked for his dad).
My aunt is black-haired with truly blue eyes, but the rest of the women in the family have greenish to hazel eyes.
My own family is predominantly English/Scottish/Irish. I have brown hair and blue eyes, as does my mother, my aunt/mother’s sister, and one of my aunts on my dad’s side of the family … and IIRC, my paternal grandmother and my uncle/dad’s brother were also blue-eyed brunettes. In addition, when I was growing up I seemed to meet a lot of other blue-eyed brunettes, so I guess I maybe just thought it was a more common combination than it actually is.
Or maybe the gene for brown eyes is somehow related to/often paired with the gene that encourages a tendency toward being willing to pose for certain kinds of photos, causing them to be over-represented in my “research material”
While eye color is not determined as simply as it is portrayed basic genetics courses, broadly speaking it does follow a Mendelian dominant-recessive inheritance pattern, with only a couple of genes having major influences. Eye color of offspring is not intermediate between that of the parents, but instead usually falls into one of two distinct types, blue or brown (ignoring less common variants like green or hazel).
Hair color, on the other hand, is determined by a wider range of genes, and generally shows a “co-dominant” type of inheritance, in which the color of an offspring’s hair is intermediate between that of the parents.
While there may be some linkage between some genes that influence eye color, and some that influence hair color, it isn’t particularly tight. I am not aware of any genetic phenomenon that would result in a disproportionate lack of blue-eyed brunettes as compared to brown-eyed blondes, as the OP suggests.
In most human populations, females are somewhat lighter skinned on average than males, but this is due to differences in gene expression, not sex linkage.
I’m a brown-haired, blue-eyed female of East European (Ashkenazi) descent, and my family is full of them. Sorry, I’m attached
Anecdotally, I live in Chicago, which has a huge number of people of East European descent, particularly Poles (and to a lesser extent, Lithuanians, Latvians, etc.) I see brown-haired, blue-eyed East European women all the time. Also, I suspect at least some of the blonde, blue-eyed ones aren’t naturally blonde.
The OP claims that there is a deficit of blue-eyed, brown-haired people in Eastern Europe. Eva Luna provides a counter example.
In any case, as with many invading armies, a lot of offspring would have been the result of non-consensual or at least non-marital relationships. Unless Jewish women were somehow immune from coerced sex, there’s no reason the Ashkenazi population would necessarily have less Mongol admixture than the rest of the population.
As an anecdote, I recently attended a lecture by a prominent Italian human geneticist. He said that, although as far as he knew his family had been resident in central Italy for many centuries and had not intermarried, it turned out his X-chromosome was from Central Asia, and his mitochondrial DNA indicated a maternal Jewish ancestor.
Ashkenazi is not a separate species, they are fully interfertile with other humans. There is always a certain amount of gene-trading between Jews and the people they live among. Plenty of Genghis Khan descendants in Russia and Eastern Europe to mix with.
I figured Eva Luna self-identified as Ashkenazi for a reason, a reason other than ‘I’m part Ashkenazi with a mix of various ethnicities from the area, so why am I even mentioning this?’
Even so, this does not “preclude” Ashkenazi ancestry going to Genghis Khan, as you stated. Y-chromosomes due to Mongol ancestry could have been lost by chance, while some autosomal genes (including those responsible for eye or hair color) could have persisted.
A fair point. “Preclude” was too strong a word. How about ‘stating that you are from a different population than Genghis Khan implies you don’t think you have any of his DNA anyway.’
Still, I don’t think an Ashkenazi saying they have blue eyes has much bearing on the hypothesis of the OP that Genghis Khan’s DNA being so widespread has all but eliminated blue eyes and brown hair in the (non-segregated) populations in eastern Europe.
I self-identified as Ashkenazi because that’s the only ancestry of mine that I have ever documented. When discussing a population that didn’t even have last names in many cases until the past couple hundred years, genealogy can be…challenging, to say the least. I certainly don’t rule out the possibility that I am as much of a mutt as anyone, and I think many people who believe they are “pure” anything at all are just deluding themselves.
More info on Jewish genealogy by genetics can be found here. If I ever have spare cash that I don’t know what to do with, I may spring for testing.
Then I will offer up my paternal line which is both Ashkenazi AND shows multiple Asian traits such as epicanthal folds and accessory nail of the fifth toe. Whatever Asian ancestor snuck into the family tree was pretty far back, and the traits are not universal among family members, but even before DNA testing there were some definite indications of Asians in my family background.
Granted such traits aren’t exclusively Asian - epicanthal folds are also found among some Celts from the western side of Europe - but so far as we know my mom was the first contribution of Irish genes to the family legacy.
Just because an event is statistically uncommon does not make it non-existent. That, and because Y-chromosomes can be lost from a lineage, it does not constitute proof that such crossings never occurred.
As I said before, the OP hasn’t demonstrated that the pattern he claims even occurs, so that proposing a hypothesis for why it occurs is rather pointless.
You really want to establish first that the initial hypothesis that there is a deficit of blue-eyed brunettes in Eastern Europe is true.
Just to answer this small part - almost certainly not. The bulk of the imperial army that invaded in the 1240’s retreated back east. The number of actual Mongols that settled in Europe ( broadly construed ) was relatively minimal. Basically the ruling nobility that had been assigned the far western appanages ( the Jochid branch of the Genghisids ), some low thousands of personal retainers attached to them as household troops, and a scattering of officers from the core imperial army that had been assigned units of local troops during the campaign and decided it made good career sense to stay with them as the new Jochid officer corps.
The great majority of the new Golden Horde’s core constituency were the predominantly Turkic peoples that already been in situ on the Russian steppe for centuries. Hence the alternate name of the Q(K)ipchaq(k) Khanate for the Golden Horde named after the Qipchaqs/Cumans/Polovsty that had been the dominant power in the region before the Mongol eruption.
Whether these resident Turkic ( also Germanic, Finnic, and Indo-Iranian ) groups had a lower incidence of blue eye color I have no idea. But I wouldn’t assume a priori that was the case.
So perhaps the real question is, “Why are brown eyes so over-represented in these photos (to the point where seeing blue eyes is a surprise), when the models in question come from a part of the world where blue eyes should be very common?”
