Naturally-occurring blond hair is primarily found in people living in or descended from people who lived in the northern half of Europe, and may have evolved alongside the development of light skin that enables more efficient synthesis of vitamin D, due to northern Europe's lower levels of sunlight.
Some sources, such as Eupedia, claim that in central parts of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, 80% of the population is blonde, with natural fair-haired people in other Baltic Countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and other parts of Scandinavia) making up 50-79% of the population.
Lighter hair colors, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding, the study said. An analysis of north European genes carried out at three Japanese universities has isolated the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair to about 11,000 years ago.
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.
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.
Perhaps the most plausible theory is that blonde hair and blue eyes arose because of a mechanism called sex selection. This is where males and females choose as their mates those who have one unusual physical characteristic, not necessarily associated with "fitness" per se but simply something unusual.
Scientists concluded that every blue-eyed person on the world today can trace their ancestry back to a single European who probably lived about 10,000 years ago in the Black Sea region and who first developed a specific mutation that accounts for the now widespread iris coloration.
Scientists believe that it is possible to trace all blue-eyed people back to a common ancestor, who likely had a genetic mutation that reduced the amount of melanin in the iris. Most people with blue eyes are of European descent.
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.
The international scientific team found a total of 124 genes that play a major role in determining human hair colour and, unexpectedly, discovered that women were twice as likely to be naturally blonde than men. In comparison, they also revealed that men were three times as likely as women to have black hair.
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.
As the population grows and people have babies, the genes for less melanin will become more common. That makes the link between lighter eyes, hair, and skin tighter. So that's why you see people with blond hair typically have 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.
New research shows that the Irish definitely have their fair share of Viking heritage–in fact, the Irish are more genetically diverse than most people may assume. The Irish have Viking and Norman ancestry in similar proportions to the English.
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.
In mythology, blondes' first appearance was 11,000 years ago with two of the Norse, or Scandinavian, goddesses, Sif and Freyja. Freyja was the goddess of beauty, love, and fertility. With blonde hair and blue eyes, she was one of the most admired goddesses for her beauty.
As a result of the relatively low levels of sunlight for most of the year, humans in Scandinavia began to develop symptoms of vitamin D deficiency: namely lighter skin and hair colour. No fellas around? With the sun rarely making an appearance through the Danish winter, it's easy to see how this theory makes sense.
While the study concluded that the average age for a woman to go grey is 33, it found redheads lose their colour at 30, brunettes at 32 and blondes at 35. For one in 10 women, those first grey hairs appear by the time they reach 21-years-old, while one in four women find their first grey by the age of 25.
Blonds get white hair just like brunets, but some blondes only appear to get a lighter blond while others experience their blonde hairs getting darker and duller as the white hairs begin to appear. Still, blondes can, over time, have a full head of white hair.
Red is the rarest hair color, according to Dr. Kaplan, and that's because so few MC1R variants are associated with the shade. “Only three variants are associated with red hair,” she says. “If a person has two of these three variants, they almost certainly have red hair.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The highest concentration of people with green eyes is found in Ireland, Scotland, and northern Europe. In fact, in Ireland and Scotland, more than three-fourths of the population has blue or green eyes – 86 percent!