If you want to argue with the science or point out deficiencies you're encouraged to. That's the beauty of science.
Geneticists simply said that they had the genes for blue eyes while the European genes associated with fair skin were not present. What wasn't said was that they were black – that was something the media simply made up because it fit with their agenda. It seems fair to assume they were darker than modern Northern Europeans, but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
“African peoples” have a pretty broad range of pigmentation, and “black” isn’t used exclusively for African people, anyhow; e.g., indigenous Australians.
It's funny how White people use “black” with almost unlimited breadth right up until that challenges the original whiteness of territory they view as an ancestral homeland, and then immediately start demanding that the blackness be viewed maximally narrowly.
Couldn't find a better illustration of how race is a fluid social construct.
I wasn't commenting about the original poster but about the broad community that have been making this exact argument about this exact issue since it entered the public debate, and a wide number of other issues for, well, almost the entire time that population studies that would support this kind of discussion of the past have existed.
(And, yes, you can see identical behavior referencing different identity divides besides white and non-white in the same period over the same broad class of past-population issues, but this specific issue of darker-skinned past inhabitants of the British Isles is one of the focuses of whites and the flexible nature of the label “black”.)
Nobody is questioning the ancestral homeland of anyone. Just because some Scandanavians were dark skinned or had ancestors from outside Scandanavia - maybe even somewhere where people were mostly dark skinned - doesn't mean they weren't Scandanavian, unless you choose to believe that "Scandanavia" is a racial and not a geographic term.
At some point in relatively recent history some European ethno-nationalists developed this concept of a "racial homeland" and unfortunately to this day that way of thinking holds appeal among some groups.
All humans ultimately descend from hominids from more equatorial regions, and on the scale of hominid history we've only very recently left those regions.
> If race is a social construct then there isn't a Black nation, Black peoples, or anything ancestral to anyone who identifies as Black.
It's exactly the opposite, black identity exists precisely because race is a social construct, and furthermore is a powerful construct that has dictated the fates of untold millions throughout history.
That’s a pretty impressive generalization. It’s also not very charitable to imply that people are being defensive about some sort of racial homeland instead of taking them at their word that they are skeptical of the wild conclusions that aren’t supported by the science.
I am from very Northern European stock and I get very dark with consistent exposure to the sun despite my extensive freckled skin. My brother by the same parents was often mistaken for someone from Southern Italy or Mexico especially if it was Summer.
> it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
Africans also aren't the color black. Nobody said the first Britons were SubSaharan African at all. They just said they had dark skin.
This is bolstered by the discovery that a widespread gene - SLC24A5 - associated with fairer skin is a recent (8k years ago) phenomenon in Europe associated with the arrival of middle eastern farmers, in whom it developed due to their Vitamin-D poor cereal-based diet [1].
The same gene is present across Eurasia through to South Asia, and is partially responsible for pigmentation variation there also, even moreso than in Europe, where the gene is almost ubiquitous today. [2]
Of course it's not the only gene that controls depigmentation. Depigmentation in East Asia is not related to that gene at all - though it could be similarly influenced by cereal-based diets.
1. https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-g...
Focusing on skin and eye color seems imprecise and really, why even bring it up? DNA mutations or markers spread in a population. Then some members of that population travel to distant lands and intermarry (or not, maybe just die,) and spread their DNA mutations around and then die. Hundreds of year later someone sequences the DNA and says, hmm, here's a marker for X population but I found it in territory Y indicating that people moved around or were taken as slaves so there was a lot more mixing than history expects.
Does your theory about the original Britons imply some direct-from-<some continent> migration? If so you'd expect markers for populations on that continent to be present in historical samples without the associated markers associated with a migration via a more lengthy route. So let's test for that which will either prove or not-prove the theory and leave the silly adjectives for twitter.Edit: apparently the theory is about paleolithic people (who did a lot of fishing) in Britain being dark-skinned, which is certainly believable.
Edit: I guess that's what the whole argument upthread is about - apparently researchers said that paleolithic british settlers were dark skinned, and became light skinned with the switch to agriculture. Which is very plausible.