This is something I've been curious about for a while. Essentially, one of the main characters of my book is a vampire-werewolf hybrid. His werewolf mother is more than a millennium and a half old and was born in her species' homeland of Greece, and his father is the 500+-years-old son of Vlad III Dracula himself. And I'm wondering what this character's skin color would realistically be as the result of this parentage. Near as I can tell, Vlad III Dracula was pretty pale, but I've been getting conflicting information about the skin tone of the ancient Greeks. What skin tone do you think is most likely to result here?
Based on your timeframe you'd be looking at Ottoman Greeks, not ancient Greeks. Which look pretty much like Greeks today.
My apologies, I rephrased 1500 as "century and a half" while rewriting this post due to a brain fart. I've fixed it to "millennium and a half"
The mother was born sometime around the 6th century, just around the tail end of the ancient Greek period. And due to her species' immortality, she's at most a half-dozen generations removed from her species's progenitor, King Lycaon. I haven't decided how many generations exactly yet, but that's the upward limit.
Okay, so that's around the time Slavs were starting to diffuse throughout the Balkans (and many of them would eventually become Romans/ "Greeks"). Even before that Greece had a lot of population influxes that became Hellenized/ Romanized so I would simply say, "Take your pick."
A mortal generation, maybe, but when you can still have children no matter how old you get, being 6 generations removed from someone can mean just about any length of time. There doesn't seem to be any agreed-upon time period in which the myth of King Lycaon was supposed to take place, but I'm leaning towards 1500-ish BC for when King Lycaon was born.
A generation for normal humans is twenty years, as that is full maturity. So a factor to consider if you are going to play with what is viewed as a generation by a speices. Changes like this need to be thought through or could cause problems with a readers willing suspension of disbelief. As the author you can do as you like with the story. I am just raising a point for you to consider.
The ancient Greeks - the actual ones - described their skin tone as "bronze". Vlad probably didn't get much sunlight... So - probably medium-light tone-ish, somewhere around Bulgarian.
