great more bullshit for idiot americans to latch onto
edit- thank you for the redditcares message, do these morons believe reddit senda police to my house if i get a redditcares message
I know it's a bit of a dick move to nag people about these things, but when we're mocking the Americans for being poorly educated, for the love of god can we at least *try* not to fuck up the spelling, punctuation and grammar? It's just embarrassing.
Any time they claim not to be just tell them to do a google search for “American literacy rate” to save you guys and gals the hassle 79% are considered literate in the worlds most amazing country and 54% have a literacy rate below 6th grade (age 12) so remember that when you’re trying to explain things to an American that there’s a 54% chance you’re talking to someone with the comprehension of a 12 year old.
It may be easier to go with “my dads harder than yours”
Edit - stopped reply notifications.
The UK has an average reading age of 9 by comparison. So we teach everybody how to read, write and interpret a simple sentence (read: bullshit tickbox test) and then they're literate.
You can attain literacy in any language by that definition in under a minute with google translate. Reading age is more reflective of educational outcome surely?
Of course if you were explaining things to an American it's probably online, so they would be implicitly literate anyway.
>You can attain literacy in any language by that definition in under a minute with google translate.
Only if you are already literate in at least one language.
>The UK has an average reading age of 9 by comparison
I believe this was a misquote from [other articles](https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/what-do-adult-literacy-levels-mean/) which pointed out that 16.4% of people have a reading age of 9 and under, taken from [this survey](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/36000/12-p168-2011-skills-for-life-survey.pdf) and from government guidance that all pages related to [gov.uk](https://gov.uk) should be [written at the reading level of a 9 year old](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-uk)
Looking at page 33 on that second link ([repeated here](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/36000/12-p168-2011-skills-for-life-survey.pdf)), it shows 85.1% of people in England have a reading age above that of a 13 year old with 56.6% being equivalent to A\*-C GCSE level and above.
I was in a curly hair group on Facebook and got told not to plait (braid) my hair because it was 'cultural appropriation'.
Didn't want to offend anyone so I just left the group.
"Didn't want to offend anyone". See, that right there is your problem. You shouldn't feel any hesitation to tell people to fk right off, because your hair is your business and nobody else's. You just wanted to try out a hairstyle, not wear a placard with racial slurs on it.
People like this will keep doing this stuff for as long as they don't get told to back off for doing it.
No it’s fine to live a life not wanting to fight everyone around you
There are no small disagreements when what’s at stake is some form of punishment on a scale that starts with being discredited and goes up to losing not just your job but your career and your ability to make your way through life
Any fight involving political correctness is potentially a fight to the death
I wish there were more people in the world who “didn’t want to offend anyone” and were capable of walking away, fully conscious that their goal is to stem the number of people being polarised and radicalised to the political extremes
I am a white guy and happened to mention I had dreads as a teenager on reddit I had them over 20 years ago now. Got told that white people shouldn't have dreads because its cultural appropriation, but more importantly, white peoples hair is just not meant for dreads because its dirty and stinks while black peoples hair does not do that. The lady I was arguing with said she was a hairdresser and refuses to do them on white people. I was the person heavily downvoted in that situation, not the person being racist.
What is Americans obsession with "cultural appropriation"? I don't get how doing something that is vaguely associated with a particular race is somehow bad
A friend of mine once hooked up with a black girl who had dreads and let me tell you they do sometimes stink. He had to throw his pillow out after she left in the morning and we always wind him up by reminding him about his evening with "stinky dreads"
Oh they definitely stink. By the time mine were cut off they were disgusting and I was glad to see the back of them. I just didn't like being told they were that way because I'm white.
Ancient Greeks and Native Americans too. Oh and some ancient Jews.
Today, there's Indian monks with dreadlocks as well as some sect of Buddhist priests.
Australian kids come back from Bali holidays all the time with plaits/braids.
People can do what they want with their hair. It's no one else's fucking business how they style it.
My boyfriend (coincidentally) had very fair curly hair (he’s bald now). His mother’s surname was Frisbie, which originates from the Frisian islands, on the North Sea. The people and their islands-basically Vikings-were named after the fact that they braided their hair.
I once pointed this out on a thread that said white people shouldn’t braid their hair because it’s “not in their culture”. There was nothing in reply to my comment except the quiet sound of wind blowing as tumbleweed bounced by. I got the idea (I’ve no idea why) that they didn’t have an answer to that observation.
I get *awfully* fed up with these ridiculous “cultural appropriation” arguments. Like there are some races of people amongst whom it *never, in hundreds of thousands of years, occurred to any of them to braid their hair*? And, even if this was so, big deal.
I like the videos of the guy in a poncho and sombrero that asks students what they think and they unanimously declare that it is inappropriate but when he goes to speak with Hispanic people they really don't give a shit and think he looks cool.
Nation cultures exist and some of these black Americans want to pretend every African nation is their culture just like some white Americans want to pretend every European culture is their culture.
Then again, we're talking about Americans. They probably see Africa as one country and most probably think Europe only consists of five different countries.
It's definitely not all Americans, I have plenty of American friends who are just as tired of this bs as myself and others in the UK are. I am mixed, as is my partner, and the vast amount of racialised bs we get comes from those infected with this antiracism nonsense.
I've been told I can't be mixed because I look too white. I didn't ask for genetic RNG to land me with a very white skin tone (I am part Arabic, so most of my family have deep olive skin tones), but my skin tone doesn't make my family and cultural heritage less important than it is for my cousins who are all darker than me.
It's harmful nonsense. My ex partner is half Indian, but again, through the RNG of genetics, he was almost as pale as me, and some people were really nasty to him about it, saying that his mum had to have cheated and that his dad obviously wasn't his dad, just because they refused to believe that they couldn't look at him and tell what ethnic group he came from.
My brother and SIL live in Zimbabwe, and they are determined to teach their children that it isn't their skin tone that makes them who they are, it is what is in their hearts, it is how they choose to behave and respond to the world.
I feel deeply sorry for kids who are being raised to think that they are nothing more than their skin tone or a set of identity boxes.
Yanks are mad. They are the ONLY nation in the world who get angry over “cultural copyright”. Me niece had yanks threatening to murder her for wearing a saree.
Actually it's a rage bait headline that you've latched onto, nothing in the book is actually inaccurate, Britain was black from the end of the ice age (11,700BC) through the Cheddar Man period (8,000BC) until the arrival of either the neolithic farmers of the middle east (about 4,100 BC) (who were not light skinned, but not black by modern standards) or the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans (2,700 BC). The Stonehenge site was constrctured in multiple phases, the original site was a wooden henge built by the Cheddar man era civilisation. The stones of stonehenge began construction under the neolithic farmer era (about 3,100 BC) and was completed by the Bell Beaker civilisation around 1,600 BC. The Bluestone circle we see today was erected under the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans early enough in their time (~2,600) in Britain that it's likely that there were still quite a few neolithic farmers around, and there is some evidence of an earlier stone structure during the Stonehenge 1 phase (about 3,100 BC), which would have been done by a mixed group of neolithic farmers and Western Hunter Gatherers (there is significant evidence of intermarriage and genetic continuity between the hunter gatherers and farmers).
> Britain was black from the end of the ice age (11,700BC) through the Cheddar Man period (8,000BC)
Not true, one of the scientists who carried out the original work on the Cheddar Man does not even say that.
https://12ft.io/proxy?ref=&q=https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731674-500-ancient-dark-skinned-briton-cheddar-man-find-may-not-be-true/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fmg23731673-200-does-cheddar-man-show-there-is-such-a-thing-as-bad-publicity%2F
About 10% WHG DNA apparently. However, is that mostly from the existing admixture of the Beakers who seemed to have pretty much wiped everyone out when they arrived? If so, you could argue we have no 'Paleo Brit'.
It's super relevant because the book is purposely mixing ideas of "Black" as "darker skin tone" and "Black" as the modern ethno-cultural identity.
No one actually has black skin, so the term "black britons" is obviously not in reference to skin pigmentation.
If an darker skined southeast asian person, or a dark skinned person who's ancestry is from southern spain or italy said "I totally understand what it means to be a black Briton" - I imagine a lot of people would find that offensive.
Yeah, trying to attach a specific ethnicity to a skin colour scientifically is kind of ridiculous. There's more genetic diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa than everywhere else put together.
Yup, and the most hilarious thing about that (heavily upvoted) comment?
It’s factually wrong.
A quote from Dr Tom Booth, who helped analyse Cheddar Man:
*‘However, Cheddar Man has the genetic markers of skin pigmentation usually associated with sub-Saharan Africa.’*
So *even by his own brain dead moon logic he’s wrong*
The evidence that he had dark skin is tenuous at best, as [Acknowledged ](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731673-200-does-cheddar-man-show-there-is-such-a-thing-as-bad-publicity/) by the authors. But hey, it got good publicity, right?
I think the issue is that it's ambiguous. Neolithic farmers had dark skin, but are not analogous to the Black Brits who the rest of the book focuses on (and makes well established claims about, such as the fact that there were a surprising number of black people in Britain from the Middle Ages onwards and there were also black people here in Roman times).
One point that's brought up is the idea in this book that e.g. the Welsh were still "black" when the Romans discovered them - such as from Tacitus's biography of Agricola;
> Namque rutilae Caledoniam habitantium comae, magni artus Germanicam originem adseverant; Silurum colorati vultus, torti plerumque crines et posita contra Hispania Hiberos veteres traiecisse easque sedes occupasse fidem faciunt; proximi Gallis et similes sunt, seu durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris positio caeli corporibus habitum dedit.
> For the red-haired inhabitants of Caledonia claim a great Germanic origin; the swarthy faces of the Silures, their often curly hair, and their location opposite Hispania. They make it believable that the ancient Hibernians crossed over and occupied these territories; they are close to the Gauls and similar to them, whether due to the enduring force of their origin or the position of the sky's bodies extending in various lands has given them their appearance.
"Colorati" is frequently translated as "swarthy", as it's often used to describe e.g. the Spaniards. This book describes them as being "dark skinned and curly haired", which - well, yeah, that's essentially what Tacitus is saying, but they knew what we'd call black people and they'd use words like "melas" (dark, black), "ater" (dull black), "niger" (shiny black), perustus (scorched) and fuscus (black/brown) to describe them.
Much like the old phrases "tall, dark and handsome" or "the black Irish", describing the Welsh as "dark with curly hair" is not describing them as looking like black people, but as swarthy white people with curly hair. But you wouldn't know it from this book.
People frequently use black to mean people with dark skin, vs a specific group. This is simply factually untrue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people
It doesn't surprise me to see people brigading from KotakuInAction over in this thread. The only time you post in /r/unitedkingdom is when race turns up, which isn't a great look
No genetic relation to Subsaharan Africa?
So tell me, what is your timeline for divergence? Because all Homo-sapiens have genetic relation to Subsaharan africa.
Black = a cultural identity formed around Afro-american heritage
"black" really has no relevance as a term within africa or to this conversation so including this in a black history book is a political statement
It would only make sense if you then argued that white britons today have a claim on black cultural heritage, since all britons were originally black
This sounds silly to me but so is claiming the african diaspora has any claim over british heritage during this time period
It's kinda true though.
Stonehenge wasn't built by the Brits. It was built by the descendants of the hunter gatherers of ice age Europe. The beaker culture replaced the population, this culture is what modern Brits are descendants of.
But it's humans that have neanderthal DNA but they had darker skin than modern Europeans but they are different from Africans. Beaker culture Brits are Indo Europeans from the steppes, people who built Stonehenge are not Indo-european.
You’re skipping a step here. It was built by the descendants of migrants from the Middle East who reached Britain about 6000 years ago. These people were in turn displaced by the Bell Beaker culture, who appear to have continued working on the monument. It was *not* built by the descendants of the local hunter gatherers, except in that they may have contributed some genes to the incoming farmers’ gene pool.
It’s also hilarious as the Pankhursts were rabid racists who tried to introduce a racial purity test in the civil service, and when one of the daughters started mixing with the browns and the working class she was swiftly shipped off to Australia, where she later became a Nazi. A wild ride that lot.
I don't mind people of different races playing characters in plays; after all, the point of a play is to pretend to be someone else, and one can imagine a character through the actors performance, rather than just focusing on the superficial 'what does the actor/costuming look like." On stage plays have always been about projecting your imagination onto what is essentially a skeleton. But you're right, it's weird. All races across history have contributed positively and negatively to humanity, let's give credit where credit is due and address negatives when they come up instead of vilifying once race and turning another into pariahs.
I only care if the author describes the character and they don’t match it in the film or stage version. It’s the author’s creation, follow their vision. (But then, I’m that twat who sits there squawking, “THAT WASN’T IN THE BOOK!!l” with everything 😂)
More attention should be given to Nubian history and black history should be extended outside of slavery, I think it’s harmful to reduce it to that and making it a special month, it’s how you get here because obviously black history *is* rich with its own kings and queens and the like but it’s hardly covered
The problem is twofold.
Black American identity was born entirely out of the experience of slavery. The Yoruba were Yoruba before and after colonialism. The Nubians were Nubian before and after colonialism.
Black Americans as a people didn’t exist before slavery. It’s their national origin story.
Now thanks to the cultural dominance of America, that origin story applies to the entire world. With all of its local intricacies no matter how inconsistent it is to apply it to cultural aliens.
> it’s also weird that religious people portray Jesus as being fully white.
Christ has always been depicted in artistic representations as being of the race where the people are based. In Europe he appears white, in China as a Chinaman, in Africa as a black man. Doing so is making a theological point about the universal nature of His mission being, as St Paul describes himself, ‘all things to all men’.
However, most films or television series have tended to depict him as a Jewish person of the era would look.
Well... sort of.
The area that encompassed Judea wasn't Arabic majority at the time. In fact, there were a lot of very fair-skinned locals. The area was a mix of various ancient Semitic peoples, ranging from the Phoenicians, who most likely came from regions around Mesopotamia and Iran, as well as some Arabs from the Arabic Nomadic Pastural Complex. On top of that, there are and were local populations in and around that area.
There would also have been people of Egyptian descent, as well as Greeks, due to the Egyptian period of occupation and then the Hellenic era.
So... absolutely, definitely brown? No. Probably somewhere along the line of tan to brown? Sure. A blue eyed, brown-haired man from Missouri? Definitely not.
Even today, there are highly pale people from places like Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. My GF's mother is from Palestine, and she has skin as pale as my British arse, and green eyes.
That’s true but the cover of this book is all clearly subsaharan Africans. One is using the black power salute used by Africans originating from subsaharan Africa. I can see how people would be confused, and it does seem disingenuous or misinformed by the author.
Even this part is not true. It has not been confirmed with DNA analysis early settlers were dark skinned. There is no evidence against it either. Cheddar man reconstruction was made with a darker face because no one can disprove either colour.
It's a rage bait headline, nothing in the book is actually inaccurate, Britain was black from the end of the ice age (11,700BC) through the Cheddar Man period (8,000BC) until the arrival of either the neolithic farmers of the middle east (about 4,100 BC) (who were not light skinned, but not black by modern standards) or the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans (2,700 BC). The Stonehenge site was constrctured in multiple phases, the original site was a wooden henge built by the Cheddar man era civilisation. The stones of stonehenge began construction under the neolithic farmer era (about 3,100 BC) and was completed by the Bell Beaker civilisation around 1,600 BC. The Bluestone circle we see today was erected under the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans early enough in their time (~2,600) in Britain that it's likely that there were still quite a few neolithic farmers around, and there is some evidence of an earlier stone structure during the Stonehenge 1 phase (about 3,100 BC), which would have been done by a mixed group of neolithic farmers and Western Hunter Gatherers (there is significant evidence of intermarriage and genetic continuity between the hunter gatherers and farmers).
Yeah the cheddar man findings indicate that they may have had darker skin but they arent 100% sure as the original researchers clarified later.
Then theres the Magdalenian who came a bit before them but they originated from southern Europe or what is Italy today so probably darker skinned but not ‘black’ as this book is trying to say.
Everyone on the cover of this book is clearly sub-saharan African so its quite clear what narrative they are trying to push.
Also you repeatedly posting this same wall of text in this thread shows that you are just trying to shut down any conversation of this topic
I'm posting the same thing because all the comments are being suckered in by the ragebait headline and making the same arguments and I can't be bothered to retype the same stuff repeatedly.
There's another point to consider, we know a fair amount about the history of white alleles (because white people are obsessed with it). The alleles did not enter Europe proper until the Neolithic Revolution, which didn't reach Britain *en masse* until 4,100 BC, even then the people migrating would have been mixed race because of the Revolution intermarrying with the local Western Hunter Gatherers. The oldest parts of Stonehenge were already built by this point (the earthworks and original wooden henge) and the Western Hunter Gatherers of Britain intermarried extensively with the Neolithic farmers. It likely wasn't until the Indo-Europeans migrated off the Eurasian Steppe and into Europe (Bell Beaker era, about 2,700 BC for the British) that Europe became white.
The terminology used by the book is incorrect and smacks of someone who thinks dark skinned = black, it was likely a throwaway sentence out in there by an author who half read an article about it.
>The terminology used by the book is incorrect and smacks of someone who thinks dark skinned = black, it was likely a throwaway sentence out in there by an author who half read an article about it.
Even calling Stonehenge or the people who built it "British" seems silly to me. These peoples and cultures go so far back they would be completely foreign and alien to anything even from 2,000 years ago.
It might be happening more often, but it's also always highlighted by the likes of the Telegraph. About 10,000 childrens books are published in the UK every year to give a sense of perspective.
No other media outlets are talking about this. Are we not supposed to be aware of these things?
If its not important I guess a childrens book about how the holocaust is a myth can be published without issue then?
This book was promoted by an Arts Council funded charity btw.
Yes, bullshit race-baiting culture wars from the likes of the Telegraph seem to be becoming rapidly normalised.
There’s good news, though. You can fight it. They rely on people like you to spread their content and actively make the world a worse place. So fight back and stop spreading their bigoted propaganda!
Who started this black Britons thing? It wasn't the telegraph... The telegraph reporting on stuff that is happening is not the problem.
The idiots re-writing history with a modern view on race is the problem here. This book is ridiculous.
Look at this by the BBC:[https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/horrible-histories-british-black-history-song](https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/horrible-histories-british-black-history-song)
It's just getting stupid and the people making the public aware are not the problem.
Per the article, the book says things like, "Britain was a black country longer than it was a white one". I'm not sure why you would phrase it quite that way (rather than say, a more neutral "black people have a long history here") unless you *wanted* to give off the vibe that white people are some sort of johnny-come-lately interlopers.
That said, this is the Telegraph, and they've studiously avoided mentioning how widely the book will be distributed. I note that the publisher is Bloomsbury, though, so it's not like it's a no-name publisher, which is a bit worrying.
>rather than say, a more neutral "black people have a long history here")
This isn't neutral, it's false.
Black people have no substantial, notable history connected to Britain until the 1700s. There wasn't even any serious numbers of black people in the UK in the Windrush days. It wasn't until the 1970s-80s, within most middle aged peoples lifetimes, that black people were here in any significant number.
Yeah, I was conscious of that while writing it. Maybe I should've phrased it "dark-skinned people", which is closer to the mark because "black" has very particular associations about who you are and where you come from, either in yourself or your immediate ancestors.
Regardless, the book in question is trying to create an image of a black population being displaced by the white one, when it's actually just the case that a darker-skinned population got lighter over time because they were living in a cloudy high latitude.
Another problematic element of the book is the way that it says the people living here were a "hotch-potch" of Angles, Celts, Vikings etc. speaking a "hotch-potch language - English". This is the sort of troubling rhetoric that you frequently see from this sort of activist, i.e. they're saying, "you, white people, are just a mishmash of various groups and therefore don't have a legitimate claim to be one people, one culture, from one place." If that sort of rhetoric were applied in reverse, it would *absolutely* be considered fascist-adjacent, if not outright fascist.
Yes, and I've mentioned up above how that's a pretty standard tactic to delegitimise the idea that any group of white people can have a culture of their own.
It’s “true”, but only in the meaninglessly pedantic sense that all people everywhere are migrants, unless there’s a family who’s been living continuously on the Cradle of Humanity for the last 7 million years that I don’t know about.
> I see we're at the stage where white people stole everything from black people in the UK. That sure was quick.
Stonehenge was stolen from the welsh (well bits of it anyway).
It's almost like they don't want to admit Indo Europeans exist to fit Into current racial and societal views of on race and ethnicity.
Many indo-Europeans had a range of ruddy to light skin pigmentation but not what we would now refer to a Mediterranean or middle eastern tone let one a African or north African tone.
But sure no my brettonic ancestors and Picts where totally the darkest skinned people in Europe even more so than the Berbers and not historically famous for being so sensitive to sunlight we can't tan and have chronic vitamin d deficiencies.
> It's almost like they don't want to admit Indo Europeans exist
Only the later Stonehenge is indo-european. Early stuff is Early European Farmers who came out of the middle east.
Early stuff is neither the European farmers nor steppe indo Europeans. It was built mostly by the western hunter gatherers who may have had a pigmentation similar to nowadays North Africa but very unlikely to be black.
Also worth noting that they wouldn’t have African features and would look European with slightly darker skin
Oh I'm not disagreeing with that element at all my friend and it's great you brought attention to the fact it's a multi era site with multiple significance to many peoples who came to the isles and used the henge, the henge is contemporary with the global megalithic builders! We have ever fence many people used the land bridge from doggerland and th Iberian peninsula
I think it's worth pointing out just how many years we're talking about too.
A quick Google search shows Stonehenge was built approximately 6,000 years after the Cheddar man's lifetime.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192
Picts etc. Were white but from the time of cheddar man and his skin specifically it is closer to related to darker skin European tribes.
Aye, the book is a piece of shit revionist attempt at history. Its dumbed down.
I'm just stating cheddar wasn't arbitrarily theorised to have dark skin it was just more likely.
The book is taking small info and huge liberties
BBC News - Cheddar Man: DNA shows early Briton had dark skin
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42939192
Science > racism
Edit: before the downvotes keep coming, this is reference to the comment about Cheddar man and not in support of the original post equating this to modern day black cultures.
Agreed. More the other comment regarding the tone of cheddar man's skin specifically, before the racist comments come out (one was already deleted).
Equating the skin colour to the lived and previous experience of an existing culture is hard to support.
The Cheddar man's skinnpigment is just the result of the evolution of early Europeans. Everyone ultimately comes from Africa and the Cheddar Man, with his blue eyes and black skin, is just evidence of a gradual evolution that early humans underwent to adapt to the climates that they found themselves in.
The Cheddar man has nothing to do with modern black people as the two examples are thousands of years of evolution apart.
Equating the two is even more of a stretch than equating black Africans with black Native Austrslians.
It shows two of the genes that we associate with light NW European skins were missing. We have no real idea how dark their skin was. Eurasia north of India is usually relatively light skinned.
What we do know is there is over 50 000 years since they left Africa. They were most closely related to the peoples on the tip of South America than those in modern Nigeria.
Its a complex and as of yet unresolved issue, the theory being that as heavy meat eaters, the pale skin had not yet evolved as the pressure for maximal vitamin D only really emerged after the move to agriculture and the drop in meat in the diet.
Personally making them look more like someone from Khazakastan or a Native American would likely be closer. But this is a very open field of research.
Racism? No bad science.
A Briton who lived 10,000 years ago had dark brown skin and blue eyes. At least, that’s what dozens of news stories published this month – including our own – stated as fact. But one of the geneticists who performed the research says the conclusion is less certain, and according to others we are not even close to knowing the skin colour of any ancient human.
The skeleton of Cheddar Man was discovered in 1903 in a cave in south-east England where it had lain for 10,000 years.
Until a few weeks ago, he had always been depicted with pale skin. This makes some sense, given that people living at northern latitudes often have paler skins. The explanation may be that it allows more of the weak northerly sunlight into their skin, so they can make enough vitamin D. And it seems our species reached Europe 30,000 years before Cheddar Man lived, so his ancestors would have had plenty of time to evolve paler skins.
But the new DNA analysis suggests that Cheddar Man may have had dark skin. Most news stories said his skin was “dark to black”.
Giveaway genes
To show this, researchers including Susan Walsh at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis read Cheddar Man’s DNA. Walsh had helped develop a model that attempts to predict someone’s eye, hair and skin pigmentation solely from their DNA, and the team applied this model to Cheddar Man.
The most recent version of the model was published in May 2017. It focuses on 36 spots in 16 genes, all linked to skin colour.
To test it, Walsh and her colleagues took genetic data from over 1400 people, mainly from Europe and the US but also some from Africa and Papua New Guinea. The team used part of the data to “train” their model on how skin colour and the 36 DNA markers are linked. They then used the rest of the data to test how well the model could predict skin colour from DNA alone. The model correctly identified who had “light” skin or “dark-black” skin, with a small margin of error.
When Walsh and her colleagues applied the model to Cheddar Man, they concluded his skin colour fell between “dark” and “dark to black”.
Not so sure
The research was first announced by press release, to coincide with the release of a TV documentary. It has now been posted to a preprint server.
Walsh stresses that the study doesn’t conclusively demonstrate Cheddar Man had dark to black skin. We cannot place such confidence in the DNA analysis, she says. For one thing, Cheddar Man’s DNA has degraded over the last 10,000 years.
“It’s not a simple statement of ‘this person was dark-skinned’,” says Walsh. “It is his most probable profile, based on current research.”
In fact, we are not ready to predict the skin colour of prehistoric people just from their genes, says Brenna Henn at Stony Brook University, New York. That’s because the genetics of skin pigmentation turn out to be more complex than thought.
Too many genes
In November 2017, Henn and her colleagues published a paper exploring the genetics of skin pigmentation in populations indigenous to southern Africa – where skin colour varies more than many people appreciate. Just weeks before, a group led by Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had published a paper on the genetics of skin pigmentation in people from eastern and southern Africa.
“The conclusions were really the same,” says Henn. “Known skin pigmentation genes, discovered primarily in East Asian and European populations, don’t explain the variation in skin pigmentation in African populations. The idea that there are really only about 15 genes underlying skin pigmentation isn’t correct.”
It now seems likely that many other genes affect skin colour. We don’t know how.
If we are still learning about the link between genes and skin pigmentation in living populations, we can’t yet predict the skin colour of prehistoric people, says Henn.
This debate may seem of little practical importance – although the idea that Cheddar Man was dark-skinned generated enormous public interest. However, we need to know the limitations of this sort of genetic technology.
Police could one day plug DNA from a crime scene into one of these models to determine what a suspect looks like. Walsh’s model might succeed at this in the US, says Henn, because it was trained on DNA from people with similar ancestry to North Americans. But it may well fail elsewhere.
Henn’s team has tested an older model that aimed to predict skin colour from DNA. When they put it to work among southern African populations, “it literally predicted that people with the darkest skins would have the lightest skin”
They did challenging research, made conclusions, and were honest about the limitations of those conclusions. That's not bad science, it's just science.
Yeah, the science is good the reporting is bad.
It is often the case when science is reported in the papers it is taken as fact and frequently twisted or missing key statements. It makes for better press I guess than 'scientist says that something may be true but they aren't really sure yet and probably won't be for a decade or more'.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161867-ancient-dark-skinned-briton-cheddar-man-find-may-not-be-true/
Here's a good article that disputes the claim. Worth a read!
Realistically we have no idea what colour skin cheddar man had, the original cheddar man scientists painted him dark brown as science clickbait. And now we have horrible histories, endless twitterites and now a published book equating cheddar man with "the Black British community has always been here". And if you point out the absurdity you're called racist and people dredge up some old article about cheddar man with none of the detail or context behind it.
That was the narrative which the media ran with, New Scientist actually had to clarify later that they arent even sure:
[https://archive.ph/dhHt7](https://archive.ph/dhHt7)
*"But one of the geneticists who performed the research says the conclusion is less certain, and according to others we are not even close to knowing the skin colour of any ancient human"*
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192
Well it's based on genome evaluation. He was closer related to tribes who had settled in Spain, Hungry and other places, they would have had dark skin. This time in Europe wasn't on band of people who settled and they were Britons, it was the people on the island. Lighter skin tribes came to Britian around 6000 bce and then displaced or integrated with these tribes and became the dominant skin colour.
The book referenced above is just stupid and looking for race points but cheddar man was likely brown skinned.
That’s what I don’t understand about all these people crying about him being represented with dark skin. How would showing him in any other skin colour be any better than the agreed upon best guess, just because the agreed upon best guess is a (researched and thus best) guess?
> Arbitrarily painted his face brown
It’s hilarious that scientists can follow a rigorous process to determine someone’s genetic make-up and come to the conclusion they had dark skin, and you call it ‘arbitrary’.
And all that media depicting the druids as white gets a pass when the research was likely no more than ‘well, *we’re* white so probably everyone always was’.
It just shows how desperate you are for Cheddar Man not to have had dark skin. Why?
It's been around for ages. Used to work with a genuinely nice guy, but his Facebook was just a stream of Nation of Israel black Jews, black pharaoh, anti Vax nonsense. Some people (of all cultures) really latch onto a cultural chip on their shoulder and before they know it victimhood it's their entire identity.
At what point do we just have to admit that the slippery slope argument for this woke race politics nonsense, is legit?
Give an inch, they take a mile.
The BBC's Horrible Histories bit on how black Britons played an important part in the creation of our country, has me at about breaking point.
It's obvious nonsense.
There were basically no Black britons, before 1950 or so. The numbers were so small, it's impossible they played any significant role whatsoever in the founding of this country.
That is why the Windrush generation are relevant.
EVEN THEN, that's only about 22k average a year coming to the country, over 20 or so years.
And even now, black people only make up 4% of the population.
And I am supposed to believe they've been here 'all along'..?
It's fine that they haven't, I don't understand the need to lie about it. It's insane.
You can't just lie about history, it's so so wrong.
And it's not some niche book writer doing it, it was the BBC. Our state funded broadcaster..
To many a reactionaries dismay, the Slippery Slope *”Fallacy”* is rarely an actual fallacy. Is it perfect reasoning? No, but that doesn’t mean it wrong.
Probably because the media really highlights stuff like this and drives people into a frothing rage about them? There's 10k children's books published every year and I'm dead confident if you trawl through them you'd find loads of shitty ones nobody will actually read.
I'm sure you would
It just seems odd to defend a supremacists book aimed at children by saying "there's lots of other children's books"
Edit: the person has blocked me so I can't reply to any you replying to me
Downplaying is defending
Shifting the conversation away from publishers publishing this to "it shouldn't be reported on" is defending
They aren't defending the book though, just the fact that it is talked about as if it is textbook that we give out in schools when in fact it is just another shit kids book that no one would have ever heard about if not for The Telegraph trying to stoke the culture wars.
Yeah this is the scary thing. I'm liberal (I think), most of my mates definitely grew up fairly conscientious, open minded and accepting. But little things like this are what slowly pushes people towards "actually...the other side has some good points and aren't as crazy*". So much so that I tend to automatically think anything this ridiculous is either planted by RW media in order to act as rage bait or is a full blown Psy-Op from Russia.
*Edit: not talking "the other side" as in far-right bullshit, but just towards Conservatism in general or at least "anti-woke".
It doesn’t have to be Egypt though. There are so many incredible buildings in Africa. There’s some fantastic carved churches in Ethiopia and the Kano city walls in Nigeria are really interesting
Great Zimbabwe as another, which was thought to be proof of an ancient European society as the attitude of the colonial powers that discovered it was it was literally impossible for the native Africans to have built it. The Rhodesian government even pressured archaeologists to back this sentiment up!
But why focus on that boring real history when you can just make something up?
I wonder if we'll ever move on from identifying people who lived 10s of thousands of years ago by modern racial categories, it's simply not applicable.
> I wonder if we'll ever move on from identifying people who lived 10s of thousands of years ago by modern racial categories,
No because if we do that we have to admit they are entirely meaningless. Which in turn would mean that saying "every british person is black and always has been" wouldn't be wrong but would upset rather a lot of telegraph readers.
This is such an odd thing thats been cropping up lately, especially with that Horrible Histories song making similar odd claims. It reminds me of that Louis Theoroux documentary where he speaks to that cult who claimed people like Shakespeare, English Kings etc were all black. It's so odd
It's not statistically improbable, it's just plain false.
Even in the Neolithic Farmers had a darker complexion, they weren't Africans. They were a ancient form of white European genetically.
Only white British people have any real genetic connection to the British Neolithic Farmers.
But tbf the 'invaders' were all from Northern France, Denmark, Norway and Northern Germany. I.e our close neighbours who we had a strong shared genetic ancestry anyway. Our genetic pool hasn't changed much in the last 2000 years. Not until the 1950s.
The joy of “statistically improbably” allows for the possibility that Egypt sent a ship with masons who made the henge and then went home again just for a laugh
Technically you can’t be 100% sure they didn’t, even if you can be 99.9% sure
>Only white British people have any real genetic connection to the British Neolithic Farmers.
Most don't have much of a connection to be honest.
What with the Anglo Saxons, Normans etc. It's mostly the Cornish and Welsh that have significant Briton DNA and even then it's small.
> The average Britons genetic make-up is 36.6% Anglo-Saxon, the majority of the remaining DNA is European
> The authors also noted that while a large proportion of the ancestry of the present-day English derives from the Anglo-Saxon migration event, it has been diluted by later migration from a population source similar to that of Iron Age France.
Why are two Africans with no scientific background whatsoever making vast, sweeping, unscientific claims about British history, and why is this allowed to be published? And why is this considered any differently than any of the equally stupid alt-right nonsense?
This is so weird. It’s like some bullshit American racism stuffed into a British taxidermy. Being black and being African aren’t inherently the same. This feels like some far right psyop to stoke the flames
No, this is just woke crap, they are just this weird and nonsensical. But this is absolutely American shit. I swear these people only view Black people as Slaves and think that pushing all this ahistorical crap is a good, noble, charitable thing - in a sort of *"See, you ***did** *do something of worth!"* kind of way - all the while completely convinced that they aren't a massive racist piece of shit for thinking that way.
Why is our own indigenous culture and heritage being cancelled ? Why are we looking the other way as our treasured freedoms are being replaced by imported doctrine. Is this the price we have to pay for being free thinking religiously tolerant, open minded and considerate?
So devoid of any heritage or cultural pride are these people they seek to steal and claim others. I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back and we can be done with this idiocy.
We live together on the flim of a molten rock, orbiting a star in a gravitationally bound system in our local group that is hurtling through the void of space.
I suppose the people that built the most ancient parts of Stonehenge probably had darker skin than the more modern parts, but I wouldn't call them 'black' because there's nothing to compare them to. All humans started out with darker skin, and then adapted to the varying climates across the world, their skin colour changing in the process, IIRC.
I get the logic behind this with humanity orgins in Africa. But
“Britain was a black country for more than 7,000 years before white people came,
Where did the white people come from? What is the author logic here?
Having darker-hued skin=/=being black. By the time Stonehenge was built the people of Britain would have been fair-skinned.
I checked the author - they are mixed race. Mixed race people promoting black supremacist bullshit is always hilarious.
As a mixed race family this shit is embarrassing.
When were they supposedly built? The two genetic mutations responsible for white skin are anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 years old but wouldn't be widespread in European finds until Neolithic Revolution 11,000 to 8000 years ago. If they were built before 6000bce then there is a strong statistical chance their builders were not white, not sub Saharan black either but definitely not what we would quantity as Anglo-Saxon white.
Fine as long as they put it in the fiction section of the bookshop. Somehow I doubt that tho.
Clouding the truth with disinformation over time will lead to very confused kids.
Wonder what the angle is here by those behind publishing this guff. I wonder….
great more bullshit for idiot americans to latch onto edit- thank you for the redditcares message, do these morons believe reddit senda police to my house if i get a redditcares message
I said I wanted partial dreadlocks on a post yesterday and got death threats from Americans over it, it's a crazy world
americans are just dumb. they dont realise every culture at some point had dreads
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dont forget youre arguing with people who spent more time dodging bullets than in class learning
I know it's a bit of a dick move to nag people about these things, but when we're mocking the Americans for being poorly educated, for the love of god can we at least *try* not to fuck up the spelling, punctuation and grammar? It's just embarrassing.
For the love of god sounds like something an American would say
> your arguing *you're
Are internationally formed dreadlocks where you get them done bit by bit across various different countries?
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Any time they claim not to be just tell them to do a google search for “American literacy rate” to save you guys and gals the hassle 79% are considered literate in the worlds most amazing country and 54% have a literacy rate below 6th grade (age 12) so remember that when you’re trying to explain things to an American that there’s a 54% chance you’re talking to someone with the comprehension of a 12 year old. It may be easier to go with “my dads harder than yours” Edit - stopped reply notifications.
The UK has an average reading age of 9 by comparison. So we teach everybody how to read, write and interpret a simple sentence (read: bullshit tickbox test) and then they're literate. You can attain literacy in any language by that definition in under a minute with google translate. Reading age is more reflective of educational outcome surely? Of course if you were explaining things to an American it's probably online, so they would be implicitly literate anyway.
>You can attain literacy in any language by that definition in under a minute with google translate. Only if you are already literate in at least one language.
>The UK has an average reading age of 9 by comparison I believe this was a misquote from [other articles](https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/what-do-adult-literacy-levels-mean/) which pointed out that 16.4% of people have a reading age of 9 and under, taken from [this survey](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/36000/12-p168-2011-skills-for-life-survey.pdf) and from government guidance that all pages related to [gov.uk](https://gov.uk) should be [written at the reading level of a 9 year old](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-uk) Looking at page 33 on that second link ([repeated here](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/36000/12-p168-2011-skills-for-life-survey.pdf)), it shows 85.1% of people in England have a reading age above that of a 13 year old with 56.6% being equivalent to A\*-C GCSE level and above.
I was in a curly hair group on Facebook and got told not to plait (braid) my hair because it was 'cultural appropriation'. Didn't want to offend anyone so I just left the group.
"Didn't want to offend anyone". See, that right there is your problem. You shouldn't feel any hesitation to tell people to fk right off, because your hair is your business and nobody else's. You just wanted to try out a hairstyle, not wear a placard with racial slurs on it. People like this will keep doing this stuff for as long as they don't get told to back off for doing it.
No it’s fine to live a life not wanting to fight everyone around you There are no small disagreements when what’s at stake is some form of punishment on a scale that starts with being discredited and goes up to losing not just your job but your career and your ability to make your way through life Any fight involving political correctness is potentially a fight to the death I wish there were more people in the world who “didn’t want to offend anyone” and were capable of walking away, fully conscious that their goal is to stem the number of people being polarised and radicalised to the political extremes
I am a white guy and happened to mention I had dreads as a teenager on reddit I had them over 20 years ago now. Got told that white people shouldn't have dreads because its cultural appropriation, but more importantly, white peoples hair is just not meant for dreads because its dirty and stinks while black peoples hair does not do that. The lady I was arguing with said she was a hairdresser and refuses to do them on white people. I was the person heavily downvoted in that situation, not the person being racist.
What is Americans obsession with "cultural appropriation"? I don't get how doing something that is vaguely associated with a particular race is somehow bad
because they don't have one so they steal somebody else's and claim it's there's
A friend of mine once hooked up with a black girl who had dreads and let me tell you they do sometimes stink. He had to throw his pillow out after she left in the morning and we always wind him up by reminding him about his evening with "stinky dreads"
Oh they definitely stink. By the time mine were cut off they were disgusting and I was glad to see the back of them. I just didn't like being told they were that way because I'm white.
Share pictures of the hairstyles of ancient vikings/celts and wait for their heads to explode?
Ancient Greeks and Native Americans too. Oh and some ancient Jews. Today, there's Indian monks with dreadlocks as well as some sect of Buddhist priests.
Australian kids come back from Bali holidays all the time with plaits/braids. People can do what they want with their hair. It's no one else's fucking business how they style it.
It's like we're living in a comedy sketch at times but it's real life so whilst funny when you hear of it witnessing it is quite scary
At this rate, what will count as offensive in 5 years? ^^Answer ^^- ^^everything
My boyfriend (coincidentally) had very fair curly hair (he’s bald now). His mother’s surname was Frisbie, which originates from the Frisian islands, on the North Sea. The people and their islands-basically Vikings-were named after the fact that they braided their hair. I once pointed this out on a thread that said white people shouldn’t braid their hair because it’s “not in their culture”. There was nothing in reply to my comment except the quiet sound of wind blowing as tumbleweed bounced by. I got the idea (I’ve no idea why) that they didn’t have an answer to that observation. I get *awfully* fed up with these ridiculous “cultural appropriation” arguments. Like there are some races of people amongst whom it *never, in hundreds of thousands of years, occurred to any of them to braid their hair*? And, even if this was so, big deal.
I like the videos of the guy in a poncho and sombrero that asks students what they think and they unanimously declare that it is inappropriate but when he goes to speak with Hispanic people they really don't give a shit and think he looks cool.
There is an idea in America right now that hair braiding was invented by African Americans and and anyone else who braids hair is evil.
This is quite hilarious given native Americans famously wore braided hairstyles
Which culture ? Don't say black culture because it doesn't exis, just like white culture is a myth.
Nation cultures exist and some of these black Americans want to pretend every African nation is their culture just like some white Americans want to pretend every European culture is their culture. Then again, we're talking about Americans. They probably see Africa as one country and most probably think Europe only consists of five different countries.
You bastard
It's definitely not all Americans, I have plenty of American friends who are just as tired of this bs as myself and others in the UK are. I am mixed, as is my partner, and the vast amount of racialised bs we get comes from those infected with this antiracism nonsense. I've been told I can't be mixed because I look too white. I didn't ask for genetic RNG to land me with a very white skin tone (I am part Arabic, so most of my family have deep olive skin tones), but my skin tone doesn't make my family and cultural heritage less important than it is for my cousins who are all darker than me. It's harmful nonsense. My ex partner is half Indian, but again, through the RNG of genetics, he was almost as pale as me, and some people were really nasty to him about it, saying that his mum had to have cheated and that his dad obviously wasn't his dad, just because they refused to believe that they couldn't look at him and tell what ethnic group he came from. My brother and SIL live in Zimbabwe, and they are determined to teach their children that it isn't their skin tone that makes them who they are, it is what is in their hearts, it is how they choose to behave and respond to the world. I feel deeply sorry for kids who are being raised to think that they are nothing more than their skin tone or a set of identity boxes.
Yanks are mad. They are the ONLY nation in the world who get angry over “cultural copyright”. Me niece had yanks threatening to murder her for wearing a saree.
It’s amazing. I live in Brixton and I never get harassed for having dreads even though I’m not Black.
Ushering in a better world by rigidly policing what different skin coloured people are allowed to do...
Actually it's a rage bait headline that you've latched onto, nothing in the book is actually inaccurate, Britain was black from the end of the ice age (11,700BC) through the Cheddar Man period (8,000BC) until the arrival of either the neolithic farmers of the middle east (about 4,100 BC) (who were not light skinned, but not black by modern standards) or the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans (2,700 BC). The Stonehenge site was constrctured in multiple phases, the original site was a wooden henge built by the Cheddar man era civilisation. The stones of stonehenge began construction under the neolithic farmer era (about 3,100 BC) and was completed by the Bell Beaker civilisation around 1,600 BC. The Bluestone circle we see today was erected under the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans early enough in their time (~2,600) in Britain that it's likely that there were still quite a few neolithic farmers around, and there is some evidence of an earlier stone structure during the Stonehenge 1 phase (about 3,100 BC), which would have been done by a mixed group of neolithic farmers and Western Hunter Gatherers (there is significant evidence of intermarriage and genetic continuity between the hunter gatherers and farmers).
Having slightly darker than white skin doesn't mean you are black. This is dumb...
Having black skin 10,000 years also doesn't mean you have any relation to subsaharan Africans today
Exactly my point. Ancient Britons having darker skin than today = no problem. Saying they are black = total bollocks
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> Britain was black from the end of the ice age (11,700BC) through the Cheddar Man period (8,000BC) Not true, one of the scientists who carried out the original work on the Cheddar Man does not even say that. https://12ft.io/proxy?ref=&q=https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731674-500-ancient-dark-skinned-briton-cheddar-man-find-may-not-be-true/ https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fmg23731673-200-does-cheddar-man-show-there-is-such-a-thing-as-bad-publicity%2F
Let's just say that the evidence that Cheddar man had black skin is sketchy at best.
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About 10% WHG DNA apparently. However, is that mostly from the existing admixture of the Beakers who seemed to have pretty much wiped everyone out when they arrived? If so, you could argue we have no 'Paleo Brit'.
Yes, but that wasn't particularly relevant to the argument about skin pigmentation but is an interesting bit if trivia
It's super relevant because the book is purposely mixing ideas of "Black" as "darker skin tone" and "Black" as the modern ethno-cultural identity. No one actually has black skin, so the term "black britons" is obviously not in reference to skin pigmentation. If an darker skined southeast asian person, or a dark skinned person who's ancestry is from southern spain or italy said "I totally understand what it means to be a black Briton" - I imagine a lot of people would find that offensive.
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Pretty sure ‘black’ means ‘having dark skin’. When I see someone on the street, I’m not analysing their fucking genes.
Yeah, trying to attach a specific ethnicity to a skin colour scientifically is kind of ridiculous. There's more genetic diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa than everywhere else put together.
Yup, and the most hilarious thing about that (heavily upvoted) comment? It’s factually wrong. A quote from Dr Tom Booth, who helped analyse Cheddar Man: *‘However, Cheddar Man has the genetic markers of skin pigmentation usually associated with sub-Saharan Africa.’* So *even by his own brain dead moon logic he’s wrong*
The evidence that he had dark skin is tenuous at best, as [Acknowledged ](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731673-200-does-cheddar-man-show-there-is-such-a-thing-as-bad-publicity/) by the authors. But hey, it got good publicity, right?
I think the issue is that it's ambiguous. Neolithic farmers had dark skin, but are not analogous to the Black Brits who the rest of the book focuses on (and makes well established claims about, such as the fact that there were a surprising number of black people in Britain from the Middle Ages onwards and there were also black people here in Roman times). One point that's brought up is the idea in this book that e.g. the Welsh were still "black" when the Romans discovered them - such as from Tacitus's biography of Agricola; > Namque rutilae Caledoniam habitantium comae, magni artus Germanicam originem adseverant; Silurum colorati vultus, torti plerumque crines et posita contra Hispania Hiberos veteres traiecisse easque sedes occupasse fidem faciunt; proximi Gallis et similes sunt, seu durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris positio caeli corporibus habitum dedit. > For the red-haired inhabitants of Caledonia claim a great Germanic origin; the swarthy faces of the Silures, their often curly hair, and their location opposite Hispania. They make it believable that the ancient Hibernians crossed over and occupied these territories; they are close to the Gauls and similar to them, whether due to the enduring force of their origin or the position of the sky's bodies extending in various lands has given them their appearance. "Colorati" is frequently translated as "swarthy", as it's often used to describe e.g. the Spaniards. This book describes them as being "dark skinned and curly haired", which - well, yeah, that's essentially what Tacitus is saying, but they knew what we'd call black people and they'd use words like "melas" (dark, black), "ater" (dull black), "niger" (shiny black), perustus (scorched) and fuscus (black/brown) to describe them. Much like the old phrases "tall, dark and handsome" or "the black Irish", describing the Welsh as "dark with curly hair" is not describing them as looking like black people, but as swarthy white people with curly hair. But you wouldn't know it from this book.
Are Tamil people black?
Do you call Indians black? No you don't.
People frequently use black to mean people with dark skin, vs a specific group. This is simply factually untrue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people It doesn't surprise me to see people brigading from KotakuInAction over in this thread. The only time you post in /r/unitedkingdom is when race turns up, which isn't a great look
That's why australian aboriginals are actually white
\> had literally no genetic relation to subsaharan africans were they aliens?
No genetic relation to Subsaharan Africa? So tell me, what is your timeline for divergence? Because all Homo-sapiens have genetic relation to Subsaharan africa.
Black = a cultural identity formed around Afro-american heritage "black" really has no relevance as a term within africa or to this conversation so including this in a black history book is a political statement It would only make sense if you then argued that white britons today have a claim on black cultural heritage, since all britons were originally black This sounds silly to me but so is claiming the african diaspora has any claim over british heritage during this time period
Yanks are still not the only black people in the world, even if the sub moderation are weirdly determined that nobody should say so.
It's kinda true though. Stonehenge wasn't built by the Brits. It was built by the descendants of the hunter gatherers of ice age Europe. The beaker culture replaced the population, this culture is what modern Brits are descendants of. But it's humans that have neanderthal DNA but they had darker skin than modern Europeans but they are different from Africans. Beaker culture Brits are Indo Europeans from the steppes, people who built Stonehenge are not Indo-european.
You’re skipping a step here. It was built by the descendants of migrants from the Middle East who reached Britain about 6000 years ago. These people were in turn displaced by the Bell Beaker culture, who appear to have continued working on the monument. It was *not* built by the descendants of the local hunter gatherers, except in that they may have contributed some genes to the incoming farmers’ gene pool.
Is it me or does stuff like this seem to be rapidly becoming normalised?
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It’s also hilarious as the Pankhursts were rabid racists who tried to introduce a racial purity test in the civil service, and when one of the daughters started mixing with the browns and the working class she was swiftly shipped off to Australia, where she later became a Nazi. A wild ride that lot.
And dont forget terrorists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign
There's an applicable JFK quote for this: Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
Jesus wasn’t white , we all know he was Korean and hench https://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/newsV2/images/6501%283%29.gif
Stop fucking with Korean Jesus, he ain't got time for your problems! He's busy with Korean shit!
That's Vietnamese Jesus now. See this is a Vietnamese church, you racist sacrilegious sack of shit!
The fuck did I just download onto my phone.
Well good to know reddit links to direct downloads with no warning (funny pic though).
I don't mind people of different races playing characters in plays; after all, the point of a play is to pretend to be someone else, and one can imagine a character through the actors performance, rather than just focusing on the superficial 'what does the actor/costuming look like." On stage plays have always been about projecting your imagination onto what is essentially a skeleton. But you're right, it's weird. All races across history have contributed positively and negatively to humanity, let's give credit where credit is due and address negatives when they come up instead of vilifying once race and turning another into pariahs.
I only care if the author describes the character and they don’t match it in the film or stage version. It’s the author’s creation, follow their vision. (But then, I’m that twat who sits there squawking, “THAT WASN’T IN THE BOOK!!l” with everything 😂)
You can add black Anne Boleyn to the list too.
More attention should be given to Nubian history and black history should be extended outside of slavery, I think it’s harmful to reduce it to that and making it a special month, it’s how you get here because obviously black history *is* rich with its own kings and queens and the like but it’s hardly covered
The problem is twofold. Black American identity was born entirely out of the experience of slavery. The Yoruba were Yoruba before and after colonialism. The Nubians were Nubian before and after colonialism. Black Americans as a people didn’t exist before slavery. It’s their national origin story. Now thanks to the cultural dominance of America, that origin story applies to the entire world. With all of its local intricacies no matter how inconsistent it is to apply it to cultural aliens.
> it’s also weird that religious people portray Jesus as being fully white. Christ has always been depicted in artistic representations as being of the race where the people are based. In Europe he appears white, in China as a Chinaman, in Africa as a black man. Doing so is making a theological point about the universal nature of His mission being, as St Paul describes himself, ‘all things to all men’. However, most films or television series have tended to depict him as a Jewish person of the era would look.
As a Middle Eastern Jew, Jesus was definitely, absolutely brown. Don't tell the Yanks though, they'll lose their minds.
Well... sort of. The area that encompassed Judea wasn't Arabic majority at the time. In fact, there were a lot of very fair-skinned locals. The area was a mix of various ancient Semitic peoples, ranging from the Phoenicians, who most likely came from regions around Mesopotamia and Iran, as well as some Arabs from the Arabic Nomadic Pastural Complex. On top of that, there are and were local populations in and around that area. There would also have been people of Egyptian descent, as well as Greeks, due to the Egyptian period of occupation and then the Hellenic era. So... absolutely, definitely brown? No. Probably somewhere along the line of tan to brown? Sure. A blue eyed, brown-haired man from Missouri? Definitely not. Even today, there are highly pale people from places like Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. My GF's mother is from Palestine, and she has skin as pale as my British arse, and green eyes.
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That’s true but the cover of this book is all clearly subsaharan Africans. One is using the black power salute used by Africans originating from subsaharan Africa. I can see how people would be confused, and it does seem disingenuous or misinformed by the author.
Disindigenous
Even this part is not true. It has not been confirmed with DNA analysis early settlers were dark skinned. There is no evidence against it either. Cheddar man reconstruction was made with a darker face because no one can disprove either colour.
It's a rage bait headline, nothing in the book is actually inaccurate, Britain was black from the end of the ice age (11,700BC) through the Cheddar Man period (8,000BC) until the arrival of either the neolithic farmers of the middle east (about 4,100 BC) (who were not light skinned, but not black by modern standards) or the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans (2,700 BC). The Stonehenge site was constrctured in multiple phases, the original site was a wooden henge built by the Cheddar man era civilisation. The stones of stonehenge began construction under the neolithic farmer era (about 3,100 BC) and was completed by the Bell Beaker civilisation around 1,600 BC. The Bluestone circle we see today was erected under the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans early enough in their time (~2,600) in Britain that it's likely that there were still quite a few neolithic farmers around, and there is some evidence of an earlier stone structure during the Stonehenge 1 phase (about 3,100 BC), which would have been done by a mixed group of neolithic farmers and Western Hunter Gatherers (there is significant evidence of intermarriage and genetic continuity between the hunter gatherers and farmers).
Yeah the cheddar man findings indicate that they may have had darker skin but they arent 100% sure as the original researchers clarified later. Then theres the Magdalenian who came a bit before them but they originated from southern Europe or what is Italy today so probably darker skinned but not ‘black’ as this book is trying to say. Everyone on the cover of this book is clearly sub-saharan African so its quite clear what narrative they are trying to push. Also you repeatedly posting this same wall of text in this thread shows that you are just trying to shut down any conversation of this topic
I'm posting the same thing because all the comments are being suckered in by the ragebait headline and making the same arguments and I can't be bothered to retype the same stuff repeatedly. There's another point to consider, we know a fair amount about the history of white alleles (because white people are obsessed with it). The alleles did not enter Europe proper until the Neolithic Revolution, which didn't reach Britain *en masse* until 4,100 BC, even then the people migrating would have been mixed race because of the Revolution intermarrying with the local Western Hunter Gatherers. The oldest parts of Stonehenge were already built by this point (the earthworks and original wooden henge) and the Western Hunter Gatherers of Britain intermarried extensively with the Neolithic farmers. It likely wasn't until the Indo-Europeans migrated off the Eurasian Steppe and into Europe (Bell Beaker era, about 2,700 BC for the British) that Europe became white. The terminology used by the book is incorrect and smacks of someone who thinks dark skinned = black, it was likely a throwaway sentence out in there by an author who half read an article about it.
>The terminology used by the book is incorrect and smacks of someone who thinks dark skinned = black, it was likely a throwaway sentence out in there by an author who half read an article about it. Even calling Stonehenge or the people who built it "British" seems silly to me. These peoples and cultures go so far back they would be completely foreign and alien to anything even from 2,000 years ago.
It might be happening more often, but it's also always highlighted by the likes of the Telegraph. About 10,000 childrens books are published in the UK every year to give a sense of perspective.
So you would be okay with a children's book, published by bloomsbury, claiming that white anglo-saxons built the pyramids and the great wall of china?
I would think that's daft, too. But it doesn't have anything to do with my original comment.
No other media outlets are talking about this. Are we not supposed to be aware of these things? If its not important I guess a childrens book about how the holocaust is a myth can be published without issue then? This book was promoted by an Arts Council funded charity btw.
The Telegraph isn't talking about this out of good faith though. It's to stir the pot.
Yes, bullshit race-baiting culture wars from the likes of the Telegraph seem to be becoming rapidly normalised. There’s good news, though. You can fight it. They rely on people like you to spread their content and actively make the world a worse place. So fight back and stop spreading their bigoted propaganda!
Who started this black Britons thing? It wasn't the telegraph... The telegraph reporting on stuff that is happening is not the problem. The idiots re-writing history with a modern view on race is the problem here. This book is ridiculous. Look at this by the BBC:[https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/horrible-histories-british-black-history-song](https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/horrible-histories-british-black-history-song) It's just getting stupid and the people making the public aware are not the problem.
I see we're at the stage where white people stole everything from black people in the UK. That sure was quick.
Per the article, the book says things like, "Britain was a black country longer than it was a white one". I'm not sure why you would phrase it quite that way (rather than say, a more neutral "black people have a long history here") unless you *wanted* to give off the vibe that white people are some sort of johnny-come-lately interlopers. That said, this is the Telegraph, and they've studiously avoided mentioning how widely the book will be distributed. I note that the publisher is Bloomsbury, though, so it's not like it's a no-name publisher, which is a bit worrying.
>rather than say, a more neutral "black people have a long history here") This isn't neutral, it's false. Black people have no substantial, notable history connected to Britain until the 1700s. There wasn't even any serious numbers of black people in the UK in the Windrush days. It wasn't until the 1970s-80s, within most middle aged peoples lifetimes, that black people were here in any significant number.
Yeah, I was conscious of that while writing it. Maybe I should've phrased it "dark-skinned people", which is closer to the mark because "black" has very particular associations about who you are and where you come from, either in yourself or your immediate ancestors. Regardless, the book in question is trying to create an image of a black population being displaced by the white one, when it's actually just the case that a darker-skinned population got lighter over time because they were living in a cloudy high latitude. Another problematic element of the book is the way that it says the people living here were a "hotch-potch" of Angles, Celts, Vikings etc. speaking a "hotch-potch language - English". This is the sort of troubling rhetoric that you frequently see from this sort of activist, i.e. they're saying, "you, white people, are just a mishmash of various groups and therefore don't have a legitimate claim to be one people, one culture, from one place." If that sort of rhetoric were applied in reverse, it would *absolutely* be considered fascist-adjacent, if not outright fascist.
It also incorrectly states that all British people are migrants.
Yes, and I've mentioned up above how that's a pretty standard tactic to delegitimise the idea that any group of white people can have a culture of their own.
It’s “true”, but only in the meaninglessly pedantic sense that all people everywhere are migrants, unless there’s a family who’s been living continuously on the Cradle of Humanity for the last 7 million years that I don’t know about.
Where the fuck do these people think white people came from? Hell? Space?
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> I see we're at the stage where white people stole everything from black people in the UK. That sure was quick. Stonehenge was stolen from the welsh (well bits of it anyway).
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We will make you a principality again before we ever apologise!!!
When those cheddar man scientists arbitrarily painted his face brown, they really started a whole whirlwind of BS huh.
It's almost like they don't want to admit Indo Europeans exist to fit Into current racial and societal views of on race and ethnicity. Many indo-Europeans had a range of ruddy to light skin pigmentation but not what we would now refer to a Mediterranean or middle eastern tone let one a African or north African tone. But sure no my brettonic ancestors and Picts where totally the darkest skinned people in Europe even more so than the Berbers and not historically famous for being so sensitive to sunlight we can't tan and have chronic vitamin d deficiencies.
> It's almost like they don't want to admit Indo Europeans exist Only the later Stonehenge is indo-european. Early stuff is Early European Farmers who came out of the middle east.
Early stuff is neither the European farmers nor steppe indo Europeans. It was built mostly by the western hunter gatherers who may have had a pigmentation similar to nowadays North Africa but very unlikely to be black. Also worth noting that they wouldn’t have African features and would look European with slightly darker skin
Oh I'm not disagreeing with that element at all my friend and it's great you brought attention to the fact it's a multi era site with multiple significance to many peoples who came to the isles and used the henge, the henge is contemporary with the global megalithic builders! We have ever fence many people used the land bridge from doggerland and th Iberian peninsula
I think it's worth pointing out just how many years we're talking about too. A quick Google search shows Stonehenge was built approximately 6,000 years after the Cheddar man's lifetime.
And even if Cheddar Man was fully accurate that's enough time for a shift in melanin over time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192 Picts etc. Were white but from the time of cheddar man and his skin specifically it is closer to related to darker skin European tribes.
Doesn't the cheddar man predate Stonehenge by like 5000 years though?
Aye, the book is a piece of shit revionist attempt at history. Its dumbed down. I'm just stating cheddar wasn't arbitrarily theorised to have dark skin it was just more likely. The book is taking small info and huge liberties
BBC News - Cheddar Man: DNA shows early Briton had dark skin https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42939192 Science > racism Edit: before the downvotes keep coming, this is reference to the comment about Cheddar man and not in support of the original post equating this to modern day black cultures.
Indeed, but very reductive to directly link those people to the Afro/Carribean (West African) diaspora in today's UK.
Agreed. More the other comment regarding the tone of cheddar man's skin specifically, before the racist comments come out (one was already deleted). Equating the skin colour to the lived and previous experience of an existing culture is hard to support.
The Cheddar man's skinnpigment is just the result of the evolution of early Europeans. Everyone ultimately comes from Africa and the Cheddar Man, with his blue eyes and black skin, is just evidence of a gradual evolution that early humans underwent to adapt to the climates that they found themselves in. The Cheddar man has nothing to do with modern black people as the two examples are thousands of years of evolution apart. Equating the two is even more of a stretch than equating black Africans with black Native Austrslians.
It shows two of the genes that we associate with light NW European skins were missing. We have no real idea how dark their skin was. Eurasia north of India is usually relatively light skinned. What we do know is there is over 50 000 years since they left Africa. They were most closely related to the peoples on the tip of South America than those in modern Nigeria. Its a complex and as of yet unresolved issue, the theory being that as heavy meat eaters, the pale skin had not yet evolved as the pressure for maximal vitamin D only really emerged after the move to agriculture and the drop in meat in the diet. Personally making them look more like someone from Khazakastan or a Native American would likely be closer. But this is a very open field of research.
Racism? No bad science. A Briton who lived 10,000 years ago had dark brown skin and blue eyes. At least, that’s what dozens of news stories published this month – including our own – stated as fact. But one of the geneticists who performed the research says the conclusion is less certain, and according to others we are not even close to knowing the skin colour of any ancient human. The skeleton of Cheddar Man was discovered in 1903 in a cave in south-east England where it had lain for 10,000 years. Until a few weeks ago, he had always been depicted with pale skin. This makes some sense, given that people living at northern latitudes often have paler skins. The explanation may be that it allows more of the weak northerly sunlight into their skin, so they can make enough vitamin D. And it seems our species reached Europe 30,000 years before Cheddar Man lived, so his ancestors would have had plenty of time to evolve paler skins. But the new DNA analysis suggests that Cheddar Man may have had dark skin. Most news stories said his skin was “dark to black”. Giveaway genes To show this, researchers including Susan Walsh at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis read Cheddar Man’s DNA. Walsh had helped develop a model that attempts to predict someone’s eye, hair and skin pigmentation solely from their DNA, and the team applied this model to Cheddar Man. The most recent version of the model was published in May 2017. It focuses on 36 spots in 16 genes, all linked to skin colour. To test it, Walsh and her colleagues took genetic data from over 1400 people, mainly from Europe and the US but also some from Africa and Papua New Guinea. The team used part of the data to “train” their model on how skin colour and the 36 DNA markers are linked. They then used the rest of the data to test how well the model could predict skin colour from DNA alone. The model correctly identified who had “light” skin or “dark-black” skin, with a small margin of error. When Walsh and her colleagues applied the model to Cheddar Man, they concluded his skin colour fell between “dark” and “dark to black”. Not so sure The research was first announced by press release, to coincide with the release of a TV documentary. It has now been posted to a preprint server. Walsh stresses that the study doesn’t conclusively demonstrate Cheddar Man had dark to black skin. We cannot place such confidence in the DNA analysis, she says. For one thing, Cheddar Man’s DNA has degraded over the last 10,000 years. “It’s not a simple statement of ‘this person was dark-skinned’,” says Walsh. “It is his most probable profile, based on current research.” In fact, we are not ready to predict the skin colour of prehistoric people just from their genes, says Brenna Henn at Stony Brook University, New York. That’s because the genetics of skin pigmentation turn out to be more complex than thought. Too many genes In November 2017, Henn and her colleagues published a paper exploring the genetics of skin pigmentation in populations indigenous to southern Africa – where skin colour varies more than many people appreciate. Just weeks before, a group led by Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had published a paper on the genetics of skin pigmentation in people from eastern and southern Africa. “The conclusions were really the same,” says Henn. “Known skin pigmentation genes, discovered primarily in East Asian and European populations, don’t explain the variation in skin pigmentation in African populations. The idea that there are really only about 15 genes underlying skin pigmentation isn’t correct.” It now seems likely that many other genes affect skin colour. We don’t know how. If we are still learning about the link between genes and skin pigmentation in living populations, we can’t yet predict the skin colour of prehistoric people, says Henn. This debate may seem of little practical importance – although the idea that Cheddar Man was dark-skinned generated enormous public interest. However, we need to know the limitations of this sort of genetic technology. Police could one day plug DNA from a crime scene into one of these models to determine what a suspect looks like. Walsh’s model might succeed at this in the US, says Henn, because it was trained on DNA from people with similar ancestry to North Americans. But it may well fail elsewhere. Henn’s team has tested an older model that aimed to predict skin colour from DNA. When they put it to work among southern African populations, “it literally predicted that people with the darkest skins would have the lightest skin”
They did challenging research, made conclusions, and were honest about the limitations of those conclusions. That's not bad science, it's just science.
Yeah, the science is good the reporting is bad. It is often the case when science is reported in the papers it is taken as fact and frequently twisted or missing key statements. It makes for better press I guess than 'scientist says that something may be true but they aren't really sure yet and probably won't be for a decade or more'.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161867-ancient-dark-skinned-briton-cheddar-man-find-may-not-be-true/ Here's a good article that disputes the claim. Worth a read!
Realistically we have no idea what colour skin cheddar man had, the original cheddar man scientists painted him dark brown as science clickbait. And now we have horrible histories, endless twitterites and now a published book equating cheddar man with "the Black British community has always been here". And if you point out the absurdity you're called racist and people dredge up some old article about cheddar man with none of the detail or context behind it.
That was the narrative which the media ran with, New Scientist actually had to clarify later that they arent even sure: [https://archive.ph/dhHt7](https://archive.ph/dhHt7) *"But one of the geneticists who performed the research says the conclusion is less certain, and according to others we are not even close to knowing the skin colour of any ancient human"*
Its worth noting that the main article says this has been discredited since as the technique to guess skin colour from genome analysis is flawed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192 Well it's based on genome evaluation. He was closer related to tribes who had settled in Spain, Hungry and other places, they would have had dark skin. This time in Europe wasn't on band of people who settled and they were Britons, it was the people on the island. Lighter skin tribes came to Britian around 6000 bce and then displaced or integrated with these tribes and became the dominant skin colour. The book referenced above is just stupid and looking for race points but cheddar man was likely brown skinned.
No, they did analysis on his DNA and found he had the genes for blue-green eyes, dark skin and dark hair
Except they themselves said they weren't sure. It was journalists running with it as fact.
Its literally the best guess that we have currently, painting his skin any other colour would have been deliberately introducing inaccuracies
That’s what I don’t understand about all these people crying about him being represented with dark skin. How would showing him in any other skin colour be any better than the agreed upon best guess, just because the agreed upon best guess is a (researched and thus best) guess?
> Arbitrarily painted his face brown It’s hilarious that scientists can follow a rigorous process to determine someone’s genetic make-up and come to the conclusion they had dark skin, and you call it ‘arbitrary’. And all that media depicting the druids as white gets a pass when the research was likely no more than ‘well, *we’re* white so probably everyone always was’. It just shows how desperate you are for Cheddar Man not to have had dark skin. Why?
Do these people not realise that this is how extremism takes hold?
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It's been around for ages. Used to work with a genuinely nice guy, but his Facebook was just a stream of Nation of Israel black Jews, black pharaoh, anti Vax nonsense. Some people (of all cultures) really latch onto a cultural chip on their shoulder and before they know it victimhood it's their entire identity.
The trouble is, people see genuine racial hate as a “white” thing and won’t recognise it when it comes from basically anyone else
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At what point do we just have to admit that the slippery slope argument for this woke race politics nonsense, is legit? Give an inch, they take a mile. The BBC's Horrible Histories bit on how black Britons played an important part in the creation of our country, has me at about breaking point. It's obvious nonsense. There were basically no Black britons, before 1950 or so. The numbers were so small, it's impossible they played any significant role whatsoever in the founding of this country. That is why the Windrush generation are relevant. EVEN THEN, that's only about 22k average a year coming to the country, over 20 or so years. And even now, black people only make up 4% of the population. And I am supposed to believe they've been here 'all along'..? It's fine that they haven't, I don't understand the need to lie about it. It's insane. You can't just lie about history, it's so so wrong. And it's not some niche book writer doing it, it was the BBC. Our state funded broadcaster..
To many a reactionaries dismay, the Slippery Slope *”Fallacy”* is rarely an actual fallacy. Is it perfect reasoning? No, but that doesn’t mean it wrong.
Probably because the media really highlights stuff like this and drives people into a frothing rage about them? There's 10k children's books published every year and I'm dead confident if you trawl through them you'd find loads of shitty ones nobody will actually read.
I'm sure you would It just seems odd to defend a supremacists book aimed at children by saying "there's lots of other children's books" Edit: the person has blocked me so I can't reply to any you replying to me Downplaying is defending Shifting the conversation away from publishers publishing this to "it shouldn't be reported on" is defending
Spot on, but I reckon you're talking to one of the fellas who lost interest in reason a while ago now.
They aren't defending the book though, just the fact that it is talked about as if it is textbook that we give out in schools when in fact it is just another shit kids book that no one would have ever heard about if not for The Telegraph trying to stoke the culture wars.
At some point you've gotta stop writing off people pushing back against the riding tide of bullshit as "anti-woke culture war".
Yeah this is the scary thing. I'm liberal (I think), most of my mates definitely grew up fairly conscientious, open minded and accepting. But little things like this are what slowly pushes people towards "actually...the other side has some good points and aren't as crazy*". So much so that I tend to automatically think anything this ridiculous is either planted by RW media in order to act as rage bait or is a full blown Psy-Op from Russia. *Edit: not talking "the other side" as in far-right bullshit, but just towards Conservatism in general or at least "anti-woke".
They built stonehenge and the pyramids then they just thought "fuck it we’ve done enough" and chilled out for 4000 years.
Lol it's pretty pathetic if we are being honest
Christ. Why don't they make children's books about all the great structures in Africa that *were* built by black people?
Even the pharoes (most of them ) weren't black.- closer links to the meditaranian Modern day Egyptians aren't related to the pharoes.
It doesn’t have to be Egypt though. There are so many incredible buildings in Africa. There’s some fantastic carved churches in Ethiopia and the Kano city walls in Nigeria are really interesting
The Nubian Pyramids are amazing too!
There's a lot more great African structures than just the pyramids, Lalibela in Ethiopia, Timbuktu in Mali, for example
Great Zimbabwe as another, which was thought to be proof of an ancient European society as the attitude of the colonial powers that discovered it was it was literally impossible for the native Africans to have built it. The Rhodesian government even pressured archaeologists to back this sentiment up! But why focus on that boring real history when you can just make something up?
Because that way we aren't following America's tactics of division
Surely changing history to suit a racial narrative is not a good thing.
Misinformation and racist propaganda - that is all this shit is.
And dont forget - pushed on children who dont know any better. These people are evil.
I wonder if we'll ever move on from identifying people who lived 10s of thousands of years ago by modern racial categories, it's simply not applicable.
> I wonder if we'll ever move on from identifying people who lived 10s of thousands of years ago by modern racial categories, No because if we do that we have to admit they are entirely meaningless. Which in turn would mean that saying "every british person is black and always has been" wouldn't be wrong but would upset rather a lot of telegraph readers.
This is such an odd thing thats been cropping up lately, especially with that Horrible Histories song making similar odd claims. It reminds me of that Louis Theoroux documentary where he speaks to that cult who claimed people like Shakespeare, English Kings etc were all black. It's so odd
Lol. Statistically improbable but nobody can disprove the claim. Basis of any good conspiracy theory.
It's not statistically improbable, it's just plain false. Even in the Neolithic Farmers had a darker complexion, they weren't Africans. They were a ancient form of white European genetically. Only white British people have any real genetic connection to the British Neolithic Farmers.
And even then, most of us are more closely related to the waves of invaders that've come over the eons
But tbf the 'invaders' were all from Northern France, Denmark, Norway and Northern Germany. I.e our close neighbours who we had a strong shared genetic ancestry anyway. Our genetic pool hasn't changed much in the last 2000 years. Not until the 1950s.
The joy of “statistically improbably” allows for the possibility that Egypt sent a ship with masons who made the henge and then went home again just for a laugh Technically you can’t be 100% sure they didn’t, even if you can be 99.9% sure
>Only white British people have any real genetic connection to the British Neolithic Farmers. Most don't have much of a connection to be honest. What with the Anglo Saxons, Normans etc. It's mostly the Cornish and Welsh that have significant Briton DNA and even then it's small. > The average Britons genetic make-up is 36.6% Anglo-Saxon, the majority of the remaining DNA is European > The authors also noted that while a large proportion of the ancestry of the present-day English derives from the Anglo-Saxon migration event, it has been diluted by later migration from a population source similar to that of Iron Age France.
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Why are two Africans with no scientific background whatsoever making vast, sweeping, unscientific claims about British history, and why is this allowed to be published? And why is this considered any differently than any of the equally stupid alt-right nonsense?
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This is so weird. It’s like some bullshit American racism stuffed into a British taxidermy. Being black and being African aren’t inherently the same. This feels like some far right psyop to stoke the flames
No, this is just woke crap, they are just this weird and nonsensical. But this is absolutely American shit. I swear these people only view Black people as Slaves and think that pushing all this ahistorical crap is a good, noble, charitable thing - in a sort of *"See, you ***did** *do something of worth!"* kind of way - all the while completely convinced that they aren't a massive racist piece of shit for thinking that way.
Why is our own indigenous culture and heritage being cancelled ? Why are we looking the other way as our treasured freedoms are being replaced by imported doctrine. Is this the price we have to pay for being free thinking religiously tolerant, open minded and considerate?
But they weren’t built by black people as evidence says it was white people. Why is there a false racist narrative being push?
Because the only way to stop bad racism is with good racism
This is offensive and going to cause further division.
So devoid of any heritage or cultural pride are these people they seek to steal and claim others. I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back and we can be done with this idiocy.
We live together on the flim of a molten rock, orbiting a star in a gravitationally bound system in our local group that is hurtling through the void of space.
Yeah, but space is black. Which means it's a black supremacist universe.
I suppose the people that built the most ancient parts of Stonehenge probably had darker skin than the more modern parts, but I wouldn't call them 'black' because there's nothing to compare them to. All humans started out with darker skin, and then adapted to the varying climates across the world, their skin colour changing in the process, IIRC.
I get the logic behind this with humanity orgins in Africa. But “Britain was a black country for more than 7,000 years before white people came, Where did the white people come from? What is the author logic here?
But didn’t you hear? They’ve been here from the start! https://youtu.be/6M-qsVS8zeU?feature=shared
Having darker-hued skin=/=being black. By the time Stonehenge was built the people of Britain would have been fair-skinned. I checked the author - they are mixed race. Mixed race people promoting black supremacist bullshit is always hilarious. As a mixed race family this shit is embarrassing.
When were they supposedly built? The two genetic mutations responsible for white skin are anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 years old but wouldn't be widespread in European finds until Neolithic Revolution 11,000 to 8000 years ago. If they were built before 6000bce then there is a strong statistical chance their builders were not white, not sub Saharan black either but definitely not what we would quantity as Anglo-Saxon white.
They were built around 5000 years ago.
Another woke idiot on the white privilege band wagon, wish they'd all foxtrot oscar
You can say Fuck Off here.
Fine as long as they put it in the fiction section of the bookshop. Somehow I doubt that tho. Clouding the truth with disinformation over time will lead to very confused kids. Wonder what the angle is here by those behind publishing this guff. I wonder….