“Redheads are not going extinct,” says Katerina Zorina-Lichtenwalter, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at University of Colorado, Boulder.
To understand why this is so, it’s necessary first to understand why there are redheads in the first place.
Pale colouration bestowed a key advantage to cultures migrating from sunnier regions into northern Europe with its grey skies and short winter days. “There was evolutionary pressure to lose skin pigmentation,” Zorina-Lichtenwalter explains, because lighter skin absorbs more UV, which produces more vitamin D from the limited amount of sunlight in northern regions.
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The MC1R gene mutations linked to crimson hair, light skin, and freckles also allows more UV to reach DNA and damage it. One study found that people carrying a so-called R variant of the MC1R gene had a 42 percent higher incidence of melanoma, one of the most aggressive forms of cancer. Melanoma is 20 times more prevalent in Caucasians than in African Americans.
However, the average age for melanoma diagnosis is 65. Therefore, Zorina-Lichtenwalter says, “it doesn’t threaten reproductive fitness.” At that age, women have already passed their genes to the next generation. This is why, she says, redheads are unlikely to disappear from the gene pool.
