Posted on 02/26/2006 11:56:29 AM PST by wagglebee
THE modern gentleman may prefer blondes. But new research has found that it was cavemen who were the first to be lured by flaxen locks.
According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.
The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.
Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.
“Human hair and eye colour are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” says the study by Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist. Frost adds that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of colour traits.”
Frost’s theory, to be published this week in Evolution and Human Behavior, the academic journal, was supported by Professor John Manning, a specialist in evolutionary psychology at the University of Central Lancashire. “Hair and eye colour tend to be uniform in many parts of the world, but in Europe there is a welter of variants,” he said. “The mate choice explanation now being put forward is, in my mind, close to being correct.”
Frost’s theory is also backed up by a separate scientific analysis of north European genes carried out at three Japanese universities, which has isolated the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair to about 11,000 years ago.
The hair colour gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe and the continent has an unusually wide range of hair and eye shades. In the rest of the world, dark hair and eyes are overwhelmingly dominant.
Just how such variety emerged over such a short period of time in one part of the world has long been a mystery. According to the new research, if the changes had occurred by the usual processes of evolution, they would have taken about 850,000 years. But modern humans, emigrating from Africa, reached Europe only 35,000-40,000 years ago.
Instead, Frost attributes the rapid evolution to how they gathered food. In Africa there was less dependence on animals and women were able to collect fruit for themselves. In Europe, by contrast, food gathering was almost exclusively a male hunter’s preserve. The retreating ice sheets left behind a landscape of fertile soil with plenty of grass and moss for herbivorous animals to eat, but few plants edible for humans. Women therefore took on jobs such as building shelters and making clothes while the men went on hunting trips, where the death rate was high.
The increase in competition for males led to rapid change as women struggled to evolve the most alluring qualities. Frost believes his theory is supported by studies which show blonde hair is an indicator for high oestrogen levels in women.
Jilly Cooper, 69, the author, described how in her blonde youth she had “certainly got more glances. I remember when I went to Majorca when I was 20, my bum was sore from getting pinched”.
However, Jodie Kidd, 27, the blonde model, disagrees with the theory: “I don’t think being blonde makes you more ripe for sexual activity. It’s much more to do with personality than what you look like. Beauty is much deeper than the colour of your hair.”
Film star blondes such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson are held up as ideals of feminine allure. However, the future of the blonde is uncertain.
A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.
Except that the theory is that global warming would create an ice age.
The meteorologist in me just can't wrap my brain around how global warming could result in an ice age. Something about temperatures going up and the melting point of water.
Northern Asians seem to have more oily skin, American Indians rubbed bear greese on their skin. These acts would enhance Vitamin D formation. Coastal Esquimos eat a lot of fish, including the liver which is very high in Vitamin D, as to Scandinavian people. Many primative peoples eat animal livers with great enthusiasm. Perhaps all liver is somewhat higher in Vitamin D, in addition to being highly nutritious.
Incidently, if you want to get more Vitamin D in the winter, bathe late in the evening so you have oil on your skin when you go out in the morning, and several hours to absorb the Vitamin D after you come in. There may be a correlation between Vitamin D levels and winter depression. More would be good.
Several addition thoughts on Vitamin D and mate selection.
Spain, Italy and Southern France are all very sunny places most of the year. Vitamin D and other oily vitamins like E and A are stored in the body for a time.
Dark skin containing more melanin is protective against excessive Vitamin D production in the tropics.
In most of Europe and North America food is supplemented with Vitamin D, so rickets is much less of problem than it used to be. This enables darker people to be healthy and bear live young. If we have a severe crisis when food is no longer supplemented, watch the blonds come back in droves.
"...few plants edible for humans. Women therefore took on jobs such as building shelters and making clothes while the men went on hunting trips...."
This must explain why I hate to cook, but love working on my house and knitting!!
I'm pretty certain that Marilyn Monroe was a real blond..
Sorry,not so. Looks best as a blonde though.
Hulkster
Women don't have to compete for men. Men are never "scarce."
On the contrary. Men compete for women. So it was women selecting the blond men that made blondness more common.
Sheesh.
Although I hate her politics, I will grudgingly concede that Jane Fonda was a hottie back in the day.
My husband has grey eyes, and my mother green eyes, so it's not surprising that, while I have brown eyes, my son has light eyes.
What is surprising is that they're blue. Nobody can remember a blue eyed child in the family -- obviously something to do with having a double recessive gene.
Blondness also runs in both families, but the type of blondness where the young children are tow-headed but darken as they get older.
Sometimes randomness is just randomness.
My oldest son looks like the milkman.
How's that for randomness.
Well, given that I, the mother, have dark eyes and my husband is the one with the light eyes, having a child with even lighter eyes doesn't suggest anything out of the ordinary.
If we both had light eyes and the child had dark eyes that would be a different matter.
I guess if my uncle didn't own a milk distributorship, and my oldest does look a lot like him, it would be a different matter for me too. :)
Then it's entirely possible to inherit a recessive for pigment in back of the iris (gray) and a recessive for pigment in front of the iris (green) and end up with a child with brown eyes.
Eye color questions.
My Scottish ancestry husband had clear bright blue eyes and red hair (according to a recent FR post that may mean he has some Neanderthal ancestry. I have hazel (northern European) eyes. When our two sons were born they had dark brown eyes. Since my husbands eyes were completely recessive, the brown had to come from me. Probably my Prussian German ancestors had some ancestry from the Mongolain Tartar invasion of Eastern Europe. Since oriental traits are often recessive to caucasian ones, I must have a dark brown semi-recessive eye color gene which overmastered my husbands true blue gene.
Simple ~ your kids inherited your recessive for pigmentation on the front of the iris, and your husband's recessive for pigmentation on the back of the iris. This yields brown eyes every single time.
It's noteworthy that in Finland they distinguish between two major populations on either side of a major river there by whether or not they have blue eyes (the fellows to the West of the river) or gray eyes (the fellows to the East of the river.)
Although outsiders might think they all have blue eyes, the Finns do notice the gray/blue difference.
This difference is also apparantly linked to some genes that control cholesterol production and levels, and by forcing change in the diets of the gray eyed people, the Finns have improved their heart health and lengthened their lives to measurable degrees.
Check those eyes again ~ bet they are "gray".
Your own "hazel" combed with a "gray" yields "brown". Remember, it's not a matter of having or not having pigmentation ~ it's where that pigment shows up on the iris ~ inside, outside, or both ~ that gives the different colors.
Check the eyes.
No, my husbands eyes were definitely a clear light blue. Two of our grandchildren have gray eyes, quite different.
Their mother is Celtic in background.
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