Wen Wanwujun.
Hair comes in length, thickness, straightness, and color. In terms of straightness, Easterners have more straight hair, Westerners have more wavy hair, and Africans have more curly hair. In terms of color, Easterners and Africans tend to have black hair, while Westerners have both black hair, blonde hair, and red hair.
Humans were all black-haired at first, and then blonde hair appeared.
The birth of blonde hair is related to the area where humans live. Vitamin D is needed for human survival, which prevents rickets and promotes cell growth. Vitamin D comes from ultraviolet light and animal foods such as cod liver. Higher latitudes have less sunlight and animals don't have as much sunlight as they do at lower latitudes, so in order to get enough vitamin D, you need to improve your body to absorb more UV rays. WhileThe reduction in body pigmentation favors the absorption of ultraviolet rays, which leads to lighter skin tones and hair tones at higher latitudes.
Most of the blonde people are in Northern Europe, such as Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. Based on the distribution of the population, it can basically be assumed that blonde hair is associated with the R1A population. However, the R1a population is only the transmitter of the blonde gene.
Light-colored** and blonde hair are associated with the A111T mutation in SLC24A5, which was absent from 24,000-year-old R* from Siberia and has not been found in modern R2 populations in Southeast Asia and India, so it can be assumed that this mutation occurred in the R1 population, between 20,000 and 13,000 years ago.
The A111T mutation occurs not only in the R1 population, but also in other populations in the Siberian region. For example, the Q1b population on the west side of the Yenisei River, who are Caucasian. N1 and Q1a on the east side of the Yenisei River are of yellow race.
Blonde hair is associated with R1A, while red hair is associated with R1B.
It is known that redheads are concentrated in Northern and Western Europe, accounting for 2% of the local population. They are descendants of the Celts.
5,300 years ago, the Indo-European-speaking Yannayas lived on the northern shores of the Black Sea, and their haplogroup was predominantly R1b. Squeezed by the R1A population from the north, they began to migrate east-west.
One group migrating westward was the Celts, who, at their peak, occupied a vast area of Europe, from the Black Sea to Great Britain. In Roman times, the Celts, known as the Gauls, were hit by the Romans and retreated to Great Britain. In summary, R1B is squeezed by R1a, resulting in the highest frequency in Western Europe, followed by Central Europe, and least in Eastern Europe.
Map of Europe with red hair.
A group of eastward migrants who founded the Afanashevo culture in the western part of the Mongolian Plateau 5,000 years ago and later migrated south to become the ancestors of the Tocharians in the Tarim Basin. In 2014, Clement Holard of the University of Strasbourg tested three ancient people from the Afanashevo culture and found that all three samples belonged to the haplogroup R1B, including two R1B-M269. In 2006, a study published in the German magazine Science reported that a mummy unearthed in Xinjiang that was about 3,000 years old had features that were surprisingly similar to those of traditional Celts: the hair was pale reddish-brown with a slight gray spot. Also unearthed in the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang were the mummies of three dried female bodies and a baby, one of whom had long light brown hair. These corpses were the easternmost Indo-European speakers who lived in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang between 3000 and 4000 BC and later became the Tocharians.
Among the "chains of contempt" for Westerners' hair color, red is the most despised. Some Westerners believe that redheads are usually savage, eccentric, and short-tempered people. People with red hair will be called "ginger heads". In addition, they are freckles and sensitive to ultraviolet rays.
When Prince Harry of the United Kingdom was in school, he was ridiculed for his hair color, and he was even called "Big Ginger" by his ex-girlfriend.
Harry is the only prince in the entire British royal family to have red hair, and the others are blonde. This inevitably raises suspicions that Prince Harry is an illegitimate child. Later, Princess Diana gave Harry a paternity test, and the results showed that he was biological.
Redhead is a recessive trait。Hair is red only if the human body carries two mutations of the MC1R gene. In other words, only the offspring of each parent may have red hair if each parent has at least one red-haired gene. As a result, there are many more people who carry the redhead gene than those who actually have it.
Diana comes from a family of redhead genes, and although Diana herself is blonde, her sister and brother both have red hair.
The UK is the region with the most red hair genes, with 4% of Brits having red hair and a whopping 285% of Brits are carriers of the redhead gene, so it's no surprise that the British royal family is carrying the redhead gene.
Since Diana and Harry's father is blonde and both are carriers of the red-hair gene, they have a 25% chance of having a red-haired offspring, and Harry is the "unfortunate one".
Redheads have always been discriminated against, while blondes have gone from being discriminated against to being the most honorable.
Let's start by looking back at the genes of Europeans.
Over the millennia, Europeans have changed their genes.
In Italy, for example, the early indigenous people were i2; By the Neolithic period, it was R1B, J2B, and G2, who were the first waves of Middle Eastern farmers who entered Europe during their first migration; By the Bronze Age, it was G2 and H, who were the second wave of Middle Eastern farmers; By the time of the Iron Age and the Roman Republic, it was mainly R1B and a small amount of J2A; By the time of the Roman Empire, J1 and J2 were the absolute dominant frequency, adding up to more than 60%, and then R1B, around 15%, and during this period, R1a began to appear, with a proportion of 15%, which should have been the Scythians who were often dyed as the Caucasians of Iran; In the later period of the Western Roman Empire, J1 and J2 accounted for 40%, R1a disappeared, and I1 and I2 returned to Italy, which should have been brought by the Germanic people; After the Middle Ages, J1 disappeared, and J2a and R1B became mainstream.
In the days of the Roman Empire, the rulers were J1 and J2, and they were both black-haired, so black-haired were the most honorable. At that time, the red-haired R1B was a savage Celtic and naturally became the most despised. Later Caesar conquered the Celts and drove them to Great Britain.
After the fall of Rome, the blonde Germanic people became conquerors, so the blonde became the most respected. The three major Germanic tribes in Germany (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) migrated across the sea to Great Britain and drove the Celts to the north of the island of Britain, and these conquerors became the ancestors of the Irish and Scottish peoples. At the same time, blonde hair has become the main hair color of the British.
In the Middle Ages, the red-haired were even more suffering**, not only were they considered morally degenerate, but they were often associated with the devil and witchcraft. During the witch hunt, red hair became one of the characteristics of witches, and they were often stripped naked.
Priestess Melisandre in Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire).
Some people may be confused: since the Celtic haplogroup R1b, and the Germanic haplogroup also have R1b, why are the former mostly red-haired and the latter mostly blonde?
First of all, the Germanic peoples were a mixed people. West Germanic R1b is dominant, East Germanic and North Germanic people have high I1 and R1a frequencies and less R1B.
Second, red hair is a recessive trait, and this gene mutation can be easily diluted out when red hair carriers are mixed with other ethnic groups. In other words, even if redheads appear high in the early R1B population, they will gradually become lower in the future. D**id Adams of the Sanger Research Institute in the United Kingdom once published an article in Nature that the redhead gene may disappear in 100 years
Therefore, even if the mainstream haplogroup of the Saxons is R1b, they will dissolve their red hair genes because they have lived on the north coast of Germany for a long time and have lived with the Slavic peoples for a long time. In short,The more mixed-race, the less red hair there is。Only those R1bs, i.e., the Celts, who were driven to the shores of Western Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, had more redheads because of the closed environment.
Enjoy the New Year