Q&A for History of Mankind (29)

The mysterious evolution of blond hair among natives of Oceania, the history of curse words, great ancient builders, Aztecs Vs Incas, academic vs non-academic historians

To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

This is the twenty-ninth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.

Just let me remind you that all new paying subscribers get an electronic copy of my 2023 book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” (also available here). If you are a paying subscriber and did not get it, reach out to me simply by responding to this email.

Before we get to subscribers’ questions, today we’re looking at a Substack post looking at a number of recent papers on a small but still very relevant mystery of genetics: why native peoples of Oceania are evolving yellow hair, in the absence of any genetic inflow from the only people on the planet who evolved yellow hair in the past — northern Europeans.

Survival of the cutest

In the aptly named “Survival of the cutest,”

Peter Frost

explains that more and more Oceanic islanders are being born with blond hair because of natural selection.

This is exactly what has been happening in Europe for millennia:

Why did blond hair evolve in Oceania? One reason may be an aesthetic preference: In Samoa, all fair hair is considered 'ena'ena, a word that is usually translated as brown, although when English-speaking Samoans use this term in reference to hair, they typically gloss it as 'blond'. This makes sense since, when one is bleaching Polynesian hair, it goes through a series of reddish- brown shades prior to arriving at blond, and even then retains a reddish hue. When describing hair, Samoans specify the actual shade of 'blond' by using certain modifiers with 'ena'ena, such as 'ena'ena manaia, which literally means 'really nice brown hair', but which refers to a very fair reddish colour.

This aesthetic preference may protect blond-haired infants from maternal neglect. Papua New Guinea has a relatively high rate of child malnutrition—35% on average and up to 78% in some regions, including regions where adults are well fed. The cause seems to be neither environmental nor ecological but rather cultural (Lepowsky, 1987, p. 75).

As I wrote in Murderous Tribesmen, from Arabia to Japan, blond hair provides no fitness advantage over the usual brown-to-black hair that most humans are born with. People with lighter-colored hair are just perceived as cuter, and if you are cute chances are more people will want to mate with you so, all things equal, in the end it’s likely you’ll end up having more descendants, who will spread your cuteness-inducing genes.

However, for the exact mechanism of how this happens, I still believe female-driven transmission is the most likely trigger:

The fact that lighter-colored hair appears to be a specific marker for youth, and thus women with blond hair appear younger than their age indicates that the KITLG variant – unlike that in HERC2 – may be have selected overwhelmingly on the female side only (that is, men perceive blond women, ceteris paribus, as more attractive; but this doesn’t apply to women regarding blond men), which would explain why it was slower to spread. Alleles for white skin are older in Asia and Europe, appearing only about 18,000 BC but they became dominant across all of Eurasia only well after the Younger Dryas: as late as about 5000 BC, at least some Spaniards were still significantly darker-skinned than their modern descendants, according to a 2014 paper in Nature (“Derived immune and ancestral pigmentation alleles in a 7,000-year-old Mesolithic European “) by Iñigo Olalde et al.

Now, I did write that blue eyes, commonly (but not always) associated with blond hair among people of European descent, are a similar case: they too seem to provide no fitness advantage, and would have thus been selected for simply because of sexual preference.

That picture still holds but an attentive reader, Stranger Here Myself, pointed me in Notes in the direction of this preprint paper, still not peer-reviewed or published by an academic publication, containing a pretty revolutionary, if preliminary, finding: that people with blue eyes may have better sight in dim conditions than those with brown eyes, which would help in the northern European environment. Something to keep an eye on, definitely, if you catch my drift.

Now for the questions from paying subscribers, on the strange history of curse words, Aztecs vs Incas and academic vs non-academic historians.