This Sunday Times article doesn’t say. But it does give an overview of a theory proposed by Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost about the provenance of blond hair itself. He figures women outnumbered men in northern Europe at the end of the Ice Age. Lighter hair helped women stand out in a crowded field. Get dates and stuff. And they didn’t have Clairol back then, apparently.
kirsten mortensen
little blog big planet
Color me skeptical. For one, there was no sudden emergence of blond women. Rather you had blonds, men and women. The theory only focuses on one sex. Two, hair natural hair color is not in isolated genetic trait. Blond hair just one of several trait associated heritable traits. You would have to examine all the traits to determine any potential evolulionary advantage, not just the hair color.
Anthropology: the “curling” of the sciences . . .
Actually, the emergence of blonde women IS quite sudden. And the timing and location for its emergence lends a lot of credence to the idea that the development of Blonde-ness as a societal trait is related to the circumstances present in Northern Europe at the time. The fact that the study only discusses one gender is irrelevant, as the ascendance of blond-ness in one sex, will lead to it in the other. However, because of the documented phenomenon whereby men show an apparently hard-wired preference for women who are paler than they are (and vice versa), it would seem to make sense that Blonde-ness would arise first in females.