Aquinas was born in central Italy during the High Middle Ages. What hair and skin colour do you think he had?
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Italy had and still has a pretty diverse makeup - Germanic peoples from the north, North Africans from the south, and Mediterranean peoples who are the crossroads of the two.
Where I live in the torturous mountains of the north of Portugal, people from villages all of five kilometres apart can look radically different. Our nearest village is your fairly standard Iberian phenotype - dark brown to black hair, and tanned looking. Across the valley is a village that took in Jews fleeing the inquisition - and they look Sephardic to this day. Ten kilometers north is a village still named in local dialect “Moorish village”, and lo and behold, the people there look Arabic.
So what was his phenotype? Only going to find that out by sequencing him. He probably had dark skin and hair, but he could have been blonde and pale.
Who knows? He might have been blonde-haired for all we know, after all the Duchy of Spoleto set up by the Lombards was also located in Central Italy. You can get an idea of that past Lombard presence from this map [1]: "
Percentage of Blond Hair in the Italian regions" (notice the green blob East of Naples), which, granted, it may not be 100% scientific but I reckon that it is at least based on some real data.
Later edit: Apparently that map is based on this mid-19th century data sample: Percentages of blond hair in the Italian regions (including Corsica). Data collected by Ridolfo Livi on 1859-1863 lever classes ( "Renato Biasutti - Races and peoples of the Earth - UTET, 1941")
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/62yyuz/percentage_...
My own grandmother was born on the shores of the Aegean Sea, in the region that now forms the border between Greece and Turkey.
She was Slavic herself, and blonde.
The Mediterranean is a lot more complicated that people from afar tend to think.
There are many plausible "skins" for Aquinas. He didn't come from relatively homogeneous place like Japan on Iceland, he was Italian. And medieval Central Italy was a massive genetic melting pot of Etruscans, Latins, Greeks, Celts, Germanic people and North Africans. It used to be crossroads of a massive empire once, and was overrun by several invasions of other peoples afterwards.
Was his family from the Northern or Southern Italian lines?
Did his family include any of the many far off bloodlines bought into Italy via the Roman Empire creating far flung citizens?
As the peer comment states, there's a wealth of pigments in Italy, and that goes back before the High Middle Ages.
The earliest evidence of Italians' extraordinary genetic diversity dates back to the end of the last glacial period
https://www.unibo.it/en/news-and-events/notice-board/the-ear...
He was born nearish to Naples in the Kingdom of Sicily, a kingdom created by the Normans. Really hard to guess.
It was an metaphor for the typical cherry picking that religions do.
Edit: no, it wasn't a hyperbole , it was a metaphor
I think you mean the typical cherry picking that institutions and organizations do, both religious and secular.