Where did dark-skinned people with light hair come from in Melanesia

Melanesia is an island group in the Pacific Ocean, which includes New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu and other States. The archipelago of more than a thousand islands is home to more than 500 thousand Melanesians. They have the darkest skin in the world outside of Africa, but many of them have light-colored Afro-curls on their heads.

Every tenth Melanesian is blond, which is not typical for representatives of the Australoid race.

At first, scientists believed that the gene for blonde hair was inherited by the Melanesians from the British, German and Australian colonizers who owned the islands in the XIX-XX centuries and grew coconut plantations here.

Researchers of the XIX century had simpler versions. Some believed that the islanders ' hair was dyed with coral lime. Others suggested that the hair quickly faded from the tropical sun and salt water, and still others - that a diet rich in fish was to blame.

And only recently there was a convincing hypothesis: random mutations may be responsible for the hair color of blond Melanesians.

Geneticist Sean Miles noticed that all Melanesians have the same shade of blond hair. This means that the hair color is regulated by a simple mutation in one gene, and it remains only to find it. Miles and his colleagues took saliva and hair samples from two groups of islanders: 43 blonds and 42 brunettes.

The groups had completely different versions of the TYRP1 gene, which encodes a protein involved in pigmentation. Hair color is determined by only one amino acid in the protein-arginine instead of cysteine.

A quarter of the population of the Solomon Islands are carriers of the mutated gene (only 10% of the population is born blonde, since this gene is recessive). Blonds can inherit their hair color from both parents. An anthropologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, Jonathan Friedlander, believes that the mutation most likely occurred accidentally in one person.

Nowhere in the world is such a mutation no longer found, and it appeared from 5 to 30 thousand years ago.