The bolded bit is actually incorrect and modern studies on DNA bear this out.
These are repeatedly brought up, both in this thread and others, and I want to take a moment to point out that merely saying "modern studies! DNA!" doesn't really mean anything.
Most academic studies that attempt to use DNA evidence to analyze historical events do so with a previous understanding of the historical context in which those events took place. An example: the so-called
Völkerwanderung, or Migration Period, that characterized western Eurasian history about a millennium and a half ago. For many, many years, accepted historical orthodoxy was that the most important events of those times were vast migrations by people from Central Asia and northern Europe into the former territories of the Roman Empire. So when people started to try to look at DNA evidence from remains that dated back to that period, they looked for similarities between remains from inside the Roman Empire and outside it. They then tried to connect these findings with modern populations, which would supposedly display similar genetic markers as the migratory people. Not surprisingly, they found exactly what they were looking for; this was touted as evidence that the Migration Period really did happen the way people had been saying that it did.
The chief problem with this analysis is that during the
same time, academic historians and archaeologists have turned an increasingly critical eye on the notion that migrations played the sort of role that people used to think that they did. Even the most generous estimate of migratory activity, by Peter Heather, suggests that less than half a million persons could have even
theoretically moved into Roman territory; compared with a Roman population forty or fifty times greater at least, the migrants would be genetically invisible. Other scholars, such as Walter Goffart and Guy Halsall (more credibly, in my opinion) revise even these numbers down further, and point out that migration (although it
did happen) was largely background noise compared to the tumultuous domestic upheavals in the Roman military, government, and society. They also note that
other periods in Eurasian history have seen numerically greater amounts of migration, both before the
Völkerwanderung and after it.
Halsall has drawn out criticisms of many of the DNA studies (and ones of similar "scientific" pretension and aim but different methods, such as analysis of the mineral content in late-Roman teeth) that they find what they are looking for
precisely because they are looking for it. Their methodology is often shoddy (even if the
scientific level of the analysis is hard to question). In many cases, the experiments have no real controls, so that they compare post-Roman and 'German' DNA without having, say, DNA from remains in Syria or Indochina to check against those similarities. Another problem is the dating. Methodologically, there are reasons to question any attempt to show that certain genetic markers started to show up in a given area
at a specific time, and as such one could make the highly relevant criticism that even
if these genetic markers can be identified with a certain population concentrated in a defined geographical space and associated with certain political and cultural customs (extremely dubious), there is simply no way to tell if they were passed from Germany to Britain by a Saxon mercenary of the fifth century or a member of the King's German Legion in the nineteenth century. Finally, there are severe problems with the sample sizes involved (almost never statistically significant enough to be able to generalize across "races").
For these kinds of reasons, I am very skeptical of any attempts to prove
anything about a connection between historical races and genetic markers. Given the history of what these papers have done and what they've tried to prove, any further research on historical genetics needs to be pretty damn amazing for me to do anything other than ignore it out of hand.
It also concerns me that this emphasis on genetics and race does a great deal to muddle the issue, destroy modern understandings of the complexity of identity, and return people's historical understanding to the sorry state it was in during the era of Toynbee and Spengler. To take the example from the quoted post again, you refer to skin color, geography, religion, ethnicity, and linguistics almost interchangeably. That's a problem, less for the specifics of your actual example (blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus
is pretty unlikely, although I have to say that I usually see him depicted with brown or black hair) and more because it is indicative of an understanding of identity that simply won't fly.
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On the actual subject of the thread, that of "Asians in Thedas", I stand by my earlier comment. I simply do not understand why people believe that individuals who possess stereotypically East Asian facial features are not realistic in the setting. Those features are available in the character creator. If the game devs think that the setting's "realism" can survive Asian Hawke and an Asian Warden, I can't imagine any plausible arguments against the realism of
other Thedosian "Asians".
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