Why do melanesians have blonde hair

Moreno-Estrada, C. Eng, S. Huntsman, E. Burchard, M. Stoneking, C. Bustamante, S. Science , ; : DOI: ScienceDaily, 3 May University of Bristol. Key contribution to Melanesian blonde hair color discovered.

Retrieved November 10, from www. The findings better explain why hair does not normally grow on By working closely with the KhoeSan, a group of populations indigenous to southern Africa, Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine, in California, and his team published their findings in the journal Science.

Bustamante and his colleagues compared the genomes of 43 blond and 42 dark-haired Solomon Islanders. This revealed that the blond hair was strongly associated with a single mutation in the TYRP1 gene, which encodes an enzyme that influences pigmentation in mice and humans. They compared DNA DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction.

For several years, blond hair was attributed to Caucasians but the Melanesians of Solomon Islands are one of the few groups with blonde hair outside Europe. Melanesians are black island people in the south pacific that migrated over thousands of years ago, long before the blacks that came to the Americas as slaves.

Melanesia is a sub-region of Oceania extending from the western end of the Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, and eastward to Fiji. The name Melanesia was first used by Jules Dumont d'Urville in to denote an ethnic and geographical grouping of islands distinct from Polynesia and Micronesia.

Until recently, the indigenous melanesian people practised cannibalism, head-hunting, kidnapping and slavery, just like the Asmat tribe , but with contact with Europeans, the population is now predominantly Christian.

The Melanesian people of the Solomon Islands are the point of interest when it comes to dark skin and blond hair. A geneticist from Nova Scotia agricultural college in Canada, Sean Myles, conduced a genetic analysis on saliva and hair samples from Melanesian Solomon Island residents.

The Melanesian people have a native TYRP1 gene which is partly responsible for the blond hair and melanin, and is totally distinct to that of Caucasians as it doesn't exist in their genes.

It is a recessive gene and is more common in children than in adults, with hair tending to darken as the individual matures. This contributes to the theories that black Africans were the first homo sapiens and that all races came out of the black African race.