Researchers say it appears blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Many men died in long, arduous hunting trips for food, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men. Lighter hair colors, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding, the study said.
In Western culture, blonde hair is typically associated with naiveity, youth and innocence, but culturually has seen a remarkable transition from its roots to where it is today. Blondes first began appearing around 11,000 years ago during the last ice age, and have since become major figures in mythology.
Ancient DNA analysis (ADNA) has revealed that the oldest fossil known to carry the derived KITLG allele, which is responsible for blond hair in modern Europeans, is a 17,000 year old Ancient North Eurasian specimen from eastern Siberia.
For several years, blond hair was attributed to Caucasians but the Melanesians of Solomon Islands are one of the few groups with blonde hair outside Europe.
The reason has roots in evolutionary psychology. Both blonde hair and blue eyes are recessive traits, so both parents must carry the gene for blonde hair to pass it on to their kids.
Finland. Finland has the highest blond hair population by percentage of the total population. Nearly 80% of the population has blond hair, and an astounding 89% of the population has blue eyes. Blond hair and blue eyes are one of the rarest combinations in the world.
Blonde fact #4: Not all blondes have blue eyes
That's why so many people around the world have black strands and brown eyes. Lighter tint gives rise to lighter coloured eyes, including blue, but also varying tones of green and grey. So, just because you have blonde hair, it doesn't mean that you have blue eyes too.
“We didn't know genetically what they actually looked like until now,” Willerslev added. He said the new research “debunks” the traditional image of blond Vikings, as “many had brown hair and were influenced by genetic influx from the outside of Scandinavia.”
Those ferocious seafaring warriors that explored, raided and traded across Europe from the late eighth to the early 11th centuries, known as the Vikings, are typically thought of as blonde Scandinavians. But Vikings may have a more diverse history: They carried genes from Southern Europe and Asia, a new study suggests.
In fact, natural blonde hair can be found within Black communities. For instance, in Melanesia, a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, blonde hair and dark skin is indigenous.
Do all blonde people share the same blonde ancestor? No, they don't. Blonde hair seems to have appeared more than once in humans. Which means that different blondes trace back their blonde hair to different ancestors.
It is quite likely that the Neanderthals had as many hair colours as modern Europeans – from blond through to dark, perhaps depending on exactly where in Europe they lived, and also based on the combination of the variants they could have had in the MCR1.
Only 2 percent of the world's population has naturally blond hair. If you narrow your sample to white people in the United States, that percentage goes up, but only to 5 percent.
The genes for blue eyes and blonde hair are recessive, meaning both parents must have the genes for them to be expressed in their offspring.
The color of your hair comes from the ratio of these two pigments in it. So, black hair is almost all eumelanin and red hair is almost all pheomelanin. The default human hair color, as it were, is black.
Blond hair and blue eyes are characteristics associated with people from northern European countries such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Denmark, etc. These people are said to look "Teutonic" which is a term the ancient Romans gave to a northern European tribe known as the Teutons.
All Blue-Eyed People May Have A Common Ancestor
Originally we all had brown eyes, however, according to researchers at the University of Copenhagen, it appears that a genetic mutation in a single individual in Europe 6,000 to 10,000 years ago led to the development of blue eyes.
The most important or identifiable haplogroup for Vikings is I1, as well as R1a, R1b, G2, and N. The SNP that defines the I1 haplogroup is M253. A haplogroup is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor.
Blue eyes are considered rare. Approximately 8 to 10 percent of the world's population has blue eyes. The color blue is considered a genetic alteration, which may have occurred about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Before that point, it was believed that most people had brown eyes.
For thousands of years, people have both prized and mocked blond hair. Now, a new study shows that many can thank a tiny genetic mutation—a single letter change from an A to a G among the 3 billion letters in the book of human DNA—for their golden locks.
A study found that in the United States 16.6% of the population has blue eyes. The study also found that 28.3% of the population has blonde hair and that 9.3% of the population has blonde hair and blue eyes.
Red- or blonde-haired Vikings? Genetic research has shown that the Vikings in West Scandinavia, and therefore in Denmark, were mostly red-haired. However, in North Scandinavia, in the area around Stockholm, blonde hair was dominant.
Green is considered by some to be the actual rarest eye color in the world, though others would say it's been dethroned by red, violet, and grey eyes. Green eyes don't possess a lot of melanin, which creates a Rayleigh scattering effect: Light gets reflected and scattered by the eyes instead of absorbed by pigment.
True blonde is also a rare hair color, and the Daily Mail reports that only 12.7 percent of women have pure blonde hair, and only 9.9 percent of men do. Surprisingly, many of the genetic differences identified by the researchers correlated with factors other than pigmentation like hair texture and growth.
The United States has predominantly black and brown hair in the population, with 85 percent for black hair and 11 percent for brown hair. Authentic blonde hair makes up only two percent of the population, and authentic red hair, the rarest hair color of all, makes up only one percent of the American population.