Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Foley
Originally North Africa was pure white under the Roman and Greek Empires, then came the outside invasions of the Semite Arabs and Negros after the collapse of Rome.
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I think that those Nordicist theories aren't very scientific.
Hitler and the Third Reich also considered pure, ethnic Berbers to be Aryan ie. White.
But the Moors were dark-skinned caucasoids with their own ethnicity.
The word "Moor" derives from the Latin Mauri, first used by the Romans to denote the inhabitants of the Roman province of Mauretania, comprising the western portion of modern Algeria and the northeastern portion of modern Morocco.
Although the Moors came to be associated with Muslims, the name Moor pre-dates Islam. It derives from the small Numidian Kingdom of Maure of the 3rd century BCE in what is now northern central and western part of Algeria and a part of northern Morocco. The name came to be applied to people of the entire region. "They were called Maurisi by the Greeks", wrote Strabo, "and Mauri by the Romans."
Shomarka Keita, a biological anthropologist from Howard University, has claimed that populations in Carthage circa 200 BC and northern Algeria 1500 BC were very diverse. As a group, they plotted closest to the populations of Northern Egypt and intermediate to Northern Europeans and tropical Africans. Keita claimed that "the data supported the comments from ancient authors observed by classicists: everything from fair-skinned blonds to peoples who were dark-skinned 'Ethiopian' or part Ethiopian in appearance." Modern evidence showed a similar diversity among present North Africans. Moreover, this "diversity" of phenotypes and peoples was probably due to in situ differentiation, not foreign influxes. Of course foreign influxes certainly had an impact but they did not replace the indigenous Berber population.
http://www.suite101.com/content/iden...-moors-a117835
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/...mauretania-geo
http://www.white-history.com/moors.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogr...1b_.28E-M81.29