Which ethnicity has red hair

I get more freckles and I should wear a ridiculously high SPF on my face. Growing up had its challenges, he said, but eventually there were social advantages to being a redhead. I was easy prey. He grew his hair long in college, even sporting a red afro, and continued to get cat calls from strangers: "What's up carrot top? And there are definitely ladies who like redheads.

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Best Christmas decorations for Getty Images. Lucky redhead women have more sex That's according to a study by a German sex researcher who found that women with red hair had sex more often. It's a ballache to dye red hair Because it holds its pigment tighter than any other hair colour, red strands need to have their pigment stripped before being dyed by bleaching which, of course, damages the hair.

Best of all, it shows all of this using a colour scale of autumnal auburns and reds. The "chart" is probably a lot more interesting than talking about melanocortin 1 receptor MC1R - that's the gene that when mutated is likely to be responsible for causing ginger hair. It's also the gene likely to affect susceptibility to pain and ability to tan.

But let's get back to the exciting map - maps in fact - we could pull together a whole gallery of them. These ones are brought to you by Eupedia. The ginger one is quite similar to the version above so you would assume that they're based on a similar set of numbers, though the numbers themselves are harder to find.

A lively debate between bloggers on the Human Biodiversity Forum even conjured up an eye-colour map as well as US-specific hair colour trends. Studies have demonstrated that people with red hair are more sensitive to thermal pain and also require greater amounts of anesthetic than people with other hair colours. The reason is that redheads have a mutation in a hormone receptor that can apparently respond to at least two different hormones: the melanocyte-stimulating hormone for pigmentation and endorphins the pain relieving hormone.

Folk wisdom has long described redheads as hot-tempered and short-tempered. If you did an autosomal DNA test e. Red hair has long been associated with Celtic people. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans described the Celts as redheads.

The Romans extended the description to Germanic people, at least those they most frequently encountered in southern and western Germany. It still holds true today. Although red hair is an almost exclusively northern and central European phenomenon, isolated cases have also been found in the Middle East, Central Asia notably among the Tajiks , as well as in some of the Tarim mummies from Xinjiang, in north-western China. So what do all these people have in common?

Surely the Udmurts and Tajiks aren't Celts, nor Germans. Yet, as we will see, all these people share a common ancestry that can be traced back to a single Y-chromosomal haplogroup: R1b.

It is hard to calculate the exact percentage of the population having red hair as it depends on how wide a definition one adopts. For example, should men with just partial red beards, but no red hair on the top of their heads be included or not? Should strawberry blond be counted as red, blond, or both? Overall, the distribution of red hair matches remarkably well the ancient Celtic and Germanic worlds. It is undeniable too that the highest frequencies are always observed in Celtic areas, especially in those that remained Celtic-speaking to this day or until recently.

The question that inevitably comes to many people's minds is: did red hair originate with the Celtic or the Germanic people? Southwest Norway may well be the clue to the origin of red hair. It has been discovered recently, thanks to genetic genealogy, that the higher incidence of both dark hair and red hair as opposed to blond in southwest Norway coincided with a higher percentage of the paternal lineage known as haplogroup R1b-L21 , including its subclade R1b-M, typical of northwestern Ireland and Scotland the so-called lineage of Niall of the Nine Hostages.

It is now almost certain that native Irish and Scottish Celts were taken probably as slaves to southwest Norway by the Vikings, and that they increased the frequency of red hair there. What is immediately apparent to genetic genealogists is that the map of red hair correlates with the frequency of haplogroup R1b in northern and western Europe.

It doesn't really correlate with the percentage of R1b in southern Europe, for the simple reason that red hair is more visible among people carrying various other genes involved in light skin and hair pigmentation.

Mediterranean people have considerably darker pigmentations higher eumelanin , especially as far as hair is considered, giving the red hair alleles little opportunity to express themselves. The reddish tinge is always concealed by black hair, and rarely visible in dark brown hair. Rufosity being recessive, it can easily stay hidden if the alleles are too dispersed in the gene pool, and that the chances of both parents carrying an allele becomes too low. Furthermore, natural selection also progressively pruned red hair from the Mediterranean populations, because the higher amount of sunlight and strong UV rays in the region was more likely to cause potentially fatal melanoma in fair-skinned redheads.

At equal latitude, the frequency of red hair correlates amazingly well with the percentage of R1b lineages.