NOT a joke, but a sober article at the Times of London on blondeness in women as an evolutionary stategy in Paleolithic Europe.
" ....Frost attributes the rapid evolution to how they gathered food. In Africa there was less dependence on animals and women were able to collect fruit for themselves. In Europe, by contrast, food gathering was almost exclusively a male hunter’s preserve. The retreating ice sheets left behind a landscape of fertile soil with plenty of grass and moss for herbivorous animals to eat, but few plants edible for humans. Women therefore took on jobs such as building shelters and making clothes while the men went on hunting trips, where the death rate was high.
"The increase in competition for males led to rapid change as women struggled to evolve the most alluring qualities. Frost believes his theory is supported by studies which show blonde hair is an indicator for high oestrogen levels in women."
From Steve Sailer (scroll down) who also has some theories why blondeness could be a disadvantage for male big game hunters, especially in sunny climes.
4 comments:
It makes you wonder if Neandertals were blonde as well instead of the near gorilla look they are usually given.
http://www.zdenekburian.com/images/imgb041.jpg
Burian's Neandertals
I have my doubts about this.=p (But yeah, blondness might be a liability when hunting...It works kind of like those reflectors on bikes...)
purely unscientific observation: when I bleached my brown hair yellow -and I do mean yellow- a few years back, I got looked at, I got doors held open for me, and on the highway, cars seemed to move out of the way for me. I kid you not. I thought I was largely ignored due to being short. Although I was so hideous looking with glowing biohazard yellow hair, the lookers may have been just spooked. It was a fun experiment.
Well, then, how do you account for the red-headed spitfires??
The diplomacy-challenged principal at the little reservation school where I was teaching said, "I don't see what the big deal is about being full-blood. I could bring a dozen Swedish blondes here tomorrow and there wouldn't be a single full-blood in the next generation." Then he wondered why all the Indian women were mad at him.
Maybe the explanation is really that those early guys thought blonde was WHITE and because they valued the wisdom of the old white-headed people, they thought the blondes were prematurely wise. (Luckily, that was before "blonde" jokes.)
Prairie Mary
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