![]() ![]() ![]() Ginger coloring in people-as well as horses, dogs, pigs, and other mammals-is conferred by just a handful of genetic mutations that both parents must carry. It is trumped by every other card in the pack.” The genetics of red In her book Red: A History of the Redhead, author Jacky Colliss Harvey characterizes the odds of having a crimson-haired baby this way: “In the great genetic card game, red hair is the two of clubs. Only if both parents are redheads can they be almost certain their baby will have fiery hair, Zorina-Lichtenwalter says. The gene variants involved are recessive, meaning two copies-one from the mother and one from the father-are required to produce a red-haired child. From the fifth century on in what is now southeast Europe and Turkey, the mythological King Rhesus of the ancient Thracians was depicted on Greek pottery with carrot-colored hair and beard. A famous 3,800-year-old Bronze Age mummy, known as the Beauty of Loulan, was unearthed from a desert cemetery in northwestern China with intact sepia-colored hair. Analysis of 50,000-year-old DNA revealed that some Neanderthals were pale-complected redheads. There’s more research on the variations in human hair color than you might expect, and the science makes it clear that crimson locks are not becoming increasingly rare, nor will they disappear any time soon. As it turns out, it’s not only tabloids that are interested in flame-haired people. To understand why this is so, it’s necessary first to understand why there are redheads in the first place. “Redheads are not going extinct,” says Katerina Zorina-Lichtenwalter, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at University of Colorado, Boulder. While the gene variants that endow flaming locks are rare, redheads are not destined to vanish from the population, despite recurring claims to that effect. ![]() That is, in part, because red hair is an exotic trait, occurring in just one or two out of every 100 people. On the screen and on the street, strawberry blonds and those with auburn tresses attract attention, and always have. ![]()
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