Redheads 'are neanderthal'
by a correspondent
FreeRepublic topic
RED hair may be the genetic legacy of Neanderthals, scientists believe.
Researchers at the John Radcliffe Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford say that the so-called “ginger gene” which gives people red hair, fair skin and freckles could be up to 100,000 years old.
They claim that their discovery points to the gene having originated in Neanderthal man who lived in Europe for 200,000 years before Homo sapien settlers, the ancestors of modern man, arrived from Africa about 40,000 years ago.
Rosalind Harding, the research team leader, said: “The gene is certainly older than 50,000 years and it could be as old as 100,000 years.
“An explanation is that it comes from Neanderthals.” It is estimated that at least 10 per cent of Scots have red hair and a further 40 per cent carry the gene responsible, which could account for their once fearsome reputation as fighters.
Neanderthals have been characterised as migrant hunters and violent cannibals who probably ate most of their meat raw. They were taller and stockier than Homo sapiens, but with shorter limbs, bigger faces and noses, receding chins and low foreheads.
The two species overlapped for a period of time and the Oxford research appears to suggests that they must have successfully interbred for the “ginger gene” to survive. Neanderthals became extinct about 28,000 years ago, the last dying out in southern Spain and southwest France.
Quite a list of negative traits -- Neandertals were cannibals; they ate raw meat; they were violent; and of course, it's implied that they were small-brained. Elsewhere some vegetarians wrote that Neandertal ate too much meat and went extinct, while others said that
our ancestors learned to eat fish, which is brain food (I'm not makin' that up). The (fortunately) late Allan Wilson of the mtDNA crowd produced the claim the Neandertal was "the village idiot" who couldn't talk because of his/her mtDNA, and therefore went extinct. In the Encyclopedia Brittanica (in the early 1970s, perhaps later) Celts are described as a group that spent all its time drinking mead and were "incapable of concerted action." My leftist sister (a professor) said the Irish had perfected just one thing -- public drunkeness. Y'know, I'm beginning to think there's a real attitude problem among academics. ;')