why does the Iraqi girl at 1.53 look European?
deathtokoalas
as others have pointed out, there is a continuum of ethnic iranians through the north of syria and iraq, into iran and north into afghanistan. but, it's an error to suggest that indo-europeans (indo-germanic isn't a good term,for historical reasons) are inherently light skinned or connected to europe. a substantial portion of indo-european speakers today live in india, and it's widely accepted that their origins are somewhere in central asia. that is to say that the child does not "look european". she is simply light-skinned.
precise kurdish origins remain difficult to establish, but they speak an iranian language and it's generally thought that they descend from the earliest iranian invasions into the region. some people suggest they may be related to a group of people historically known as "medes", but this is mostly speculation. regardless, something along those lines is roughly correct. that places their entrance into the region, probably from the northeast, at roughly 1000 years before the common era. stated tersely: light-skinned people have continuously occupied the north of syria and iraq for roughly 3000 years. further, to their slight north, exist armenians and various caucasian groups, whom are also all light-skinned and have been in the region even longer.
it is true that ancient mesopotomian groups (like babylonians) were semitic, and probably of tanned complexion. however, they never expanded far outside of the fertile crescent; light-skinned ancestors of armenians and what we today call christian assyrians (like urartians) existed in the north of syria and iraq.
the oldest group known to modern iran are called elamites and are thought to have probably looked like some modern indians (they may have spoken a language related to the dravidian languages, but this is far too difficult to reconstruct with certainty). these groups were slowly displaced by invading iranians over a period of roughly 1000 years. starting about 500 years before the common era, light-skinned iranians were the dominant cultural and political force through syria, iran and iraq for another thousand years. the struggle between first greece and then rome and persia existed in the context of white emperor against white emperor.
the seventh century saw a series of catastrophic wars between persia and rome that left both of them unable to defend their borders. this allowed some muslim conquerors to "liberate" the semites in the south of iraq and what was then called judea from persian and roman rule, respectively, and put them under the control of a growing center of power in the city of medina. starting around the year 700, waves of arab settlers began to migrate into areas that muslim warlords had conquered, from both persia and rome. the persians were conquered entirely, and the romans never fully recovered. multiple waves of turkish and mongolian invasions followed, but they were largely assimilated. this constructs the broad boundaries of the existing ethnic divisions in the middle east.
eventually, the british carved an irrational state out of the ottoman empire that tried to create a coalition between a northern iranian region and a southern arabic region, but it's perhaps naive to suggest this was done out of ignorance.
so, the short answer is that light-skinned people are actually indigenous to this region, which is historically connected to central asia, and the typical darker-skinned "arabic-looking" person is in fact only really indigenous to the arabian peninsula.
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deathtokoalas
the indigenous people of that region were asssyrians, before the kurds helped carry out a genocide of them around the first world war. the kurds are thought to be indigenous to the zagros mountains.
however, there is no historical record of the kurdish people before the dawn of islamic imperialism. it's not difficult to deduce that they've probably been around the mountains for a very long time, but it is not possible to connect them to a past ethnic group. medes have been presented as a good guess, but it's ultimately without compelling evidence.
the kurds could, for example, descend from a group of iranian migrants fleeing the islamic advance, or they could be a late migration of alans or ...
i haven't read that text, but i've read enough on the topic to know that what the genetic analysis has demonstrated is that the people of the region demonstrate a genetic continuity and similarity to their neighbours. that is to say that kurds are genetically similar to assyrians, northern arabs and armenians. that doesn't do anything to prove origin, it just proves that the groups have mixed over the period they've been in contact. the same kind of analysis will state that the welsh and english are genetically similar, but we have historical records that tell us they have different origins.
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deathtokoalas
i'm going to respond to this and then block the commenter, because i'm not interested in the kind of language being used. my primary source was cavalli-sforza many years ago, updated along the way with various articles that i didn't think to document, as i wasn't expecting to be asked for sources on youtube 15 years later. but, i need to stress that i haven't just looked at results of studies, i've analysed the math underlying them.
the indigenous people of the area - assyrians - are not closely related to southern arabs at all. they show a stronger genetic resemblance to jews, but are also the most distinct group in the region. some people will suggest that, due to religious differences (being christian in a sea of muslims) there has been less genetic mixture between assyrians and other groups and this is why assyrians seem to demonstrate a bottleneck. however, it should be noted that the aforementioned genocide no doubt substantially reduced the amount of genetic diversity present in the assyrian population, making it difficult to come to meaningful conclusions as to how widespread the genetic flow was amongst the assyrians, who live continuously in the area for 3000 years before they were mass slaughtered, and the people around them.
the bigger point i'm trying to get across is that what these genetic studies have demonstrated is not that whatever group is from whatever area, but that groups that live in close proximity tend to demonstrate dramatic gene flow. assyrians, armenians, kurds and a number of the turks of the region are genetically indistinguishable from each other. there is no way to use genetics to demonstrate a person's exact ethnicity, and groups that live in close proximity are not genetically distinct from each other.
it was initially thought that genetics would help us classify races. instead, what genetics has taught us is that there is no biological basis for the concept of race. it is simply not a scientific concept.
worse, you seem to be making a very elementary error in the way you're interpreting the data. i don't know if your source makes the same error or not, but if it doesn't then you're misunderstanding it. you're not just confusing genetic continuity with ethnic continuity, which a stigma has not built up against yet but is wrong nonetheless, but you're making the massive faux pas of confusing linguistic continuity with genetic continuity, which i tried to correct the original posters on. finding that skeletons in the region have dna that is similar to modern kurdish dna is not demonstrating kurdish-speaking continuity or kurdish-identifying continuity. it is merely demonstrating genetic continuity. this could, and in fact usually does, happen when a group of invading people interbreed with a dominant indigenous group, as likely happened when the kurds moved from (probably, not certainly) the zagros mountains into the region. i gave you an example of this phenomenon in britain - english speakers are predominantly celtic-british, like the welsh, despite speaking a language and identifying as an ethnic group that invaded from germany. you haven't demonstrated anything about where the kurds came from, you've just demonstrated that they had sex with the people that lived there when they got there.
with that, i now block.
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deathtokoalas
he got one in before i blocked...
i repeat that there was no mention of the kurds until the arab invasion. kurd is actually an arab word that means something like "wanderer". it would be difficult for greeks and sumerians to describe an ethnic group named by arab invaders. so, i'm not going to ask for a source because i already know it's bullshit. if he's not just making it up, he's certainly drawing on a source that tries to extrapolate kurdish history backwards by identifying them with other groups. but as i've stated, that can't be done through more than crude guesswork, because the term is not indigenous in origin and whatever the original indigenous term actually was has been lost to us. it's little more than a hunch, but the etymology of the term is why i'm of the opinion that the kurds probably moved west as a result of being displaced by arabs moving into iran. they may have been refugees. note that this region was also the battleground between persia and rome for upwards of a thousand years, so it would make sense that the end of that conflict would lead to an increase in migration into a newly peaceful area.
as an aside, the linguistic evidence (which is more compelling than genetic evidence when it comes to migration of ethnic identity) puts the derivation of the kurdish language from persian in northwest iran about the year 100 or so. so, if we understand the genetic evidence properly (which rejects the kurds as a race distinct from the people around them), and we rely on the linguistic evidence as a means of determining ethnogenesis instead, it would have to be stated that the kurds didn't even exist as an ethnic group at the time of the sumerians or babylonians.
i'm also going to post a link for further reference. this is a little bit dated, and i wouldn't take the chart too seriously (if you read the write-up, it explains that the differences are slight. these charts are also sort of cherry picked. minor variations in the model that take into account different expressions create different relationships. the key is that the cluster from pathan up to "turkish" (iranian, here. the greeks didn't leave a mark in anatolia, either, but the persians did) is closely related. also, throwing pathan and tajiki in is sort of a curveball. it's a control, really. that shouldn't be read as that armenians are closely related to afghans. it should be read as armenians are closer to afghans than they are to yemenis, which is not very close in either way. a larger sample of ethnicities would separate them out.), but it gets the point of genetic continuity (rather than genetic difference) being dominant across the middle east.
http://www.atour.com/health/docs/20000720a.html
