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The reason I ask this is because today's ethnically French population, although varied in its looks, has a range of stereotypical phenotypes that look distinctively "French" and that "French look" does not look "northern European". The average Frenchman certainly does not look Germanic or Nordic which isn't surprising considering that the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, etc settled in small numbers relative to the much larger Gallo-Roman population.
What is surprising though is that the modern French also do not look "Celtic" - they bear little resemblance to Celtic nations today in the British Isles for example. And while "Celtic" is correctly understood to be more of a cultural designation, in antiquity the Gaulish people of modern France were always described as being taller than the Italians and Greeks, with a predominance of lighter features and bigger builds. This description mirrors that of typical Northern Europeans as tall, fair skinned, and blond - at least relative to Mediterranean peoples (Italians, Greeks, Iberians, North Africans, Levantine peoples, etc)
While light features are common to France and while the French tend to have lighter features than say Italians for example, French people as a whole have darker features (hair and eyes) and are of slighter build and shorter stature than Northern Europeans (Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, etc). The "stereotypical" French person bears more resemblance to their Latin speaking cousins in Italy and Spain than they do to Germanic speaking northerners or to their supposedly "Celtic" brethren in Britain and Ireland.
My question is why? If the greater part of Gaul (modern France) was inhabited by Celts who were described to be distinctively looking by the Romans (aka - Italians in the 1st century BC) then what happened to them in the intervening 2,000 years? To what degree did Italian (and other Mediterranean people's settlement in Roman Gaul) impact the gene pool of modern France?
Most people inquire about the impact of the Franks and other Germanic tribes on the people of France. But based on how French people look, to me the more natural question is what impact did being part of the Roman Empire have on the Gauls?
I've tried researching this myself, but would really appreciate some help in answering this question from the broader community.
There is no such thing as a "french" phenotype. This kind of thinking, that the defining feature of a population is the average/ideal/template phenotype is actually very outdated. Precisely what Darwin and later the Biometrists showed is that what is important for explaining evolution and populations is the variance not the mean.
In other words there is no such thing as a french phenotype, there is a wide spectrum of phenotypes that individuals whose ancestors have lived in the geographic region known as France for many generations fall within and this wide spectrum overlaps the phenotypic distributions of their neighbors such that it is pointless to focus on the average "French" phenotype. It's not even static, so what questions can you answer with the average of a distribution that isn't even significantly different from the neighboring regions? (I.e. your arbitrary grouping of French is not a grouping supported by genetic of phenotypic data)
Furthermore, this is less a genetics question and more an anthropological question. Quantitative traits like skin color, hair color, face shape are obviously extremely polygenic and highly influenced by environment. Also I think you need to remember that the amount of DNA you receive from any ancestor is ~(1/2)^n where n is the number of generations. Thus if we assume the average human generation time of 29 years and Gaul was circa 2000 years ago, thats 2000/29=~69 (lol) generations ago meaning you have ~(1/2)^69=1.6940659e-21 DNA from any one of those ancestors in that generation. (This is ignoring inbreeding which of course is occurring)
Uhm ya so pretty much populations aren't a homogenous average that stays static over time until the blacks come in. Sorry but that's what your post kinda sounds like it's getting at. As if the Gaulic/Celtic purity was somehow lost by invaders. Which to that i'd say you need to read more about the extensive migrations of Europe such as the migration period and any literature on ancient DNA showing how interconnected Eurasia and North Africa were even during the Bronze and Iron ages.
I hope my post isn't shooting you down too much, understanding human history through genetics is really fun but it's very complicated. It takes a lot of foundational learning in demographic inference methods in population genetics, some knowledge of ancient cultures and archaeology, and the patience to know you will never know the full truth because this study is limited. Keep pursuing your interests!
DeleteriousMutations - I find your tone and approach to be highly suggestive of the post-racial, hijacked leftist strain of thought dominant in academia and popular culture these days - one that labors to deny the existence of national ethnic groups and whose dogma dictates that race doesn't exist and is instead nothing more than a "social construct".
The reality is that there is without a doubt a distinctively "French" look, or at the very least a very pronounced set of French "looks". If you walk around an average French town, aside from recent 20th-21st century immigrants from mostly Francophone ex-colonies, you will find that the people whose families have lived in France for thousands of years do in fact look noticeably different from say, the average Briton or the average German or Dane - certainly dramatically different from a black African or a Chinese person.
While there is no single "French look", there is definitely a clearly defined spectrum, outside of which a person would not look "French". This is true of any ancient nationality.
Having lived in and traveled extensively throughout Europe, I can say that I can recognize a group of Frenchmen in a bar, and distinguish them from a larger group of say, Spaniards or Italians, the same way I can distinguish Italians from Spaniards, given a sufficiently large sample size (e.g. more than 10 people).
It's even easier to distinguish a large group of French people from a group of Swedes, or a group of Irish people.
So yes, while I'm not an ignorant fool as your condescending reply suggests, and I do realize that no population cluster is impermeable to gene flow from outside its national borders, and that there has been some degree (albeit very limited until recent generations) of continuous gene transfer into France from outside of France over the last 2,000 years, and while recognizing that the majority of what would comprise the "French stock" was solidified since before the Iron Age (a mix of neolithic pre-Indo European hunter-gathers, Indo-Europeans, and then some mixing of Central European Celtic speakers), I still do pose the question - what genetic impact did settlers from elsewhere in the Roman Empire have on the newly formed Roman Gaul? Why do modern (post Roman settlement and intermarriage) French people not look like the pre-Roman Gauls as described by their contemporaries in antiquity?
It would suggest that the genetic impact of immigrants from elsewhere in the Roman empire (mostly mediterranean peoples from Italy, Greece, maybe North Africa) was at least present, if not significant.
Your tone is that of an 15 year old troll and an idiot. Yes race is a social construct. Have you looked at the data? Do you know? I have!
Tell me oh wise young troll, how does one determine that two populations are sufficiently different enough that we should call them races? What test do you use?
Lol "ancient nationalities" please go tell the French about this :D
I seriously have no desire to engage in a back and forth argument with a stranger on a reddit forum - definitely have better things to do with my life, lol! I'm guessing you're a university student, and your professor and your fellow woke students have indoctrinated you with the belief that there are no variations in genetics between populations as divergent as east Africans and Pacific Islanders? That there are no higher prevalence of certain kinds of disease or predispositions toward certain athletic abilities due to variations in physical traits, etc? That all differences between peoples of different continents are only skin deep, and that such differences go no deeper than cultural identity?
Define "race" however you want, and call it "ethnic group" or whatever term you prefer. I don't care. While I certainly don't subscribe to Victorian-era notions of immutable racial characteristics and sweeping generalizations about every major group, I do acknowledge (and for that matter celebrate) the reality of racial differences between populations, and I can't deny what my own eyes and common knowledge will tell you - which is that per the topic of this post, there is very much such a thing as a set of "French looks", a relatively narrow spectrum of physical appearance which collectively can be very easily associated with a very specific "French look". This is to be expected as well, considering that the overwhelming majority of an average French person's ancestry will be concentrated in a single geographic region which had minimal mixing with outside populations.
Have you ever been to France? Have you ever lived in France? Or is your take on this topic purely academic?
If you took a random sample of 100 "ethnic" French people (in the same way genetic services like 23andMe would, by selecting only for people who do not have recent ancestry from outside of France) and took another random sample of 100 Spaniards or 100 Dutch people, you mean to tell me that you could not easily discern the French population from the others, simply by looking at their faces?
If you cannot, you've clearly never spent much time in Europe or you are utterly lacking in observational skills.
Also, do you realize how appallingly condescending and patronizing the above language sounds? What do you know of my academic background? If I were to paraphrase the above you are saying, "I know this stuff is complicated and you're very ignorant, but curiosity is great! Keep trying and maybe you'll be as smart as me one day"
The condescension is so transparent, it's shameful, and honestly indicative of someone lacking in self-awareness and EQ.
For the record, I'm a successful 30 year old management consultant with a degree from a top global university. This is my first time browsing the genetics subreddit but I'd honestly be shocked if you knew more about European history or any history for that matter than I do, as I have had a burning passion for and insatiable curiosity about history and related fields my entire life. I've also lived in Europe for years, and I speak Spanish, French, and Italian fluently.
So please get off your damn soap box and learn some humility. Maybe get a job that allows you travel and get out and see the real world so you can challenge your precious assumptions and understanding of the world that seems to be entirely limited to what you have learned in a classroom or textbook
I'm a grad student yes. Indoctrinated? No. I've taken statistics courses and know how to do test for significant differences between distributions. Then I used this really basic knowledge to understand and also test the differences in genetic variation between populations myself. So I'm very aware of the reality of human genetic variation and population differences.
But I agree with you there are PHENOTYPIC differences between groups, of course. So there are phenotypic and genetic differences between group, but i'm telling you the genetic differences are negligible. Furthermore, they are explained almost entirely by random genetic drift NOT natural selection.
Also it's not correct to say that the variation in phenotypes is only determined by the genetic variation. Environmental variation needs to be accounted for. And for the traits you are mentioning like appearance or skin color that is heavily influenced by environment so again, anthropology is where you should go not genetics.
If you can agree that what you are talking about is mainly the phenotypic variation, then ya i'd place a pretty good bet that if I applied some statistical method, like machine learning classification, to a sample of 100 photos from 3 countries that the classifier wouldn't be very good at predicting them. Hell I bet someones done it let's google it. (Maybe i'll do it with the friends I made in Europe? lol) Dang only been (unethically) performed to identify between Black, European, and East Asian. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318138434_Prediction_of_Human_Ethnicity_from_Facial_Images_Using_Neural_Networks
Unfortunately with CNNs you can't do feature extraction so we can't tell what features best predict nationality. How much do you want to bet its skin tone? Think it's could differentiate Africans from Melanesians well with just this sample? Probably not. With enough images and time to train the CNN you could absolutely do this for a couple populations for close pops like German to French I doubt it'd be accurate.
The fact you think your observational skills are grounds for genetic or anthropological evidence is really funny. Have fun watching Alex Jones' new 5G videos.
As a french person, and in the name of the french republic and the french people : shut the fuck up
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