Are Spaniards white?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Even the colonization of Europe by Cro Magnon Homo sapiens was not a single thing; it was accomplished in seven "waves", the last one being ~10K years before present, originating mainly from the area of what is now Turkey (and over the Caucasus mountains, whence the name of the "white race"), and every nation in Europe is a blend of those seven gene pool groups, as shown by mtDNA studies of the populations of those countries. Most interestingly (to me) is that the settlers of Europe were not white-skinned, and the population of Europe were not white until several thousands of years after it was settled. I'll get into that more, later.

In modern times, even after white skin became effectively ubiquitous in Europe, there's still a lot that renders the idea of "pure" whiteness a false description of European genetics. That's not even counting the influence of the Arab-Muslim invasions, Carthagenian intermixture with African stock, and all the more modern population influxes. In short, "white race" is, as pointed out already by several of us, not a useful description of humanity, despite our tendency to fixate on skin tone as a basis for visual classification. Since most of these populations have admixed in the past 30,000 years of European migration and warfare, they are far from "hard and fast" categories, but there are a few classifications that can be drawn from traits common to the gene pools (which I won't get into, as it's tedious to anyone who isn't a physical anthropologist... including me).

All that said, there are several sub-groups of "Caucasian gene pools", in terms of phylogenetic trait expression. Remember that these are only broad categories, and almost all individuals within any one category will be varied in what percentages of the various origin-group genes are expressed in their family lineage.

Since this is already too long for a post, I have hide-tagged my detailed description of what I recall about racial classifications, and their significance.

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The "Mediterranean" type are a broad group that stretches from the Ibero-Celts of Spain and parts of France (my Cajun ancestors were of this group, which is why I have an olive tone to my skin and extremely curly hair, so much so that my "whiteness" is often called into question, here in the southeastern USA) to the Indo-Arayans (the actual Aryans, not the Hitler Nordic confusion), including the Greeks and lighter Egypitans, as well as the Ashkenazi-type Jews. Armenians are a sub-group within this category, who appear to have origins in the Hittites of Biblical times (Asia Minor), though like most of these categories they have a mix of other racial groups.

The "Kelts" are a group that once dominated most of Europe, and still remain within most gene pools (the Roman province of Gaul, modern France, was so called because the Gauls were a type of Kelt, a related word), though the "pure" Kelts of today are mostly associated with Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Most Kelts were overrun by later invasions of Germans (who are, ironically, a mixed-race group, themselves, of partly Keltic and partly Nordic stock, and a few others) along with other groups that either assimilated the populations or drove the remnants to retreat to the Isles.

The "Lapp" type includes the far-northern Scandinavians, especially the Fins, though they've been heavily intermixed with the Nordics.

The "Nordic" type, which moronic Hitler and some other German "race scientists" (pause for eye-roll) confused with the Aryan people because that word meant "the lordly people", is well-known, consisting of Swedes, Norwegians, etc.

The "Persian" (or Aryan, or Indo-Afghan) type stretch from India to Iran to Syria, and constitute many of the races featured in Biblical stories as historical antagonists, such as the Medes, the Assyrians, and of course the Persians.

The "Alpines" are actually a result of Mongol invasions and several admixtures, despite the name being associated with territories we consider to be German-esque, and stretch from the Ural mountains through central Europe. The "Baltic" types are also associated with this group, sharing some features with a different set of gene percentages from roughly the same admixture roots.

The "Indo-Dravidians" are a byproduct of the Aryan invasion of India through Pakistan, but despite dark-toned skin and black hair are still considered a Caucasoid race. Since we're already talking about dozens of variations on which group intermixed with which other group and yet produced "European Whiteness" as a result, there's no basis for not counting the Hindi as white, despite the bronze tone of their skin.

And finally (and most amazingly to me) are the Ainu people, a "white race" that lives in Japan, as a minority group, and apparently did from before the Koreans originally settled the islands. These eastward-traveling ancient peoples are, according to recent discoveries, one of the groups that crossed the Beringia land bridge into the Americas during the ice age, and constitute a surprisingly large percent (I forget how much) of the Native American gene pool. Researchers were tipped off to look into this by obviously Caucasoid-type skulls found near Seattle, a couple of decades ago--skulls of Asian/Mongoloid stock tend to be circular, where the hat meets the head, so to speak, while Caucasians tend to have an oblong shape, among other distinctive features--and were shocked at the results of the genetic surveys.

The point is that there's really no such thing as "a white race", other than a few groups of phenotypic characteristics common to our gene pools, which vary widely among peoples considered by standard nomenclature to be "purely European". Since only five genes contribute to our degree of skin pigmentation, and only two (mutations of) of them are distinct to European populations considered "white", it's really a trivial thing upon which to base our classification system. The most amusing part is that "whiteness" only evolved very recently, at a maximum of 20,000 years ago, with some genetic studies showing it may have happened less than 8,000 years ago, and be a product of the selection advantages for groups of farmers, post Agricultural Revolution, moving in waves through the already-settled (and dark-skinned) human populations of Europe.

For those who missed all that, it means that the people who settled Europe were not white-skinned, and did not become so until recently, perhaps during historical times. Clan of the Cave Bear, with its Nordic, blonde-haired, blue-eyed "beauties" as protagonists, is entirely fictional. There were no white people at all in Europe at the time of the story. They did not yet exist.

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