Aaron and Hunter have a rich Aboriginal heritage. Not that you could tell this by looking at them. Aaron, with his blond hair and blue eyes looks about as Aboriginal as any blue eyed blond does. The family is an anomoly, I commonly said, prior to the breadth requirement of university level biology - and I guess I just admitted it wasn't a useless course after all!
Great Grandma is one quarter Metis. Her mother was full Metis. Great Grandpa is french, with blue eyes and a full head of white hair that was once blond. Grandpa took after his mom and has native colouring. Grandma is of Scottish descent, blue eyes and once strawberry-blond-ish hair. Each of their children have blue eyes, as do all of the grand children. Knowing that blue eyes are recessive I found this incredibly strange.
The bio course helped put some of the pieces together. Recessive genes are always there, but once they come out, they effectually become dominant. Here's why. Grandpa, because his mother had brown eyes and his father had blue, had both of the genes. Grandma, who had blue eyes, only has the dual recessive gene. In a way, it was luck that each of their three children were blue-eyed. If you have blue eyes, you no longer carry the gene for brown. It is no longer available, so to speak.
Anyone who still has their class pictures from when they were young (providing this is along my own time line) can compare the number of brown-eyed children in their classes to the number in their children's classes today. I noticed this immediately when I saw my kids' pictures. When I was in kindergarten and up, there were only a few people with blue eyes. They were special. My daughter is the only one who ended up with brown eyes. She is special now because there have only been a couple of children in her class with brown eyes. The average now is blue.
I caught an interesting documentary on NOVA a few weeks ago (could be months, could be days, I'm not that good anymore with "how long ago?" scenarios). It has been commonly believed that Neanderthals somehow became extinct and Homosapiens survived. However, scientists have managed, thanks to the decoding of the human genome, to also decode Neanderthal DNA and guess what they found? Neanderthal DNA is still present today, most prominently (if around 10% is prominent) in those of European descent but also in those who come from other regions, to a lesser degree.
What this means is that Neanderthals were not, as previously thought, a weaker species that became extinct because they could not survive but that their genes were bred out. Not all of them. Apparently one of the genes we all still carry from Neanderthanls is instrumental (read: absolutely necessary) for language. It was stronger than whatever Homosapiens had. Our physical characteristics, head shape, leaner rather than stocky bodies were better suited for survival and so those particular characteristics became dominant. This discovery has also determined that it is not the case, as was previously believed, that Neanderthals were a separate species from Homosapiens because if that were so, we should have seen any co-mingling (I like the word) result in a sterile offspring if any offspring were to result at all.
The point is that I see a similar pattern in Geoff's bloodline. Certain physical characteristics are being bred out, noticeably, within four generations (though I know it goes back five generations) and I find that sad. If Ethan would not have come out with a comment years ago about "Indians", I'm not sure when I would have gotten around to telling him that Aaron and Hunter, Geoff and the rest of the family have Indian heritage. It just isn't immediately recognizable after Grandpa. And that is kind of sad.
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