Why do Europeans have so many eye and hair colors?

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S.A.M.

S.A.M.

uniquely dreadful
Valued Senior Member
The colors are most diverse in Europe as compared to other places in the world, what is the reason for this?
 
Europe is that diverse in cultures you have no idea that person is english even if the person is english, for all you could know he might be french. the only way you could tell is from there accent.
 
One possibility: Europe was the furthest north, inland region in which agricultural (non-nomadic) people lived far from the sea - so the vitamin D/UV damage tradeoff was most severe.

The double recessives necessary for blonde and red hair had immediate survival value, back in the mountains of Europe. Tribal and sexual selection had something to work with.

Just one possibility. Migration and chance also, etc etc.
 
iceaura said:
One possibility: Europe was the furthest north, inland region in which agricultural (non-nomadic) people lived far from the sea - so the vitamin D/UV damage tradeoff was most severe.

The double recessives necessary for blonde and red hair had immediate survival value, back in the mountains of Europe. Tribal and sexual selection had something to work with.

Just one possibility. Migration and chance also, etc etc.
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Sounds very credible :)
 
iceaura said:
One possibility: Europe was the furthest north, inland region in which agricultural (non-nomadic) people lived far from the sea - so the vitamin D/UV damage tradeoff was most severe.

The double recessives necessary for blonde and red hair had immediate survival value, back in the mountains of Europe. Tribal and sexual selection had something to work with.

Just one possibility. Migration and chance also, etc etc.
Click to expand...

So there are recessives for blond and red hair and eye colors in other populations?
 
Yes, but occurence differs in each population.
For example:
African populations may have next to no recessive alleles for eye/hair color. Because in the past the dominant alleles have been heavily selected upon.
 
Enmos said:
Yes, but occurence differs in each population.
For example:
African populations may have next to no recessive alleles for eye/hair color. Because in the past the dominant alleles have been heavily selected upon.
Click to expand...

Hmm so why so many colors?
 
Apparently its been and done before
http://pages.globetrotter.net/peter_frost61z/European-hair-and-eye-color.htm

Nice article.

Europeans are just highly evolved guppies :D

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Sturm-eyes.gif
 
Enmos said:
Yup we sure are :cool:
It probably also has to do with sexual selection.
Click to expand...

Hmm an inbred weakness for advertising?

In other animals, bright colors are usually due to sexual selection. Sometimes the result may be a "color polymorphism" (see box). This is because a potential mate is attracted not just by a bright color but also by a rare one that stands out from the crowd. By enhancing reproductive success, however, such a color will also become more common and less eye-catching. Sexual attraction will then shift to less common variants, the eventual result being an equilibrium that maximizes color diversity (Brooks 2002; Frost 2006; Hughes et al. 1999).

This sort of rare-color advantage has been reported in humans. The American biologist Thomas Thelen (1983) prepared three series of slides featuring attractive women: one with 6 brunettes; another with 1 brunette and 5 blondes; and a third with 1 brunette and 11 blondes. Male subjects then had to choose the woman in each series they would most prefer to marry. The result? For the same brunette, preference increased significantly from the first to the third series, i.e., in proportion to the rarity of her hair color. This rare-color preference may account for the wide range of human hair and eye phenotypes we see today.

But why do we see more of this color diversity in Europe than elsewhere? Perhaps because sexual selection was stronger in ancestral Europeans, particularly during the long period when they lived from hunting and gathering.

Among contemporary hunter-gatherers, the ratio of single men to single women is most unequal in "steppe-tundra" environments where almost all consumable biomass is in the form of highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores such as caribou, reindeer, or muskox. On the one hand, men die younger because of the distances they must cover in search of herds, with no alternate food sources. On the other, men are less polygynous because they bear almost the full cost of feeding their families in a habitat that offers women little opportunity for food gathering. With fewer men altogether and even fewer polygynous ones, women have to compete for a limited supply of potential husbands. They are thus under stronger sexual selection.
Click to expand...
 
I was going on another definition of inbred :shrug:

But how is it a weakness in advertising ?
 
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